Letting children learn to play is a good way to truly educate them

In the modern era when the concept of \”upbringing\” is prevalent, more and more parents believe that correct upbringing methods will produce good children. Parents are putting more and more efforts into practicing various parenting methods, and at the same time they are also feeling more and more troubles. The book \”The Gardener and the Carpenter\” proposes that the concept of \”nurturing\” is fundamentally wrong. It is like a carpenter processing wood into products such as chairs, doors and windows. Taking care of children should be like taking care of a garden, and being a parent is like being a gardener. Good gardeners work to create fertile soil that supports the entire ecosystem, where all plants can then grow freely. The author of this book, Alison Gopnik, is known as the top psychologist in the United States who best understands children\’s learning. She is an internationally recognized leader in research on child learning and development. In the book, the author uses the dual identities of scientist, mother and grandmother to conduct an in-depth analysis of children\’s learning and growth process. Reading this book can not only help us establish correct parenting concepts and harmonious parent-child relationships, but also help us alleviate the global phenomenon of \”parental anxiety\”. Let’s get into this book together. Chaos is the main theme of childhood. Children\’s bounden duty is to explore. Before they grow up, they have a long childhood, which provides children with valuable time for exploration. It also means that they will be more chaotic than adults. The latest scientific research finds that children\’s chaotic nature makes a unique contribution to human evolvability. During childhood, the human capacity for change and exploration reaches its peak. The colorful personalities of young children are the best example. Children\’s different personalities stem from subtle differences in genes, and the complex interactions between different genes and the environment will also bring about rich changes in personality. Even children from the same family can be completely different. For example, the author recalled in the book that his two sons liked to climb to the top of the climbing frame when they were young. The eldest son Alexey would make sure he could come down every time before going up, while the second son Nicholas would not even start climbing. Go back to the ground and climb up, not caring about what happens next. Diversity and variability are basic laws of human development. Children always have a lot of ideas about how the world works, and their views on the same problem will continue to change. Infant brains are more plastic than mature brains; they generate more neural connections and are more flexible, able to effortlessly change as their environment changes. Therefore, each generation of children is a noise and a dose of chaos, shaking up the stereotypes of the previous generation and bringing about new possibilities. This means being a parent takes on a whole new meaning. As parents, we need to give each child more unconditional love. No matter what personality characteristics the children have, whether they are naughty or sensitive, bold or timid, we must love them unconditionally and do our best to help them. Their diversity creates conditions. It is the love of parents that makes the intellectual development of children possible. We also need to provide a safe, stable space for exploration where children with endless possibilities can flourish. Here, children can explore as much as they want, and all kinds of ideas can be freely expressed, even withoutContinuous trial and error without any desire for quick success. Of course, confusion is inevitable along the way. We can let the children play and then tidy up the place instead of restricting the children\’s exploration for the sake of tidiness. After all, chaos is the order of the day in children\’s lives. Observation and imitation are powerful and useful ways of learning As parents, we always take for granted that children learn from their parents and caregivers. Not only that, the parenting model also believes that parents can and should consciously control their children\’s learning. Just like the learning model in school, an adult who teaches a specific child needs to carefully design his or her actions so that the child learns the specified knowledge and skills. But what exactly can children learn from their parents? How did they learn? This book tells us that children’s social learning has an important model, which is observation and imitation. Every child is an excellent little actor. They love to imitate and play a variety of roles, especially their caregivers. The authors also point out that this ability to imitate is innate, and that even very young children can learn a lot from others and can even learn complex tasks by observing the actions of others. The book mentions that children of the Mayan Indians will participate in, imitate and master tasks such as making tortillas or using machetes from an early age. Those are difficult and dangerous adult skills that we would never think of teaching young children. These parents slow down, exaggerate their movements, and act in a way that makes it easier for their children to participate. But they don\’t design special behaviors or do special things to teach their children. The author points out that children are sensitive to information provided by others, but they will never be passively shaped by others. They combine external information with their own experience in complex ways, sometimes even better than adults. What this means to parents is that “precepts are not as good as words”. Whether we are walking or shopping, singing or talking, cooking can slow down the action a little and allow our children to be part of these daily activities, living and exploring with them. For children, this observation and imitation of skilled parents and others is an education in itself. In this process, we don’t have to deliberately teach our children what to do. We can try to do it with our children. When we try to change \”do as I say\” to \”let\’s do it together\”, the children will not only do what we do, they will even bring us unexpected surprises. Play and learning are inseparable. Play is an important and indispensable activity for everyone in childhood. It\’s so much fun that a 9-month-old baby giggles while playing peek-a-boo. It sometimes looks like it\’s \”working\”, like fighting or hunting, digging or cleaning, but it\’s actually not accomplishing anything, it\’s just pretending to be working. That’s why play is always voluntary. If children are deprived of the opportunity to play, their desire to play will continue to accumulate and will be \”released\” as soon as they are given the opportunity. PlayfulNoisy play helps children interact with others, exploratory play helps children understand how things work, and it helps children think about possibilities and understand what others are thinking. The most typical example of the value of play to children mentioned in the book comes from the documentary \”Nanook of the North\”. In the movie, hunter Nanook lives in some of the harshest climates on Earth, using his hunting and gathering skills to survive. He made a small toy sleigh for his son who had just learned to walk, and the father and son had fun playing in the ice and snow. This move may seem inconspicuous, but for people living in harsh climates, playful exploration in the ice and snow is the best investment in the future. Obviously, it is important for children to play, and play and learning are inseparable. Play is an important part of human childhood, and allowing children to play spontaneously, randomly, and autonomously helps them learn. As a caregiver, there are many ways you can help your child play. You can find and create a relatively safe and stable playing environment for your children. Children will be more active when playing in a more stable and safer environment. Caregivers can also provide children with richer play resources, such as providing children with more diverse toys. For children, everything from sticks, stones, corn cobs to tablets can be good toys. Caregivers can also provide children with different toys and different ways to play in a specific culture, giving children a specific opportunity to master the attributes of their own culture. If you want to teach your child something special, you can also join in the child\’s play, interact with the child, and guide the child to discover the secrets like a detective. Of course, play itself is a satisfying pleasure and a source of joy and laughter for parents and children. If for no other reason, the sheer joy of playing is enough. The above is the essence of this book. Raising children is the most fundamental, profound, and precious part of the human project. It is not a carpentry job, where the child must be carved into a specific shape. On the contrary, being a parent is like being a gardener, aiming to provide a healthy, strong, and diverse environment for children to grow up, so that children can create their own future with unlimited possibilities. A very special love is formed between every parent and child, a long-term, dedicated love with no strings attached. Under the parenting model, the value of taking care of children\’s growth can be quantified. The measurement is based on the value of children as adults when they become adults, but the unique and beautiful relationship between parents and children is ignored. As philosophers say, this relationship is valuable for its very nature, not because it is a tool that benefits us. As a parent, it is more valuable to be a caregiver who is stable and can provide reliable learning resources than to be a caregiver who is direct and teaching.