The last chapters of the book focus more about the philosophical part of the human being and how what we experience during our childhood shapes who we are as adults. To Gopnik it all comes down to three important aspects: truth, imagination, and love, and for children they are all intertwined. Babies and toddlers know exactly how love works, they can differentiate between the love and care they get from their parents and the love they get from sibblings, family members and babysitters. But not all children have the same idea about love and this is what psychologists describe as different styles of attachment, they basically describe the different reactions babies have when they are separated from their mothers or the person that represents their source of love. "Secure" attachment, is tipically portrayed by babies who are sad when the mother leaves and happy when she returns. "Avoidant" are those babies who don't react in any way when their mother leaves or returns, but after measuring their heart rate during separation they do feel sad but somehow learned not to express it. "Anxious" describes those babies that become very distressed when the mother leaves and once she returns they can't manage to calm down and relax and can also become mad at her.
These examples helped discover through an study that secure and insecure babies have different theories of love. It also has an effect on how they will talk and think about love later on as they grow up.
Truth, what Gopnik emphasizes in this aspect is the fact that "children are born knowing a lot about the world and other people" (244). Also they learn a lot just by observing and hearing the people around them, they are capable of performing experiments through playing and consequently change what they think. They also learn about other people, their feelings emotions , behaviors, and also learn about themselves. "This remarkable ability to find the truth, in turn, depends on the capacity to imagine and to love" (245).
Therefore, we see that truth, imagination and love depend on each other and are crucial in a child's development and it all has to do with the care and love we give them, "children can learn so freely because they are protected by adults, and they can imagine so freely because they are loved" (246).
Dear Carolina,
ReplyDeleteMy handwriting on your draft might be too messy to read. I wrote that you did great work (!). AS you expand your final draft:
1. Do connect more to what you've learned about langauge through the Philosophical Baby. 2. Go beyond writing that you've learned a lot about children: show us more of the concrete details/analysis. 3. If this book could truly inform and transform how people undertand children's minds in general and the role of language in particular, how do you thinnk parenting and education might change? How does it make you understand your own childhood/education differently? 4. YOur comman of written English is truly IMPRESSIVE. But do go over the final draft carefully--perhaps with a native-English speaker/friend/tutor to "get" the errors and areas that might not be clear to a reader.
This is evidence of very hard work!
Ola Carolina!!!!!...me puse a revisar mis blogs despues de 2 anos y encontre este y me acorde de usted....QUE MAS!!!? QUE HA SIDO DE SU VIDA!? ufff el tiempo si vuela. Hojala lea esto y si lo hace contacteme por email: (jonathanflorez1@gmail.com) para que hablemos. Chao y que este bien.
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