Alison Gopnik: Parenthood

I've had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling. Our love for children is so unlike any other human emotion.

I fell in love with my babies so quickly and profoundly, almost completely independently of their particular qualities. And yet 20 years later I was (more or less) happy to see them go – I had to be happy to see them go. We are totally devoted to them when they are little and yet the most we can expect in return when they grow up is that they regard us with bemused and tolerant affection.

We are ambitious for them, we want them to thrive so badly. And yet we know that we have to grant them the autonomy to make their own mistakes. In no other human relation do we work so hard to accomplish such an ill-defined goal, which is precisely to create a being who will have goals that are not like ours.

About the author

Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published over 100 articles on children's learning and development and was the first to argue that children's minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions. Her latest book is The Philosophical Baby.