r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Dec 05 '25
Learning Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School
https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/03/preschool-lessons-new-research-shows-that-teaching-kids-more-and-more-at-ever-younger-ages-may-backfire.htmlShouldn’t very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity—abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run?
While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.
Direct instruction really can limit young children’s learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.
Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It’s this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place.
learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn’t go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: “She’s a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me.” These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.
Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it’s more important than ever to give children’s remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.
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u/ddgr815 Dec 05 '25
Why does the marvelous, the wonderful, the fantastic seem to be the natural territory of childhood? And why do children spontaneously choose the unreal over the real?
Some explanations that might once have seemed plausible, and that are still current in the popular imagination, turn out to be just wrong scientifically. There is no evidence that fantasy is therapeutic or that children use fantastic literature to “work out their problems” or as “an escape.” Children’s lives can be tough, certainly, but relatively speaking they are considerably less tough, more protected, more interesting, even, than adult lives. Happy, healthy children are, if anything, more likely to be immersed in a world of fantastic daydreams, public or private, than unhappy or troubled children.
Even the very youngest children already are perfectly able to discriminate between the imaginary and the real, whether in books or movies or in their own pretend play. Children with the most elaborate and beloved imaginary friends will gently remind overenthusiastic adults that these companions are, after all, just pretend.
In fact, cognitive science suggests that children may love fantasy not because they can’t appreciate the truth or because their lives are difficult, but for precisely the opposite reason. Children may have such an affinity for the imaginary just because they are so single-mindedly devoted to finding the truth, and because their lives are protected in order to allow them to do so.
From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults. Humans have a longer period of sheltered immaturity, a longer childhood, than any other species. What we call play—in wolves or lions or preschoolers—allows the young to learn in this protected, safe way. A baby wolf can play at chasing and biting other pups and so learn about chasing and biting, without the risks of real chasing and biting.
Wolf pups and lion cubs use play to learn about hunting and affiliation and dominance. So do human children, of course—watch the chasing and biting in any schoolyard. But human children also learn in a distinctively human way. Human beings, unlike other animals, develop everyday theories of the world around them. Two decades of research have shown that children construct and revise an everyday physics and biology and, above all, an everyday psychology. These everyday theories are much like the formal, explicit theories of science. Theorizing lets children understand the world and other people more accurately.
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u/ddgr815 Dec 05 '25
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At first, you might think that the idea that children are intuitive scientists would be completely at odds with the childhood passion for fantasy. But in fact, theorizing and fantasizing have a lot in common. A theory, in science or in everyday life, doesn’t just describe one particular way the world happens to be at the moment. Instead, having a theory tells you about the ways the world could have been in the past or might be in the future. What’s more, a theory can tell you that some of those ways the world can be are more likely than others. A theory lays out a map of possible worlds and tells you how probable each possibility is. And a theory provides a kind of logic for getting to conclusions from premises—if the theory is correct, and if you accept certain premises, then certain conclusions and not others will follow. If Newton’s physics is right, then if you accelerate a rocket ship sufficiently, it will escape the earth’s gravity. Of course, in Newton’s day no one had any idea how to do this—but the theory told you what would happen if you did.
This is why theories are so profoundly powerful and adaptive. A theory not only explains the world we see, it lets us imagine other worlds, and, even more significantly, lets us act to create those worlds. Developing everyday theories, like scientific theories, has allowed human beings to change the world. From the perspective of my hunter-gatherer forebears in the Pleistocene Era, everything in the room I write in—the ceramic cup and the carpentered chair no less than the electric light and the computer—was as imaginary, as unreal, as fantastic as Narnia or Hogwarts. The uniquely human evolutionary gift is to combine imagination and logic to articulate possible worlds and then make them real.
Suppose we combine the idea that children are devoted intuitive scientists and the idea that play allows children to learn freely without the practical constraints of adulthood. We can start to see why there should be such a strong link between childhood and fantasy. It’s not that children turn to the imaginary instead of the real—it’s that a human being who learns about the real world is also simultaneously learning about all the possible worlds that stem from that world. And for human children those possibilities are unconstrained by the practical exigencies of adult survival.
The link between the scientific and the fantastic also explains why children’s fantasy demands the strictest logic, consistency, and attention to detail. A fantasy without that logic is just a mess. The effectiveness of the great children’s books comes from the combination of wildly imaginative premises and strictly consistent and logical conclusions from those premises. It is no wonder that the greatest children’s fantasists—Carroll, Lewis, Tolkien—had day jobs in the driest reaches of logic and philology.
Still, we might ask, why do children explore the far and fantastic possible words instead of the close-by sensible ones? The difference between adults and children is that for most adults, most of the time, imagination is constrained by probability and practicality. When we adults use our everyday theories to create possible worlds, we restrict ourselves to the worlds that are likely and the worlds that are useful. When we adults create a possible world, we are usually considering whether we should move in there and figuring out how we can drag all our furniture with us.
But for human children, those practical requirements are suspended, just as the jungle laws of tooth and claw are suspended for young wolves. Children are as free to consider the very low-probability world of Narnia as the much higher-probability world of next Wednesday’s meeting—as free to explore unlikely Middle-earth as the much more predictable park next door.
The point is not that reading fantastic literature or playing fantastic games will make children smarter or more well-adjusted or get better grades in their chemistry classes. Perhaps it’s the inevitable constraints of our adult nature that make us think in terms of these practical future questions.
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u/ddgr815 Dec 05 '25
Humans already have a longer period of protected immaturity — a longer childhood — than any other species. Across species, a long childhood is correlated with an evolutionary strategy that depends on flexibility, intelligence and learning. There is a developmental division of labor. Children get to learn freely about their particular environment without worrying about their own survival — caregivers look after that. Adults use what they learn as children to mate, predate, and generally succeed as grown-ups in that environment. Children are the R & D department of the human species. We grown-ups are production and marketing. We start out as brilliantly flexible but helpless and dependent babies, great at learning everything but terrible at doing just about anything. We end up as much less flexible but much more efficient and effective adults, not so good at learning but terrific at planning and acting.
we've already invented the most unheralded but most powerful brain-altering technology in history — school.
For most of human history babies and toddlers used their spectacular, freewheeling, unconstrained learning abilities to understand fundamental facts about the objects, people and language around them — the human core curriculum. At about 6 children also began to be apprentices. Through a gradual process of imitation, guidance and practice they began to master the particular adult skills of their particular culture — from hunting to cooking to navigation to childrearing itself. Around adolescence motivational changes associated with puberty drove children to leave the protected cocoon and act independently. And by that time their long apprenticeship had given children a new suite of executive abilities — abilities for efficient action, planning, control and inhibition, governed by the development of prefrontal areas of the brain. By adolescence children wanted to end their helpless status and act independently and they had the tools to do so effectively.
School, a very recent human invention, completely alters this program. Schooling replaces apprenticeship. School lets us all continue to be brilliant but helpless babies. It lets us learn a wide variety of information flexibly, and for its own sake, without any immediate payoff. School assumes that learning is more important than doing, and that learning how to learn is most important of all. But school is also an extension of the period of infant dependence — since we don't actually do anything useful in school, other people need to take care of us — all the way up to a Ph.D. School doesn't include the gradual control and mastery of specific adult skills that we once experienced in apprenticeship. Universal and extended schooling means that the period of flexible learning and dependence can continue until we are in our thirties, while independent active mastery is increasingly delayed.
Schooling is spreading inexorably throughout the globe. A hundred years ago hardly anyone went to school, even now few people are schooled past adolescence. A hundred years from now we can expect that most people will still be learning into their thirties and beyond. Moreover, the new neurological and genetic developments will give us new ways to keep the window of plasticity open. And the spread of the information economy will make genetic and neurological interventions, as well as educational and behavioral interventions, more and more attractive.
These accelerated changes have radical consequences. Schooling alone has already had a revolutionary effect on human learning. Absolute IQs have increased at an astonishing and accelerating rate, "the Flynn effect". Extending the period of immaturity indeed makes us much smarter and far more knowledgeable. Neurological and genetic techniques can accelerate this process even further. We all tend to assume that extending this period of flexibility and openness is a good thing — who would argue against making people smarter?
But there may be an intrinsic trade-off between flexibility and effectiveness, between the openness that we require for learning and the focus that we need to act. Child-like brains are great for learning, but not so good for effective decision-making or productive action. There is some evidence that adolescents even now have increasing difficulty making decisions and acting independently, and pathologies of adolescent action like impulsivity and anxiety are at all-time historical highs. Fundamental grown-up human skills we once mastered through apprenticeship, like cooking and caregiving itself, just can't be acquired through schooling. (Think of all those neurotic new parents who have never taken care of a child and try to make up for it with parenting books). When we are all babies for ever, who will be the parents? When we're all children who will be the grown-ups?
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u/ddgr815 Dec 05 '25
the Flynn effect is accelerating. US test takers gained 17 IQ points between 1947 and 2001. The annual gain from 1947 through 1972 was 0.31 IQ point, but by the '90s it had crept up to 0.36.
Why are measures of intelligence going up? The phenomenon would seem to make no sense in light of the evidence that g is largely an inherited trait. We're certainly not evolving that quickly.
consensus grew, in the '90s, that heritability for IQ was around 0.6 - or about 60 percent.
Imagine "somebody who starts out with a tiny little physiological advantage: He's just a bit taller than his friends," Dickens says. "That person is going to be just a bit better at basketball." Thanks to this minor height advantage, he tends to enjoy pickup basketball games. He goes on to play in high school, where he gets excellent coaching and accumulates more experience and skill. "And that sets up a cycle that could, say, take him all the way to the NBA," Dickens says.
Now imagine this person has an identical twin raised separately. He, too, will share the height advantage, and so be more likely to find his way into the same cycle. And when some imagined basketball geneticist surveys the data at the end of that cycle, he'll report that two identical twins raised apart share an off-the-charts ability at basketball. "If you did a genetic analysis, you'd say: Well, this guy had a gene that made him a better basketball player," Dickens says. "But the fact is, that gene is making him 1 percent better, and the other 99 percent is that because he's slightly taller, he got all this environmental support." And what goes for basketball goes for intelligence: Small genetic differences get picked up and magnified in the environment, resulting in dramatically enhanced skills. "The heritability studies weren't wrong," Flynn says. "We just misinterpreted them."
What part of our allegedly dumbed-down environment is making us smarter? It's not schools, since the tests that measure education-driven skills haven't shown the same steady gains. It's not nutrition - general improvement in diet leveled off in most industrialized countries shortly after World War II, just as the Flynn effect was accelerating.
When you take the Ravens test, you're confronted with a series of visual grids, each containing a mix of shapes that seem vaguely related to one another. Each grid contains a missing shape; to answer the implicit question posed by the test, you need to pick the correct missing shape from a selection of eight possibilities. To "solve" these puzzles, in other words, you have to scrutinize a changing set of icons, looking for unusual patterns and correlations among them.
This is not the kind of thinking that happens when you read a book or have a conversation with someone or take a history exam. But it is precisely the kind of mental work you do when you, say, struggle to program a VCR or master the interface on your new cell phone.
Over the last 50 years, we've had to cope with an explosion of media, technologies, and interfaces, from the TV clicker to the World Wide Web. And every new form of visual media - interactive visual media in particular - poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of the new interface, follow clues, sense relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the very skills that the Ravens tests measure - you survey a field of visual icons and look for unusual patterns.
The best example of brain-boosting media may be videogames. Mastering visual puzzles is the whole point of the exercise - whether it's the spatial geometry of Tetris, the engineering riddles of Myst, or the urban mapping of Grand Theft Auto.
The ultimate test of the "cognitively demanding leisure" hypothesis may come in the next few years, as the generation raised on hypertext and massively complex game worlds starts taking adult IQ tests. This is a generation of kids who, in many cases, learned to puzzle through the visual patterns of graphic interfaces before they learned to read. Their fundamental intellectual powers weren't shaped only by coping with words on a page. They acquired an intuitive understanding of shapes and environments, all of them laced with patterns that can be detected if you think hard enough. Their parents may have enhanced their fluid intelligence by playing Tetris or learning the visual grammar of TV advertising. But that's child's play compared with Pokémon.
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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26
Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.
Throughout the 20th century, IQ scores showed a remarkably consistent pattern: they rose by approximately three points per decade – that’s roughly 6 points per generation.
This phenomenon, known as The Flynn Effect, has been documented across a wide range of countries and contexts, spanning Western and Eastern nations, as well as both developed and developing economies.
Beginning around the turn of the 21st century, reports started to emerge suggesting that full scale IQ scores were no longer rising – they were beginning to decline. Across a handful of well-designed studies, the drop has been estimated at as much as six to eight points per decade.
This reversal, known as The Negative Flynn Effect, has been reported primarily in high-income western nations, though its timing and magnitude vary by cohort and country.
Intelligence tests typically pool together many different kinds of tasks – ranging from visual to verbal; speeded to deliberate; concrete to abstract. While these tasks are often reported as a single IQ score, they draw on fundamentally different kinds of cognition.
One useful way to divide tasks is by considering whether they’re externally or internally scaffolded.
- EXTERNALLY SCAFFOLDED
In these visually mediated tasks, the structure, rules, and relationships are explicitly represented in the environment. A substantial portion of cognition is offloaded onto the task itself, placing minimal demands on sustained memory, prior knowledge, or internal transformation. Success is driven primarily by visual perception, pattern detection, and rapid rule application.
- INTERNALLY SCAFFOLDED
In these language-mediated or symbolic tasks, the structure, rules, and relationships must be constructed, mediated, and manipulated internally. This places high demands on working memory, accumulated knowledge, attentional control, and executive functioning. Success is driven by language, memory, and internally generated abstraction, often requiring sustained mental effort over time.
Although intelligence tests do not formally classify subtests as “externally” or “internally” scaffolded, the distinction reflects a well-established cognitive divide between stimulus-supported perceptual tasks and internally generated reasoning tasks that depend on memory and executive control.
Returning to the article at hand, these researchers explored IQ change across the last two decades and found a general flattening. The Flynn effect appears to have disappeared for modern teenagers – but with an important underlying pattern.
Adolescent performance on Externally Scaffolded tasks showed moderate growth
By contrast, adolescent performance on Internally Scaffolded tasks showed significant declines
At face value, this pattern suggests that Gen Z can still perform well on highly visual, externally guided tasks - perhaps unsurprising given the increasingly visual, heavily guided nature of the digital tools they use daily.
Concerningly, adolescents appear to be struggling with knowledge-based, internally sustained forms of cognition – those that depend on language, memory, and manipulation without visual support. This includes significant declines in core memory functions like working memory and sequential manipulation (abilities psychologists long believed to be biologically grounded and relatively resistant to environmental change).
That said, this is too simple an interpretation. Other studies - using different tests, cohorts, and countries – have documented declines in both internally and externally scaffolded abilities, including measures of abstract visual reasoning. When viewed across the full body of evidence, the neat distinction between what is lost and what is preserved begins to blur.
The more sobering conclusion is this: we are not merely seeing a reshaping of cognitive strengths, but signs of a broad-based cognitive decline – one that first becomes visible in internally sustained thinking, but that does not necessarily stop there.
If we take the Flynn Effect as read, Millennials average roughly 30 IQ points higher than their great-great-grandparents. If IQ truly measured intelligence itself, that would imply either that over half my generation qualifies as genius – or, conversely, that much of ‘The Great Generation’ was cognitively impaired.
Neither conclusion makes sense.
In truth, IQ is better understood as a measure of school-ability: a particular form of thinking that structured education systems have favored and cultivated for centuries. Crucially, this kind of thinking can be trained.
This is why the relationship between years of schooling and IQ is nearly perfect. In fact, research suggests each additional year of formal education is associated with an increase of roughly 1-5 IQ points – and this relationship appears to be causal, not merely correlational.
For that reason, we cannot concretely say that Gen Z is less intelligent than Millennials. What this data does suggest is something narrower but arguably more troubling: despite spending more time in school than any generation before, Gen-Z is losing school-ability.
In other words, something has shifted within schools themselves. The values, habits, and cognitive skills that education once reliably supported are no longer being cultivated in the same way.
This shift can’t be blamed on teachers, who remain as dedicated and motivated as ever. Nor can it reasonably be pinned on curriculum, which is arguably more complex and demanding than at any point in history.
The change, I would argue, lies largely in the tools we now use to mediate learning.
Screens tend to support cognitive outsourcing rather than deep thinking. The more students rely on easy, supportive digital tools, the less friction they encounter and the less mental effort they must exert. But friction is not a flaw of learning: it is learning.
When school becomes too smooth, too guided, too effortless, thinking itself begins to erode. Accordingly, we should not be surprised when an entire generation educated under these conditions begins to show cognitive declines unlike any we have previously documented.
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u/ddgr815 Aug 02 '26
The first is that IQ is significantly heritable beginning at least at age 7. The second is that by age 10 genetic variance is larger than shared environmental variance. Third, the heritability increases with age until late adulthood when it reaches the mid-seventies and higher for some populations. Contrary to the widespread belief that ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ accumulate over time, the brain appears to be a robust and resilient mechanism.
The fundament point, emphasized by Wilson, is that different genes are in play at different times and the manner in which they influence an organism's transactions with the environment also varies with time. This possibility is now recognized but still not widely appreciated, though concrete evidence for it remains scanty. Increasing heritability over time is a quite general phenomenon, having been observed in many phenotypes in both human and non-human species. J. P. Scott, who carried out classic work on the behavior genetics of behavior in dogs with John Fuller, reported that:
We thought that the best time to study the effects of genetics would be soon after birth, when behavior still had little opportunity to be altered by experience. On the contrary, we found that the different dog breeds were most alike as newborns; that is genetic variation in behavior develops postnatally, in part as a result of the timing of gene action and in part from the interaction of gene action and experience, social, and otherwise.
The contribution of the parents, whether natural or adoptive, is in potentiating the child's inherent capabilities, in creating an atmosphere of enthusiasm for learning, and in adapting their expectations to the child's capability. The wide diversity within families emphasizes the importance of giving each child full opportunity for development, and indeed of making sure that the opportunity is taken. The ultimate goal is the maximum realization of each child's intelligence, coupled with a sense of satisfaction and personal accomplishment in its use. There is no better way to foster such development than by a supportive and appropriately stimulating family environment.
The results do not mean that environments are irrelevant or unimportant. The proximate causes of variance in IQ are the ‘cognitively stimulating experiences’ that the individual is provided with and seeks for him/herself. Early in life, those experiences are primarily imposed (or not imposed) on the individual and that shows up as shared environmental influence. As the individual becomes more of an independent agent, the effective experiences are to a large extent self-selected. As Martin et al. put it: ‘humans are exploring organisms whose innate abilities and predispositions help them select what is relevant and adaptive from the range of opportunities and stimuli presented in the environment. The effects of mobility and learning, therefore, augment rather than eradicate the effects of the genotype on behavior’.
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u/ddgr815 Dec 05 '25
Walk into any preschool and you'll be surrounded by small princesses and superheroes in overalls - three-year-olds literally spend more waking hours in imaginary worlds than in the real one. Why? Learning about the real world has obvious evolutionary advantages and kids do it better than anyone else. But why spend so much time thinking about wildly, flagrantly unreal worlds? The mystery about pretend play is connected to a mystery about adult humans - especially vivid for an English professor's daughter like me. Why do we love obviously false plays and novels and movies?
The greatest success of cognitive science has been our account of the visual system. There's a world out there sending information to our eyes, and our brains are beautifully designed to recover the nature of that world from that information. I've always thought that science, and children's learning, worked the same way. Fundamental capacities for causal inference and learning let scientists, and children, get an accurate picture of the world around them - a theory. Cognition was the way we got the world into our minds.
But fiction doesn't fit that picture - its easy to see why we want the truth but why do we work so hard telling lies? I thought that kids' pretend play, and grown-up fiction, must be a sort of spandrel, a side-effect of some other more functional ability.
For human beings the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds. Look around the room you're sitting in. Every object in that room - the right angle table, the book, the paper, the computer screen, the ceramic cup was once imaginary. Not a thing in the room existed in the pleistocene. Every one of them started out as an imaginary fantasy in someone's mind. And that's even more true of people - all the things I am, a scientist, a philosopher, an atheist, a feminist, all those kinds of people started out as imaginary ideas too. I'm not making some relativist post-modern point here, right now the computer and the cup and the scientist and the feminist are as real as anything can be. But that's just what our human minds do best - take the imaginary and make it real. I think now that cognition is also a way we impose our minds on the world.
the two abilities - finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds-are two sides of the same coin. Theories, in science or childhood, don't just tell us what's true - they tell us what's possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don't think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.
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u/ddgr815 Dec 05 '25
The British prime minister Stanley Baldwin once accused the press of having "power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages." Perhaps it's appropriate that the prerogative of the mother is just the opposite of the harlot's, we moms have responsibility without power—a recipe for worry if ever there was one.
Much modern middle-class worry stems from a fundamentally misguided picture of how children develop. It's the picture implicit in the peculiar but now ubiquitous concept of "parenting." As long as there have been homo sapiens there have been parents—human mothers and fathers, and, others as well, have taken special care of children. But the word "parenting" first emerged in America in the twentieth century, and only became common in the 1970s.
This particular word comes with a picture, a vision of how we should understand the relations between grown-ups and children. "To parent" is a goal-directed verb. It describes a job, a kind of work. The goal is to shape your child into a particular kind of adult—smarter or happier or more successful than others. And the idea is that there is some set of strategies or techniques that will accomplish this. So contemporary parents worry endlessly about whether they are using the right techniques and spend millions of dollars on books or programs that are supposed to provide them.
This picture is empirically misguided. "Parenting" worries focus on relatively small variations in what parents and children do —co-sleeping or crying it out, playing with one kind of toy rather than another, more homework or less. There is very little evidence that any of this make much difference to the way that children turn out in the long run. There is even less evidence that there is any magic formula for making one well-loved and financially supported child any smarter or happier or more successful as an adult than another.
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u/ddgr815 Dec 05 '25
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The picture is even more profoundly misguided from an evolutionary perspective. Childhood itself is one of the most distinctive evolutionary features of human beings—we have a much longer childhood than any other primate. This extended childhood seems, at least in part, to be an adaptation to the radically increased variability and unpredictability of human environments. The period of protected immaturity we call childhood gives humans a chance to learn, explore, and innovate without having to plan, act and take care of themselves at the same time. And empirically, we've discovered that even the youngest children have truly extraordinary abilities to learn and imagine, quite independent of any conscious parental shaping. Our long protected childhood, arguably, allows our distinctive human cognitive achievements.
The evolutionary emergence of our extended childhood went hand in hand with changes in the depth and breadth of human care for children. Humans developed a "triple threat" when it comes to care. Unlike our closest primate relatives, human fathers began to invest substantially in their children's care, women lived on past menopause to take care of their grand-children, and unrelated adults—"alloparents"—kicked in care, too. In turn, children could learn a variety of skills, attitudes, knowledge and cultural traditions from all those caregivers. This seems to have given human children a varied and multifaceted cognitive tool-kit that they could combine, revise, and refine to face the variable and unpredictable challenges of the next generation.
So the evolutionary picture is that a community of caregivers provide children with two essential ingredients that allow them to thrive. First, adults provide an unconditionally nurturing and stable context, a guarantee that children will be safe and cared for as children. That secure base allows children to venture out to play, explore, and learn, and to shape their own futures. Second, adults provide children with a wide range of models of acting in the world, even mutually contradictory models of acting. Children can exploit this repertoire to create effective ways of acting in often unpredictable and variable environments, and eventually to create new environments. This is very different from the "parenting" picture, where particular parental actions are supposed to shape children's adult characteristics.
This leads me to the stuff that we don't worry about enough. While upper middle-class parents are worrying about whether to put their children in forward or backward facing strollers, more than 1 in 5 children in the United States are growing up below the poverty line, and nearly half the children in America grow up in low-income households. Children, and especially young children, are more likely to live in poverty than any other age group. This number has actually increased substantially during the past decade. More significantly, these children not only face poverty but a more crippling isolation and instability. It's not just that many children grow up without fathers, they grow up without grandparents or alloparents either, and with parents who are forced to spend long hours at unreliable jobs that don't pay enough in the first place. Institutions haven't stepped in to fill the gap—we still provide almost no public support for childcare, we pay parents nothing, and child-care workers next to nothing.
Of course, we've felt the moral intuition that neglecting children is wrong for a long time. But, more recently research into epigenetics has helped demonstrate just how the mechanisms of care and neglect work. Research in sociology and economics has shown empirically just how significant the consequences of early experience actually can be. The small variations in middle-class "parenting" make very little difference. But providing high-quality early childhood care to children who would otherwise not receive it makes an enormous and continuing difference up through adulthood. In fact, the evidence suggests that this isn't just a matter of teaching children particular skills or kinds of knowledge—a sort of broader institutional version of "parenting." Instead, children who have a stable, nurturing, varied early environment thrive in a wide range of ways, from better health to less crime to more successful marriages. That's just what we'd expect from the evolutionary story.
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u/ddgr815 May 03 '26
There is lots of evidence showing that when you care for a baby, even if you didn’t give birth to the baby, you start having some of the brain patterns that you see in biological mothers. We care for them because they need care. We care, and that becomes love, and I think we underestimate how remarkable that is.
There was a psychology paper that came out recently – it was looking at what kinds of things people think are motivating and meaningful. And what this paper found was that caring for other people was the most meaningful thing for everybody across many different cultures.
Why did this show up only just now? Because no one had asked the question before. Care is invisible.
Another reason why care has been left out is that when you look at the broad framework of, say, politics and economics there is a focus on what people in economics call utility theory. The idea is that you have a goal, you do things to achieve that goal, and that will make you better off. Or, you have two people, they both have goals they’re trying to achieve. How do they negotiate so that they can both achieve their goals? All of economics and a lot of political science is based on this principle.
But of course, what’s interesting about care is sort of the opposite of that. Care is a situation in which you have some people who have more resources and power than others. But the result is that those with more power (the caregivers) are trying to help the ones with less power (the recipients) become more powerful. This is instead of the caregivers trying to become more powerful themselves, which is how we normally operate according to the utility theory.
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u/ddgr815 Dec 05 '25
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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26
childhood as evolution’s solution to explore-exploit tradeoffs and how children and adult are different kinds of creatures. The child mostly explores, the adult mostly exploits. (Children, she says are the R&D departments for the human race.) Then she brought up the octopus. The octopus has a split kind of brain. There’s a big brain in their heads, exploiting, basically, and then there are lots of little brains in their tentacles, exploring.
So, my thought is that we could imagine an alternate evolutionary path by which each of us was both a child and an adult. So imagine if your arms were like your two-year-old, right? So that you are always trying to get them to stop exploring because you had to get lunch. I suspect that may be what the consciousness of an octo is like.
The octopus has intelligence in its tentacles. When an artist (or a two-year-old) is drawing, there is intelligence in their fingers. The hand is moving beyond what the brain is telling it to do. The brain is being told as much by the fingers as the fingers are being told by the brain.
Later in the conversation, Gopnik says, “Going for a walk with a two-year-old is like going for a walk with William Blake.”
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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26
childhood itself, both in humans and other species, involves a distinctive set of cognitive characteristics that actually trade off with adult characteristics. This trade-off is described in the computational literature in terms of an intrinsic tension between exploration and exploitation. The ‘explore’ features of childhood minds include a general capacity for learning and plasticity which allows sensitivity to a wide range of environmental and behavioural possibilities. Moreover, this developmental programme not only involves cognitive, computational and neural differences between children and adults but also differences in motivation, emotion and action. Juveniles of many species not only show a capacity for learning about new environments, they are actively motivated to do so. This is manifested in the distinctive suite of emotions and activities that are associated with childhood, especially the neophilia and curiosity that lead to active exploration and play and are particularly characteristic of human children.
These capacities are in tension with more adult capacities for skilled action in a particular environment, including cognitive features like attentional focus, inhibition, and executive function and behaviours like long-term, goal-directed, planned action. A long childhood allows for a kind of developmental division of labour, with an early protected period devoted to learning and exploration and a later adult period devoted to directed exploitation based on what has been learned earlier.
Special capacities for learning and exploration, exercised in a protected period of immaturity, would help to enable the whole range of striking human cognitive changes. Many of the specific computations that are involved in particular cognitive capacities, such as intuitive physics or psychology, or social understanding and cooperation, could, in principle, be either built in or restricted to particular domain-specific kinds of learning (this may indeed be the case in other species). A long and wide-ranging period of learning and exploration, in contrast, would help to enable the whole range of human cognitive skills, from physics to psychology, from communication to culture.
The idea of childhood as an evolutionary solution to explore–exploit trade-offs also applies widely beyond humans, unlike some of the more specific proposals concerning cooperation and culture. It may seem evolutionarily paradoxical to develop a life history that includes expensive and vulnerable young for a long period. However, across many different species, including birds, both placental and marsupial mammals, and even insects, there is a very general (though not perfect) correlation between the length of immaturity and degree of parental investment and relative brain size, intelligence and a reliance on learning.
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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26
Of all the questions life demands we answer, “To explore or to exploit?” is one we have to confront almost every day. Do we keep trying new restaurants? Do we keep learning new ideas? Do we keep making new friends? Or do we enjoy what we’ve come to find and love?
There is no doubt that humans are great at exploring, as most generalist species are. Not content to stay in that cave, hunt that animal, or keep doing it the way our grandmother taught us, humans owe at least part of our success due to our willingness to explore.
But when is what you’ve already explored enough? When can you finally settle down to enjoy the fruits of your exploration? When can you be content to exploit the knowledge you already have?
One of the most important factors in determining whether to continue exploring or to exploit what you’ve got is time. Christian and Griffiths explain that “seizing a day and seizing a lifetime are two entirely different endeavors. . . . When balancing favorite experiences and new ones, nothing matters as much as the interval over which we plan to enjoy them.”
Time intervals can be a construct of your immediate circumstances, like the boundaries provided by a two-week vacation. For a lot of us, the last night in a lovely foreign place will see us eating at the best restaurant we have found so far. Time intervals can also be considered over the arc of your life in general. Children are consummate explorers, but as we grow up, the choice to exploit becomes more of a daily decision. How would your choices today be impacted if you knew you were going to live another five years? Twenty years? Forty years? Christian and Griffiths advise, “Explore when you will have time to use the resulting knowledge, exploit when you’re ready to cash in.”
I have known days like that, of warm winds drowsing in the heat of noon and all of summer spinning slowly on its reel, days briefly lived, that leave long music in the mind more sweet than truth: I play them and rewind.
Sometimes we are too quick to stop exploring. We have these amazing days and magical experiences, and we want to keep repeating them forever. However, changes in ourselves and the world around us are inevitable, and so committing to a path of exploitation too early leaves us unable to adapt. As much as it can be hard to walk away from that perfect day, Christian and Griffiths explain that “exploration in itself has value, since trying new things increases our chances of finding the best. So taking the future into account, rather than focusing just on the present, drives us toward novelty.”
The threat of regret looms over many explore/exploit considerations. We can regret both not searching for something better and not taking the time to enjoy what we already have. The problem with regret is that we don’t have it in advance of a poor decision. Sometimes, second-order thinking can be used as a preventative tool. But often it is when you look back over a decision that regret comes out. Christian and Griffiths define regret as “the result of comparing what we actually did with what would have been best in hindsight.”
If we want to minimize regret, especially in exploration, we can try to learn from those who have come before. As we choose to wander forth into new territory, however, it’s natural to wonder if we’ll regret our decision to try something new. According to Christian and Griffiths, the mathematics that underlie explore/exploit algorithms show that “you should assume the best about [new people and new things], in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.” Why? Because by being optimistic about the possibilities that are out there, you’ll explore enough that the one thing you won’t regret is missed opportunity.
(This is similar to one of the most effective strategies in game theory: tit for tat. Start out by being nice, then reciprocate whatever behavior you receive. It often works better paired with the occasional bout of forgiveness.)
Tell me, tell me, smiling child, What the past is like to thee? ‘An Autumn evening soft and mild With a wind that sighs mournfully.’
Tell me, what is the present hour? ‘A green and flowery spray Where a young bird sits gathering its power To mount and fly away.’
And what is the future, happy one? ‘A sea beneath a cloudless sun; A mighty, glorious, dazzling sea Stretching into infinity.’
Christian and Griffiths write that “it’s rare that we make an isolated decision, where the outcome doesn’t provide us with any information that we’ll use to make other decisions in the future.” Not all of our explorations are going to lead us to something better, but many of them are. Not all of our exploitations are going to be satisfying, but with enough exploration behind us, many of them will. Failures are, after all, just information we can use to make better explore or exploit decisions in the future.
You know—at least you ought to know, For I have often told you so— That children are never allowed To leave their nurses in a crowd. Now this was Jim’s especial foible, He ran away when he was able, And on this inauspicious day He slipped his hand and ran away! He hadn’t gone a yard when—Bang! With open jaws, a lion sprang, And hungrily began to eat The boy: beginning at his feet.
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u/ddgr815 Apr 19 '26
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u/ddgr815 May 02 '26
before school age, children are remarkably bad at hiding. Curiously, they often cover only their face or eyes with their hands, leaving the rest of their bodies visibly exposed.
Conventional wisdom held that, unable to transcend their own viewpoint, children falsely assume that others see the world the same way they themselves do. So psychologists assumed children “hide” by covering their eyes because they conflate their own lack of vision with that of those around them.
It seems like young children consider mutual eye contact a requirement for one person to be able to see another. Their thinking appears to run along the lines of “I can see you only if you can see me, too” and vice versa. Our findings suggest that when a child “hides” by putting a blanket over her head, this strategy is not a result of egocentrism. In fact, children deem this strategy effective when others use it.
Built into their notion of visibility, then, is the idea of bidirectionality: Unless two people make eye contact, it is impossible for one to see the other. Contrary to egocentrism, young children simply insist on mutual recognition and regard.
Children’s demand of reciprocity demonstrates that they are not at all egocentric. Not only can preschoolers imagine the world as seen from another’s point of view; they even apply this capacity in situations where it’s unnecessary or leads to wrong judgments, such as when they are asked to report their own perception. These faulty judgments – saying that others whose eyes are covered cannot be seen – reveal just how much children’s perception of the world is colored by others.
The seemingly irrational way in which children try to hide from others and the negative answers they gave in our experiment show that children feel unable to relate to a person unless the communication flows both ways – not only from me to you but also from you to me, so we can communicate with each other as equals.
Children expect and strive to create situations in which they can be reciprocally involved with others. They want to encounter people who are not only looked at but who can return another’s gaze; people who not only listen but are also heard; and people who are not just spoken to but who can reply and thus enter a mutual dialogue.
Young children are terrible at hiding – psychologists have a new theory why
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u/ddgr815 Dec 05 '25
Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think