The second important thing about the influence of other people is that the most significant behavior seems almost entirely unintentional. Parents don’t deliberately set out to imitate their babies or to speak motherese; it’s just what comes naturally. Our instinctive behaviors toward babies and babies’ instinctive behaviors toward us combine to ena

Language is as much invented as learned. Babies don’t simply soak up associations between names and things or mimic adults’ use of words.

The more recent research changes this picture. Lusts don’t dictate thoughts, and “bonding” isn’t a once-and-for-all event that must take place in a critical period. Knowledge guides emotion more than emotion distorts knowledge. The relations between parents and children, like other human relations, develop and change as both partners come to know a

The philosopher Otto Neurath compared knowledge to a boat we rebuild as we sail in it. To keep afloat during his thirty years of wandering, Ulysses had to constantly repair and rebuild the boat he lived in. Each new storm or calm meant an alteration in the design. By the end of the journey hardly anything remained of the original vessel. That is an

The question, as always, is how do they do it? The answer, as in the last chapter, is that they are born knowing a great deal, they learn more, and we are designed to teach them.

It was as if the Korean-speaking children paid more attention to how their actions influenced the world, while the English-speaking children paid more attention to how objects fit into different categories. The likeliest explanation for this is that the children were influenced by what the grown-ups around them said, which in turn was shaped by the

When babies are around a year old, they begin to point to things and they begin to look at things that other people point to. Like imitation, pointing is something so familiar we take it for granted. But also like imitation, pointing implies a deep understanding of yourself and of other people.

Piaget wanted to find a link between Kant and the mollusks, between epistemology and biology. His great insight was that studying the development of human children was one way to do this.

Grandparents and uncles and aunts have also disappeared from children’s lives just when they are most needed, and grandchildren and nieces and nephews have sadly disappeared from our lives. Perhaps we will construct institutions that allow people whose own children have grown up, or who don’t have children, to be involved with other people’s childr