Sublime

older children define play as whatever you do with your friends. However, toddlers and preschoolers define play as doing whatever you choose.

The theories also go beyond the evidence they are based on. That means they allow scientists to make new predictions about things they’ve never seen before, just as the children’s representations allow them to make new predictions. Those predictions allow scientists, and children, to act on the world in more effective ways. Just as babies play with

As the neuroscientist Gary Marcus explains, “Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.”

This builds on a growing body of work that our ‘‘mind perception’’ (which manifests as inferences of intentions, beliefs, and values) meaningfully varies across individuals and shapes our moral judgments

I recently spoke with an anthropologist named Barry Hewlett who studies child-rearing in hunter-gatherer societies in Central Africa. He explained to me that children in those societies spend lots of time with their parents — they tag along throughout the day and often help with tasks like foraging — but they are rarely the main object of their par

Piaget focused on the kinds of errors kids make. For example, he’d put water into two identical drinking glasses and ask kids to tell him if the glasses held the same amount of water. (Yes.) Then he’d pour the contents of one of the glasses into a tall skinny glass and ask the child to compare the new glass to the one that had not been touched. Kid

Babies feel but don’t reason (and have the beginnings of morality).

One thing that science tells us is that nature has designed us to teach babies, as much as it has designed babies to learn.