**Hand-Waving Advice **
Posits that parents should be more gardeners than carpenters. OK, but what does that mean? I thought it would mean gardening in the way that Seeing like a State describes farming: a complex interaction between farmer and environment that includes non-reducible complexity and generations of built in-knowledge that is ignored by intersubjective human systems. That would have been an interesting avenue to explore.
But alas, when the Gopnik says gardening, what she really means is allowing kids to play, rather than being overly didactic or prescriptive in parenting. Maybe for somebody in my grandparents generation who thought that kids should be ‘seen and not heard’ this thesis is new. But for me, this is not news. I would have wanted to know more about types of play, what are effective methods of fostering play, when is it still necessary to be didactic etc. Instead the advice is just: ’let them play’ which while I directionally agree with, doesn’t need a book to convince me or fill in any details to justify the time and price for this one.
** 75th book of 2023 **