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Steven Pinker Quotes about Children

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The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.

The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.

Steven Pinker
Children, Ideas, Achievement
"Steven Pinker: The evolutionary man". Interview with John Crace, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2008.

Being smarter gives you a tailwind throughout life. People who are more intelligent earn more, live longer, get divorced less, are less likely to get addicted to alcohol and tobacco, and their children live longer.

Steven Pinker
Children, Intelligent, People
"This much I know". Interview With Tom Templeton, www.theguardian.com. June 21, 2008.

When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.

Steven Pinker
Children, War, Thinking
Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.14, Penguin

The Rights Revolutions too have given us ideals that educated people today take for granted but that are virtually unprecedented in human history, such as that people of all races and creeds have equal rights, that women should be free from all forms of coercion, that children should never, ever be spanked, that students should be protected from bullying, and that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. I don’t find it at all implausible that these are gifts, in part, of a refined and widening application of reason.

Steven Pinker
Bullying, Children, Gay

The fact that people can forget these simple truths when intellectualizing about children shows how far modern doctrines have taken us. They make it easy to think of children as lumps of putty to be shaped instead of partners in a human relationship.

Steven Pinker
Children, Teaching, Taken
Steven Pinker (2003). “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, p.594, Penguin UK

Evolutionary psychologists seem to want to unmask our noblest motives as ultimately self-interested - to show that our love for children, compassion for the unfortunate and sense of justice are just tactics in a Darwinian struggle to perpetuate our genes.

Steven Pinker
Children, Struggle, Compassion

Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate.

Steven Pinker
Children, Mean, Kids

For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on.

Steven Pinker
Children, Growing Up, Kids

Education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn how to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends, even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history. They do have to go to school to learn written language, arithmetic, and science, because those bodies of knowledge and skill were invented too recently for any species-wide knack for them to have evolved.

Steven Pinker
Children, Reading, School
"The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature". Book by Steven Pinker, 2002.

As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.

Steven Pinker
Children, Long, Dots

So no, it's not all in the genes, but what isn't in the genes isn't in the family environment either. It can't be explained in terms of the overall personalities or the child-rearing practices of parents.

Steven Pinker
Children, Practice, Personality
"A biological understanding of human nature". Edge Interview, www.edge.org. September 18, 2017.

We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.

Steven Pinker
Children, Views, Law
Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.480, Penguin

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