Selected as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times‘The Gardener and the Carpenter should be required reading for anyone who is, or is thinking of becoming a parent’ Financial Times Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us humanYet the thing we call ‘parenting’ is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the huge industry surrounding it have transformed childcare into obsessive, controlling, and goal-orientated labour intended to create a particular kind of child, and therefore a particular kind of adult.Drawing on the study of human evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative, and to be very different both from their parents and from each otherThe variability and flexibility of