Reddit reviews The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life

If you want to have a creative thinker who can be a leader in STEM turn off the TV, put away screens, stop any lessons and provide your toddler with lots of books, art and most importantly opportunities for free play, especially outside. Children learn through play. I really recommend The Philosophical Baby by UC Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik.

The language thing is great if you can keep it up. I have chosen to focus on one language a have been using speech therapy type techniques since infancy, so my 2.5 YO talks more like a 3 or 4 YO. Kids learn a lot through social interactions using language so if you get an early head start on language you can benefit from the snowball effect as your kid is always going tone ahead of their peers.

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris introduces John Brockman’s new anthology, “Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI,” in conversation with three of its authors: George Dyson, Alison Gopnik, and Stuart Russell.

George Dyson is a historian of technology. He is also the author of Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral.

Alison Gopnik is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley and a leader in the field of children’s learning and development. Her books include The Philosophical Baby.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is the author of (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the most widely used textbook on AI.

I can't answer the question definitively, but an interesting phenomenon that I've observed as a teacher is how teaching infants sign language allows them to exhibit their cognition and thought process. I teach in a Montessori infant classroom and I've taught babies (under 18 months) signs that I then see them use in different but totally appropriate ways. For example: we use the sign "outside" to mean literally out-of-doors in the fresh air. But we have kids who then use the same sign to mean "out of the classroom", "out of this area", "come to this side of the fence," etc. They are showing that they understand this concept of "i am here and I want to be elsewhere". They don't have the verbal/physical words, but the neural pathways are certainly there, and every time someone uses that sign or says "outside" that pathway is being reinforced. Obviously, I don't know for sure, but I would imagine that since these children are signing in response to heard words, if you could see a brain scan you'd see areas lighting up for thinking of the sound of words, and also motor skills for thinking about the movement of signing.
Now I want to see if anyone's done this kind of study, and if not, why not?! Off I scuttle to do some research....

Edit: a really terrific resource for understanding infant cognition is Alison Gopnik. She's a cogsci researcher out of UC Berkeley and she's written the following:

[The Scientist in the Crib](The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind https://www.amazon.com/dp/0688177883/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_bboSybE1V7Q9G)

[The Philosophical Baby](The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life https://www.amazon.com/dp/0312429843/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_QboSybDSGGJZQ)

I can't speak for [her new book](The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children https://www.amazon.com/dp/0374229708/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_udoSybM1SFBSC) but I can tell you that the first two completely changed the way I view babies. They really are amazing little people with astounding cognitive abilities from birth!

3 YO brains aren't like little adult brains - they are so different that leading developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik describes them as almost being another species. Or at least like the butterflies to our caterpillars.

Little kids have way more neural connections than adults - over time they get pruned based on the kid's experiences. This means that they see limitless options where we just see a toothbrush. They also have very underdeveloped frontal lobes so are not able to control themselves very well.

In addition to these structural differences, children need play and exploration to prepare their brains for academic learning, creativity, and focus when they are older. If a parent were to totally scare a kid into always doing everything the parent wants all the time that wouldn't be healthy for cognitive development.

There's lots of great advice here about how to deal with this. If you want to read more about why klittle kids are the way they are I really recommend Dr. Gopnik's book The Philosophical Baby. It doesn't
give strategies for handling little kids but it does give you a wonderful appreciation for why they act the way they do and how important it is for development. http://www.amazon.com/The-Philosophical-Baby-Childrens-Meaning/dp/0312429843