Parents should be Gardeners and not Carpenters

For those of us that are parents, or grandparents, we are told over and over that parenting is the most important job we will ever have.

The assumption is that if we buy Baby Einstein, enroll our kids in the best preschool, (sometimes costing as much as college) provide just the right mix of extracurricular activity and teachers and pour in the right measure of self esteem, we will turn out, as if from a factory, the perfect child. One ready to take on the challenges and leadership of their world and one that will continue to be a part of the parenting/industrial complex

But is any of this true? What do children, with all their curiosity, really need? Do they need to be moulded, sculpted, or do they simply need room to grown and with lots of love as the fertilizer?

These are the questions that Alison Gopnik has been asking for years and now she bring all of this together in her newest work The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children.

My conversation with Alison Gopnik:

A cancer on the Church..that didn't have to happen

Just recently we heard about tens of millions of dollars in cash being laundered in the Vatican. Clearly the Vatican and the Catholic Church are still imperial institutions, very much disconnected from the real world. Nowhere has this been more evident than in the almost twenty year history of sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

We often think about these stories on a very human, very tragic case by case basis. But from thirty thousand feet, the numbers are staggering. 500+ priests sent to prison, over 3 billion paid in settlements, single priests that have abused more than 200 individual children and these are just a few of the statistics.

How did this happen? How did horror and human degradation become so institutionalized, covered up and almost accepted from the Pope on down?

This is the story that Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Michael D’Antonio tells in his new book Mortal Sins: Sex, Crime, and the Era of Catholic Scandal.

My conversation with Michael D'Antonio:

Nature vs. NurtureShock

Suppose everything we think we know about raising children were turned upside down? Po Bronson, author of the previous cutting edge books "The Nudist on the Late Shift, and "What Should I Do With My Life?" now, in his new book NurtureShock: New Thinking About Childrentakes us beyond the folklore of child rearing into the realm of modern science. He reveals what decades of studies teach us and gives an intriguing analysis of conventional wisdom. You will never approach your kids the same way again.

My conversation with Po Bronson: