Top Highlights

• Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative, and to be very different both from their parents and from each other.
• The variability and flexibility of childhood lets them innovate, create, and survive in an unpredictable world.
• The purpose of loving children, in particular, is to give those helpless young human beings a rich, stable, safe environment— an environment in which variation, innovation, and novelty can blossom.
• We humans have always been caught between preserving the old and ringing in the new. This tension has gone on for a very long time—it isn’t just a feature of our technological culture, but a part of our evolutionary program.
• How can we value and pass on our own culture and traditions, yet also allow and encourage our children to invent entirely new ones?