The Gardener and the Carpenter

A book about parenting, sort of… When you become a parent, it’s inevitable, you’ll probably read about it. You’ll say you don’t care about these books and you’ll be filled with fear that you’re somehow doing something wrong. The way I interpreted it at least, this one basically tells you to “Get over it!”

Its title might seem odd, but it’s actually a pretty interesting theory about two ways of being a parent and taking care of your children.

The gardener is that person who cares and provides the best they can for their flowers and lets them flourish. They do the best they can, but there are a lot of different factors interfering with their garden. They know they can’t control everything and do not expect a precise result or outcome at the end of their task.

The carpenter is the new parenting model, that most parents try to assume when taking care of their children and Gopnik compares it to a carpenter who picks the material and shapes it exactly the way they want. (Does that sound like a child to you?)

The whole book is about experience and observation, scientific experiments and the author’s own experience as a mother and a grandmother. Different perspectives from the same person can bring surprisingly interesting results.

She leads us to think about childhood, about our children and about our own childhood and what we felt back then, trying to take off some of our fears and uncertainty, making us feel more powerful as parents, despite the fact that she defends that we can’t predict what our child will become, no matter what. They are human beings with free will and we can’t model them, just try to become a model ourselves.

She gives us back what the new parenting model took from us in the first place: freedom.