A review by andrejt
The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children by Alison Gopnik

2.0

The book makes a sensible argument that parents should build a nurturing environment instead of trying to shape their children. Hence the gardener vs. carpenter metaphor. However, the book doesn't provide much information on how to build a nurturing environment. It isn't very well structured and it freely crosses the boundary between contemplation and rambling. The few more empirical parts were interesting, but they cherrypicked evidence without offering a more critical assessment or convincing readers that one study of a village in Guatemala or a small-sample lab experiment at Berkeley are generalizable in any meaningful way.