用新的儿童发展科学来讲述亲子关系
The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, by Alison Gopnik, The Bodley Head, RRP￡18.99/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, RRP$26, 320 pages
《园丁与木匠：用新的儿童发展科学来讲述亲子关系》(The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children)，艾莉森•戈普尼克(Alison Gopnik)著，Bodley Head出版社/建议零售价18.99英镑，法勒、斯特劳斯和吉鲁出版社(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)/建议零售价26美元，320页
The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child, by Paula Fass, Princeton University Press, RRP$29.95, 352 pages
《美国童年终结：从不干涉到管制的亲子教育史》（The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child），葆拉•法斯(Paula Fass)著，普林斯顿大学出版社 (Princeton University Press)，建议零售价29.95英镑，352页
Parents are struggling, it seems.
家长们似乎正面临困境。
We are obsessed with the job of parenting, trying to mould our children so that they are happy, garlanded with top grades and achievements, and ready to take on the future — even though that future is unknowable to us.
我们沉迷于家长这份工作，试图塑造我们的孩子，让他们快乐、顶着高分和成就的光环、准备好迎接未来——尽管他们的未来是我们无从知晓的。
Meanwhile, the frightening wider world lurks, chaotically, beyond our control.
与此同时，混乱、可怕的外部世界潜伏在四周，我们无法控制。
And to minimise our own fear and worry, we try to protect our young people so that a middle-class childhood now lasts until college, and often beyond.
为了最大限度地减少我们自己的恐惧和担忧，我们努力保护我们的孩子，以至于如今一名中产阶级子弟的童年一直持续到上大学，甚至更久。
There is an impossible mismatch between modern micromanagement inside the home and the unknowables outside.
现代家长事无巨细的管理与不可知的外部世界极不匹配。
To assuage this crisis, parents (meaning, in my experience, anxiety-prone middle-class mothers) lap up advice from books telling us how to fix our family life so as to engineer more successful futures for our kids.
为了平息这种危机，父母（以我的经验来看，这往往意味着容易焦虑的中产阶级母亲）积极地从那些讲述如何修复家庭生活、为孩子设计更成功未来的书籍中吸取建议。
The standout among these manuals in capturing the parenting zeitgeist was Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011).
《虎妈战歌》(Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,2011年)从这些紧随亲子教育思潮的手册中脱颖而出。
This memoir by a Chinese-American mother of bringing up two high-achieving girls details how a traditional Asian regime can work wonders.
这部回忆录的作者是一名美籍华裔母亲，她培养出了两个成就非凡的女儿，书中详述了一套传统的亚洲生活计划是如何创造奇迹的。
Its key mantras include: be very strict, enforce music practice, don’t allow free expression through drama, sport — or sleepovers.
关键原则包括：非常严格、强制音乐训练、不允许擅自参加戏剧、体育活动或在外留宿。
Overnight, tiger mother became shorthand for a woman who turns parenting into a high-stakes management career.
一夜间，虎妈成为了把管孩子变成一份重要管理事业的女性的代名词。
Two new books, however, suggest that over-scheduling and controlling our children when they are young — including snowplough parenting where every obstacle to the child’s success is cleared from their path; then being a helicopter parent hovering over college-age adults — may be a waste of time.
然而，上述两本新书表明，在孩子小时候，给他们安排太多计划、把他们的生活控制得太死——包括帮孩子扫清成功路上的一切障碍的铲雪机式家长，在孩子进入大学后仍然在他们头顶徘徊不去的直升机式的父母——可能是浪费时间。
It may even be downright damaging for our children’s future and society’s economic prosperity.
这甚至可能会完全毁掉孩子的未来和整个社会的经济繁荣。
Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter should be required reading for anyone who is, or is thinking of becoming, a parent.
所有父母或者想要成为父母的人都应该阅读艾莉森•戈普尼克所著的《园丁与木匠》。
It might also offer comfort to any adult who feels that their life has been blighted by their own parents.
任何觉得自己的人生被父母祸害了的成年人，或许也能从这本书中获得些许慰藉。
(And at ￡20, it is cheaper than therapy.)
（只需要20英镑，比心理治疗费便宜。）
From an empirical perspective, parenting is a mug’s game, is one of Gopnik’s startling early assertions.
从经验主义的角度来看，管孩子是费力不讨好的事，是戈普尼克惊人的初步论断之一。
Instead of using parenting as a verb, she argues for a far more flexible way of being a parent, with caring for children at its heart: Love doesn’t have goals or benchmarks or blueprints, but it does have a purpose.
她主张不要管孩子，而是用一种灵活得多的方式做父母，核心是照顾孩子：爱没有目标、标准和蓝图，但是爱有目的。
The purpose is not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive.
爱的目的不是改变我们所爱的人，而是为他们提供他们蓬勃发展所需的条件。
It is essentially a nurturing role, rather than shaping and constructing: the parent as Gardener, rather than Carpenter.
父母的角色在本质上是抚育，而不是塑造或者构建：父母是园丁，而不是木匠。
And as Gopnik goes on to show, attempting to shape children’s outcomes is useless as well as time-consuming and potentially damaging.
戈普尼克接下来表明，努力让孩子有出息的做法既无用又耗时、还可能造成伤害。
Gopnik is a professor of psychology and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where she runs a cognitive science laboratory.
戈普尼克是美国加州大学伯克利分校(University of California, Berkeley)的心理学和哲学教授，管理着该校一间认知科学实验室。
Hers is a rare erudition: scholarly, yes, but accessible and rooted in her experience as a mother and grandmother.
罕见的是，她的书虽然的确很学术，但并不难懂，并且依托于她作母亲和祖母的经历。
Her toddler grandson Augie, in particular, makes frequent appearances.
尤其是她蹒跚学步的孙子奥吉(Augie)在书中频频出现。
As Gopnik notes, Grandmother scientists and philosophers have been rather thin on the ground in the past.
戈普尼克写道，当了奶奶的科学家和哲学家在过去寥寥无几。
It is, of course, only since more women have become involved in science that we’ve learned that gathering is as important as hunting, and the complexities of childcare are as interesting as the politics of competition and deception.
当然，直到越来越多的女人参与到科学研究中以后，我们才知道采集和狩猎同样重要，育儿的复杂性像竞争和欺骗的策略一样有意思。
It is all very cheering and puts women’s work in its proper place: utterly central to humanity’s continued success.
这些论述令人欣慰，对女人的工作给予了公允的评价：它是人类持续成功的最核心要素。
And we do need to consider the future our children will inhabit.
我们需要考虑我们的孩子将生活在什么样的未来中。
It is not one we can control, or even imagine.
这个未来不是我们所能控制的，甚至不是我们所能想象的。
Parents are not designed to shape their children’s lives.
父母的天职不是决定子女生活的面貌。
Instead, parents and other caregivers are designed to provide the next generation with a protected space in which they can provide new ways of thinking and acting that, for better or worse, are entirely unlike any that we would have anticipated beforehand.
相反，父母和其他监护人的天职是提供保护下一代成长的空间，孩子可以在其中发展出我们完全预料不到的、新的思维和行为方式——无论是好是坏。
This is the picture that comes from evolutionary biology, and . . . from empirical studies of child development.
这是演化生物学以及……儿童发展实证研究描绘的画面。
One of the most striking aspects of Gopnik’s book is the way she guides readers into an understanding that love and security, rather than control and a narrow educationally focused approach, is the best foundation children need to flourish.
戈普尼克的书中最引人注目的一点是，她如何引导读者了解，儿童茁壮成长所需的最佳土壤是爱和安全感，而不是控制和着重于教化的狭隘抚育方式。
Hardest, perhaps, for the goal-oriented parent to accept is that we have to allow children to make their own mistakes.
或许，目标导向型父母最难接受的一点是我们必须让孩子自己去犯错。
You come to make better decisions by making not-so-good decisions and then correcting them.
你现在之所以能够做出更好的决定，是因为你做过不那么好的决定、然后纠正了这些决定。
While we may have been told this before, Gopnik’s science-based assertion is a welcome corrective to the prevailing culture of coaching and tutoring children — often at great expense — to avoid failure.
尽管我们之前或许听过这话，但戈普尼克依据科学做出的论断是对目前主流氛围——指导和辅导子女（往往以巨大代价）避免失败——的纠正。
Where though, does this leave parents who know that a talented child should, for example, persevere with a musical instrument, which, although often a slog for all concerned, will one day surely give them pleasure? Gopnik is not prescriptive about this.
但是，如果父母明知一个有天赋的孩子应该比如说学一种乐器（尽管学艺过程对所有相关人等往往都很辛苦，但是有一天肯定会为他们带来快乐），该怎么做？戈普尼克没有说明这点。
Children, after all, have always learned by repeating what they see adults doing over and over.
毕竟，孩子总是通过一遍遍模仿成年人的行为来学习。
Music and sports are both learned this way, and as we know, repetition can eventually lead to mastery.
音乐和运动都是以这种方式学习，众所周知，熟能生巧。
She does, however, highlight that the way we educate children in the west is often not best suited to how young brains learn.
然而，她的确指出了一点：西方父母教育子女的方式，往往不是特别适合孩子的大脑接受。
A one size fits all approach isn’t going to suit everyone.
一刀切的模式无法适用于所有人。
In the classroom children are expected to learn by being taught, often a passive experience, and one which requires a very narrow focus and close attention.
大人期望孩子在课堂里通过老师的教授来学东西，这种学习往往是被动的体验，要求全神贯注于一个非常狭窄的区域。
We are used to this classroom-based system but Gopnik encourages us to step back from it.
我们都很熟悉这种基于课堂的体系，但是戈普尼克鼓励我们退出这种体系。
It’s natural for [children] to imitate and practice the activities that are most important to the adults around them.
（孩子们）天生会模仿和练习对周围的成年人来说最重要的活动。
In school, intentionally or not, that means paying attention, taking tests, and getting grades.
在学校里，无论有意还是无心的，这都意味着集中注意力、考试和分数。
The results are seen in Gopnik’s lab a few years later, when the most successful of those master exam-takers arrive at their prestigious university and are resentfully surprised when they have to begin again and become apprentice scientists and scholars.
数年后，课堂体系的结果出现在戈普尼克的实验室——那些最成功的高分学生进入一所知名的大学，愤怒又意外地发现他们不得不从头开始、成为学徒科学家和学者。
Being the best test-taker in the world isn’t much help for either discovering new truths about that world, or new ways of thriving in it.
成为全世界分数最高的人，对探索有关世界的新真相和新的成功方式没多少帮助。
Gopnik is articulating something that many of us have struggled with all our adult lives, perhaps without fully realising our problem: we were brought up to believe that success comes from good exam results.
戈普尼克阐述了一件困扰我们中许多人整个成年生涯的事情（原因或许是我们没有没有完全认识到自己的问题）：我们从小接受的教育让我们相信，成功源自好的考试成绩。
As an expert exam-taker, it worked for me, career-wise.
我擅长考试，这件事在事业方面对我有利。
Outside the office, though, I have struggled with the practical skills and risk-taking that should be part of my human heritage.
然而，在办公室之外，那些作为人类原本应该具备的实用技能和承担风险的能力，却让我觉得困难重重。
It looks like I didn’t do enough discovery or apprenticeship learning — and certainly did not take risks.
看起来似乎我没有进行足够多的探索式或模仿式学习——当然也没怎么冒险。
We need, Gopnik says, to avoid making the same mistakes with our own children.
戈普尼克表示，我们需要避免在自己的孩子身上犯下同样错误。
While Gopnik is dealing mainly with the individual child and his or her development, another Berkeley professor, historian Paula Fass, has written a complementary and enlightening book that covers the societal picture — a sweeping history of childhood in America since that country’s revolution and how successive generations have been raised.
戈普尼克的话题主要涵盖儿童个体及其发展，而另一位加州大学伯克利分校的教授、历史学家葆拉•法斯(Paula Fass)则写了一本与她的书互补并发人深省的著作。该书涵盖了社会方面的图景——囊括了自美国革命以来的童年、以及一代代儿童如何被抚养长大的全面历史。
Her introduction points out that a child is not raised in isolation: Historians are only now catching up to what theater, opera and daily news have known for some time, as we begin to understand just how important the relations between generations are to who we are as nations and societies.
她在该书序言中指出，儿童并不是在与世隔绝的状态下被养大的。戏院、歌剧和日常新闻已知晓了一段时间的东西，历史学家眼下才刚刚知晓。正如我们刚开始明白，代际关系对于塑造我们的民族和社会有多么重要。
Our individual histories take place in the small theaters of our personal lives, but these are deeply entwined in a larger world of politics and culture.
我们的个人历史发生在我们个人生活的小舞台上，然而这些都与更大范围的政治和文化世界深深缠绕在了一起。
In that context, the book’s rather doom-laden title, The End of American Childhood, is a reference to Fass’s conclusion that modern American parents, in micromanaging their children, are breaking with a long tradition of independence of thought and action that differentiated children in the New World from their European counterparts.
在这个背景下，该书充满悲观色彩的标题《美国童年的终结》指向了法斯的结论，即事无巨细地管孩子的现代美国父母，是在抛弃美国的一项长期传统——思想和行为独立，而正是这个长期传统让新世界（the New World，指美洲大陆——译者注）的儿童与欧洲儿童不同。
The American boys of the early republic grew early into independence.
合众国早期的美国儿童很早就学着独立。
They were neither indulged nor coddled.
他们既没有被纵容，也没有被娇惯。
They were given some say in the objects of their labor and, when possible, free time to play.
他们对自己的劳动对象有一定发言权，在情况允许的时候也有自由时间去玩耍。
But the children were also seen as ‘little citizens’ — persons with capacity as well as potential.
不过，这些儿童也被视为‘小公民’——有能力也有潜力的人。
Children, even the children of wealthy parents, had to work in the home or on the land in early America, something that did not happen in the more developed European nations, where well-off homes had servants and children were considered in need of protection.
在早期美国，儿童——即使是富裕家庭的孩子——得在家里或田间干活，在更发达的欧洲国家则没有这回事。在这些欧洲国家，富裕家庭里有仆人，儿童被视为需要保护。
Meanwhile, many young Americans needed entrepreneurial spirit — they had to make a living from an early age.
此外，许多年轻的美国人需要具备开创精神——他们很早就要自己谋生。
Expectations of children were simply more fluid in 19th-century America, Fass says.
法斯表示，在19世纪的美国，人们对儿童的期望更灵活一些。
That fluidity, as she shows, created the dynamism and independence of thought that powered America’s nascent democracy and economic growth.
正如她所证明的，这种灵活性催生了思想的活力和独立性，而这种活力和独立性为美国初生的民主制度和经济增长提供了动力。
Thomas Jefferson, for example, was vehement in rejecting primogeniture and entail, two aspects of British property law that put land in permanent and deeply undemocratic patterns of family descent.
比如，托马斯•杰斐逊(Thomas Jefferson)强烈反对长子继承和限嗣继承，正是英国物权法的这两点将土地置于永久的、极不民主的家庭传承模式之下。
By 1800, sons and daughters in the US inherited equally.
到1800年，在美国，女儿有了与儿子同等的继承权。
(Meanwhile, in the UK, primogeniture still happens in the aristocracy — although it was abolished for the monarchy in 2013).
（与此同时，在英国，贵族中仍存在长子继承现象——不过英国于2013年废除了王室的长子继承制。）
With mass 19th-century immigration, American society changed again, and Fass expertly traces the tensions and shifts this created.
随着19世纪移民的大量涌入，美国社会再次发生了改变。法斯则娴熟地跟踪研究了这一局面导致的种种紧张关系和变动。
These immigrants believed they had crossed the ocean to survive and, if possible, to succeed, but not necessarily to change.
这些移民认为，他们横穿大洋是为了生存和争取成功，却未必是为了改变。
But their children, outside the home, were exposed to the freedom of America, often becoming the only family members who could speak English — a powerful position.
然而，他们的子女在家庭以外接触了美国的自由，也往往成为家族成员中唯一会说英语的——这让他们取得了强有力的地位。
Fathers often felt that their authority as head of the traditionally patriarchal European household was under threat.
父亲们往往会感觉到，他们作为传统父权制欧洲家庭一家之主的权威面临威胁。
After the second world war, child-rearing in Europe grew closer to that of the US, as middle classes across the continent reduced their emphasis on family hierarchy.
二战以后，欧洲养育子女的方式变得更像美国——整个欧洲的中产阶级都不那么强调家庭中的等级关系了。
The post-cold war spread of democracy, along with the rise of western youth culture, accelerated that change.
冷战后民主的扩散以及西方青年文化的崛起加速了这一转变。
But Fass believes that something has happened in the past couple of decades to break American families’ link with their free-spirited pioneer past.
不过，法斯认为，过去几十年发生了一些事情，切断了美国家庭与其自由派先锋传统的联系。
It’s a shift that resonates in Europe, too, as it is a response to global power shifts.
欧洲也在同样发生这一变化，因为这一变化是对全球力量重心转移的反应。
Fass suggests that in the 21st century the real concern may be about how the commitment to independence can be maintained in a highly competitive world.
法斯暗示，21世纪真正让人担忧的问题也许是，在竞争非常激烈的世界中，如何能维持对独立的执著。
The stakes are higher than ever.
关系前所未有地重大。
As a result, modern parents have somehow lost the will to allow independence; parents are giving children, even older children, only half of the traditional formula for success . . . they are giving what they believe is autonomy without a real sense of responsibility.
导致的结果就是，现代父母不那么愿意让子女独立了。父母正在给予孩子的（甚至是较大的孩子），只是传统成功秘方的一半……他们正在给予孩子他们心目中的自治，却没有给孩子真正的责任感。
Our caution is understandable.
我们的谨慎是可以理解的。
The international geopolitical outlook is shaky and, as Fass points out, cultural trends include personal memoirs [that] are often exposés of abusive parents and difficult childhoods, and child rearing advice comes more and more frequently in response to fear and anxiety.
国际地缘政治前景动荡不安，而且正如法斯指出的，包括在（文化潮流中的）自传时常暴露各种虐待子女的父母和艰难的童年，越来越多育儿建议是为了回应担忧和焦虑。
Our instincts tell us to do more, not less, to protect our children from the cruel 21st-century world.
我们的直觉告诉我们，应该做更多（而不是更少）的努力，去保护我们的子女免遭残酷的21世纪世界的伤害。
The End of American Childhood is a corrective to that outlook.
《美国童年的终结》是对这一前景的纠正。
In reconnecting us to the past, Fass reassures us of the universal truth that parents have always loved and worried about their children.
通过将我们与过去重新联系起来，法斯向我们再次确认一条普遍适用的真理：父母始终是疼爱和担忧子女的。
And, as Gopnik points out, To be a parent, as opposed to parenting, is to be a bridge between the past and the future.
而且，正如戈普尼克指出的：做父母（相对于‘管孩子’而言），而担当过去与未来之间的桥梁。
Fass’s and Gopnik’s work shows us that both neuroscience and history teach us that children would benefit from a little more worldly discovery and less parental cosseting.
法斯和戈普尼克的作品向我们证明，神经科学和历史都告诉我们，多一点现实的探索、少一点父母的娇惯会让子女受益。
It may not be possible for most children to work in the fields, but they might take a job in their teens, or be left alone to manage their exam revision — a test of application, and of resilience if they fail.
也许多数儿童不可能下地干活，但他们也许可以在少年时代打份工，或者让他们自己搞定考试复习——这考验他们的勤奋，如果他们不及格，则考验他们的承受能力。
The gift we can give our children is to stop worrying, take a long view, and allow the next generation to develop its own path.
我们能给予子女的礼物是停止担心，把眼光放长远，让下一代开辟自己的道路。
It means, heartbreakingly, that we must let go.
这意味着一个令人心碎的事实：我们必须放手。
If we fail to do that, their future may not be so bright.
如果我们做不到这一点，他们的未来可能会不那么光明。
As Gopnik warns, Shaping [children] in our own image, or in the image of our current ideals, might actually keep them from adapting to changes in the future.
正如戈普尼克所警告的：按照我们自身形象、或我们目前的理想形象塑造（子女），实际上也许会让他们无法适应未来的变化。
