Alison Gopnik's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

1

Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

4.3

Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human

Recommended by Alison Gopnik, Carol Gilligan, and Paul Seabright.

Alison Gopnik

She makes the very interesting argument that our particular evolutionary niche is such that we can’t just depend on mothers to provide care. [source]

Carol Gilligan

Hrdy is an evolutionary anthropologist and her research challenges the widely held view that the nuclear family is the traditional or original human family. [source]

Paul Seabright

Hrdy has done more than any other individual to bring a sophisticated understanding of biology to the heart of a feminist perspective that we can live with in the 21st century. [source]

Cover unavailable

2

Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them

Marjorie Taylor

4.4

Many parents delight in their child's imaginary companion as evidence of a lively imagination and creative mind. At the same time, parents sometimes wonder if the imaginary companion might be a sign that something is wrong. Does having a pretend friend mean that the child is in emotional distress? That he or she has difficulty communicating with other children? In this fascinating book, Marjorie T

Recommended by Alison Gopnik.

Alison Gopnik

This is a book by one of the people who has been part of the new wave of research in cognitive development. What Marjorie did is to deal with a really fascinating phenomenon that all parents notice, which is the fact that children often have these imaginary friends who are very vivid and significant. Traditionally, explanations for this were either psychoanalytic explanations that had something to do with children’s neurosis, or the Piagetian idea that children failed to understand the difference between fantasy and reality. [source]

Cover unavailable

3

The People in the Playground

Iona Opie

4.2

For nearly forty years Iona Opie worked with her late husband Peter on a notable series of books on the traditional lore of childhood. As part of the fieldwork from 1970 onwards, she visited the local school playground every week. The children accepted Mrs Opie as a regular feature of the playground, a harmless collector of jokes and games. Her aim, however, was to provide the living context of sc

Recommended by Alison Gopnik.

Alison Gopnik

Yes. Iona and her husband Peter were folklorists, and they went out to try to understand children, in the same way that an anthropologist would go into a distant tribe or a folklorist would record the songs and stories of people in some distant place. Their great book, The Lore and Language of School Children, is a wonderful record of what schoolchildren do – the rhymes and songs, rituals and mythology of the school yard. What they discovered was that children have an incredibly powerful and wide-ranging social network – so that a rhyme would show up in a school somewhere in northern England, and within a year you could hear the same rhyme on the west coast of America. [source]

Cover unavailable

4

Child's Discovery of the Mind

Janet Wilde Astington

3.8

Three-year old Emily greets her grandfather at the front door: "We're having a surprise party for your birthday! And it's a secret!" We may smile at incidents like these, but they illustrate the beginning of an important transition in children's lives--their development of a "theory of mind." Emily certainly has some sense of her grandfather's feelings, but she clearly doesn't understand much abou

Recommended by Alison Gopnik.

Alison Gopnik

This book is part of Harvard University Press’s excellent series, The Developing Child. I could have really chosen any of the books in the series. They asked developmental scientists to write very simple versions of the research that they were doing for a lay audience. This particular book is about one of the most interesting areas of research in the past 30 years, which is our understanding of how children themselves come to understand the minds of the people around them. [source]

Cover unavailable

5

The Afterlife Is Where We Come From

Alma Gottlieb

4.6

When a new baby arrives among the Beng people of West Africa, they see it not as being born, but as being reincarnated after a rich life in a previous world. Far from being a tabula rasa, a Beng infant is thought to begin its life filled with spiritual knowledge. How do these beliefs affect the way the Beng rear their children?

In this unique and engaging ethnography of babies, Alma Gottlieb explor

Recommended by Alison Gopnik and Tobias Hecht.

Alison Gopnik

This book is a beautiful and moving account of the relationships between the mothers and children in this community and how close they are, even when childhood is endangered. [source]

Tobias Hecht

Though this is what you could call an infant-centred ethnography, even Gottlieb approaches babies largely through what adults and older children say about them and do with them. [source]