Hard thinking

As he describes in his feature in the Sunday Herald, Barry Didcock came to visit us a few weeks ago to talk about some of the ideas that stimulated The Baby in the Mirror. I have always felt that the study of children's development forces us to think about the most fundamental questions about our existence: writing about children is writing about our humanity, not some simplified, bright-coloured version of it. Barry was ready to do some hard thinking too, which made him a great conversational partner. I was particularly interested that he picked up on my musings about behavioural genetics, a topic on which I originally intended to say much more in the book. What prevented me, in the end, was the point I noted in an earlier post. My focus in the book was very deliberately on one particular child, which meant that examining differences between children—the stuff of behavioural genetics—was hard to fit into the picture. Anyway, I recommend the writings of Eric Turkheimer on this topic; I hope I'll get to follow this up in some form in a future post.  

I have been writing about children this week, but not for the blog. Links will follow soon.