The new research shows that babies and young children know and learn more about the world than we could ever have imagined. They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations, and even do experiments. Scientists and children belong together because they are the best learners in the universe. And that means that ordinary adults also have more powerful learning abilities than we might have thought. We hope this book will demonstrate that scientists and cribs belong together in still other ways.
Parents are deeply, even passionately interested in children, or at least in their children.
But parents find that their interest in children is treated differently than their interest in science. Books about science assume that their readers are serious, knowledgeable, intelligent, sophisticated adults who simply want to know about the things they care about. How-to books can be enormously useful, but they shouldn't be the only place parents can learn about something they care about as much as they care about children. We hope this book will help fill that gap. The science of baby's minds should hold a special fascination for people who live with babies and young children every day.