本文翻译自艾莉森·高普尼克的《园丁与木匠》这本书
据传这本书的中文版九月份上市，我在这里尝试着翻译一下，谨以学习之用，借此机会补习一下自己的英语。如要转载请注明出处。
A curious thing happened to mothers and fathers and children in the late twentieth century. It was called parenting.
二十世纪晚期，对父母和孩子来说，一项被称为育儿的新奇事物出现了。
As long as there have been animals, there have been mothers and fathers and their young. And as long as they have been Homo sapiens, human mothers and human fathers, and others as well, have taken special care of children. “Mother” and “father” are as old as English itself, and “parent” has been around since at least the fourteenth century. But the word “parenting,” now so ubiquitous, first emerged in America in 1958, and became common only in the 1970s.
只要有动物，就会有母亲和父亲及他们的后代。只要有智人，就会有人类母亲和父亲以及他们悉心照料的孩子。“母亲（指Mother）”和“父亲（指father）”这两个词自英语形成时就存在了，“父母（指parent）”从十四世纪开始出现。而如今被大家所熟知的“育儿（parenting）”一词，首次于美国1958年出现，于20世纪70年代才开始流行。
Where did parenting come from? The parenting model has become particularly influential because of a series of distinctive social changes that took place in twentieth-century America, changes that made being—and especially becoming—a parent very different than it had ever been before. Smaller families, greater mobility, and older first-time parents radically altered the learning curve. For most of human history, people grew up in large extended families with many children. Most parents had extensive experience of taking care of children before they had children themselves. And they had extensive opportunities to watch other people, not just their own parents, but grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles and older cousins, take care of children. Those traditional sources of wisdom and competence—not quite the same as expertise—have largely disappeared. Parenting how-to books, websites, and speakers are appealing because they seem to fill that gap.
育儿从哪里来的呢？育儿模式变得有深远影响起因于二十世纪美国发生的一系列独特的社会变革，这些变革使得作为尤其是成为一个父亲或者母亲与过往的父母非常不同。越来越小的家庭，越来越强的流动性，首次生育的年龄越来越大等等这些因素根本地改变了父母们的学习曲线。在人类历史的大部分时段里，人类都是从多子女的大家庭中长大。大多数人在拥有子女之前都有过丰富的带孩子的经验。而且他们有大量的机会看到其他人如何照顾孩子，这些人不局限于他们的父母，还包括他们的祖父母、外祖父母、姨、姑、叔、伯、舅和年长一些的堂兄姐、表兄姐等等。这些传统智慧和能力的来源——与专业知识不尽相同——几乎消失殆尽。育儿指南性质的书籍、网站、传播者变得富有吸引力，缘于他们似乎填补了这块空白。
At the same time that families got smaller and more scattered, and people had children later, middle-class parents spent more and more time working and going
to school. Most middle-class parents spend years taking classes and pursuing careers before they have children. It’s not surprising, then, that going to school and working are today’s parents’ models for taking care of children—you go to school and work with a goal in mind,and you can be taught to do better at school and work.
与此同时家庭变得越来越小也越来越分散，人要孩子的年龄越来越晚，中产阶级父母花费越来越多的时间工作和求学。大多数中产阶级父母在拥有孩子之前用好多年来上课和追求事业发展。那么边工作边上课就会显得稀松平常，这也是当今照看孩子的父母典范——你带着目标去上学和工作，你可以被指导得做得更好。
So there’s a reason the parenting model is popular. But it’s a poor fit to the scientific reality. From an evolutionary perspective, the relations between human
children and the adults who care for them are crucially and profoundly important; indeed, they are a large part of what defines us as human beings. Our most distinctive and important human abilities—our capacities for learning, invention, and innovation; and for tradition, culture, and morality—are rooted in relations between parents and children.
如此看来，育儿模式流行起来是有原因的。但是这与科学现实不太相符。从进化论的观点来看，孩子与养育他们的成人之间的关系至关重要；事实上，他们是界定我们为人类的重要组成部分。我们最与众不同最重要的人类能力——我们学习、发明创造的能力，还有我们的传统、文化、品行——都是根植于父母与子女之间的关系之上的。
