If you’re a parent and in danger of complacently enjoying your summer holiday, have a look at parenting.com. As I write, the top news stories report that: “Even older kids can drown with adults around” (don’t think of dozing while your children cavort on the beach); “You may be surprised how much you should actually feed your toddler” (only 40 calories per inch of height – no easy beach-snack-buying for you); and “Teen loses part of his leg after his sparkler bomb explodes too soon” (don’t let your teenagers out alone in case they decide to duct-tape 200 sparklers together).

This website gets 5 million visitors a month. I’m stating the obvious when I observe that, collectively, parenting advice has created a culture where most parents feel either self-satisfied or guilty. But what is the alternative? In her new elegantly readable and thoughtful book, the US clinical psychologist Alison Gopnik has set out to explode the myth of good parenting and offer more enticing models of care.

For Gopnik, the term “parenting” is itself pernicious. Parent is a noun that shouldn’t have been turned into a verb in the 1950s. Gopnik’s distinction between parenting and being a parent is encapsulated through the carpenter and the gardener of her title. Like the parents who begin with a manual, carpenters have a definite aim: they shape their material into a pre-designed product. Gardeners, on the other hand, are freer. They create a nurturing environment in which their plants can flourish. The crucial difference here is between work and love. For Gopnik, the “parenting” parent works at educating and developing their child, while the freer parent simply loves their child, allowing their offspring to do much of the educating and developing for themselves.

Gopnik suggests, helpfully, that we should relate parenting to other forms of love. We don’t measure our success as wives by how much our husbands have developed as a result of our relationship, so perhaps we needn’t do this with our children. The purpose of love is “not to change the people we love, but to give them what they need to thrive”.

Parent-child love is nonetheless a trickier kind of love because of its tensions and contradictions. Gopnik lists three paradoxes of parental love that she thinks are ignored by most parenting manuals. There’s the tension between dependence and independence (we begin with complete responsibility for a dependent baby but end with weekly phone calls from an independent adult). There’s the specificity of our love for our children (we only really love the children we care for, yet we look after our children in a wider social context). And there’s the contradiction between our desire for tradition (we need to pass on our own culture) and our children’s need to innovate (each generation needs to push into technological and creative change). Parents need to nurture freely enough for their children to have space to gain independence, while also feeling secure in their dependency; to feel free to innovate, while also imbibing our traditions.

Gopnik’s model for how to do this draws on the tests performed in her own child psychology lab, her experiences as a grandmother and on evolutionary biology. She uses evolution to insist on the desirability of mess. We are not all meant to produce the same kind of manual-designed children. Society as a whole works better if some children are brave and some cautious, some academic and some sporty. In any family, there will be a mixture of personalities, so our role as parents is to nurture the different natures that have come our way. This doesn’t necessarily require much from us, because children are so good at getting what they need. They are programmed (Gopnik uses the word “designed” throughout the book) to learn through imitation and through play. They don’t imitate blindly: they see our faults and learn from our mistakes. This means that we don’t need to get things right, simply to live alongside them and let them observe us.

So does this leave us free to enjoy our summer holidays? Yes and no. Gopnik is down on teaching our children didactically, so as the mother of a child who is reluctant to learn to read, I initially thought that this meant I could simply leave him to build walls instead. But even in Gopnik’s account, we live in a world where reading is more necessary than building walls, so he’s going to have to learn somehow. The answer seems to be even more demanding than teaching. She cites an experiment where children learned best from people who dressed up as detectives and invented games where children could believe that they were deducing maths problems for themselves. Is this parenting? Certainly it sounds like work to me.

Yet the emphasis on play is important, and has wider social implications. Gopnik’s central point is that children learn best by accident, when they are exploring for themselves, and that different kinds of children should be given the space to thrive. This, certainly, is a reason to ignore many of the parenting manuals. But it’s also a reason to be doubly worried about the way that schooling is increasingly directed to imparting measurable skills in measurable ways. Tired parents may feel free to leave Gopnik’s book out of their suitcase, but it should be required reading for anyone involved in educational reform.

Lara Feigel is the author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich. The Gardener and the Carpenter is published by The Bodley Head (£14.99). Click here to buy it for £12.29