10 yo asked when I'd let him and his 7 yo brother walk to school by themselves. I told him the task was not to get himself to school safely, but to get his brother to school safely. I could practically hear his brain struggle to assimilate this paradigm shift.
If you ask parents what they want for their kids, many will say “I just want them to be happy.” But there are drugs that achieve this, and taking them results in disaster. So that is probably not what we should want.
My 7 yo grades my bedtime stories, and though I should know better, I find these grades highly motivating. I'm still on a high from getting an A+ on last night's. And a B- I got several months ago still rankles.
Most nights our sons react to the announcement that it's bedtime as if bedtime were some new thing we'd just invented that day in order to oppress them.
We discovered a very effective new way to make our boys drink more water. Burping contests. To his great delight, 7 yo is the family champion.
One surprising thing I've learned from being a parent is that kids often know the words for things they're not supposed to know about, without really knowing what they mean. The solution is to do nothing. The last thing you want to do is ask “Do you know what that means?”
Back in high school I told my dad, 'I'm going to have a computer someday.' And he said that it cost as much as a house — the downpayment on a house. And I said, 'Well, I'll live in an apartment.'
Good activity if you're home with little kids who like telling stories: let them dictate stories that you type for them. For younger kids the physical act of writing is the bottleneck, so this liberates their imagination.
Something I told my 11 yo recently: The apparently random collection of things you learn when you're young makes you into a sort of key. Then you have to find the lock it matches. But that's not as hard as it sounds, because the matching lock is usually nearby.
I tell my kids that it's a custom that swearwords are reserved for adults. But if they doubt the force of custom, they should imagine showing up for school one day naked.
Something I taught my 11 yo today: Some amount of programming consists of copying and pasting lines you've already written, and then changing a few parameters. But the better the language, the less of this you do.
When teaching kids to program, it's good if you're doing something too, instead of standing over them, so they can experiment (which is an important part of programming). But you can't be doing anything uninterruptible. Sorting Lego is perfect.
Don't worry about kids acquiring bad programming habits when they're first learning. The only habit that matters is the habit of programming. Tidiness can come later. Enthusiasm can't.
Something I explained to my 11 yo: The biggest division in work may be between jobs that involve making new stuff (science, engineering) and those that don't (administration, sales), and you'll be a lot happier if you end up on the side you're suited for.
Something I taught my 11 yo: Practice teaches you how to do things without having to think consciously about each step. So even when you “already know how” to do something by making a conscious effort, you can often reach another level of knowing how to do it through practice.
Parenting trick: invent a gesture that means “I love you.” 2 yos like it as a game. 8 yos like it because they can use it in public.
'The last thing one settles in writing a book,' Pascal observes, 'is what one should put in first.'
In the wise words of Carson, the butler of Downton Abbey, “The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end that’s all there is.”
Society isn’t about maximizing the collective it’s about free individuals coming together to produce rules so that we can enjoy the benefits of collective action while still living in a diverse society that respects individual rights, beliefs, and ways of living.