A simple rule I taught my 9 yo today: If you can't figure something out, figure out how to figure it out.

Whenever I teach little kids something, I'm always trying harder to teach the meta-lessons, like breaking down a problem into smaller parts, or that practice makes you better.

A competition where 10% of kids win awards is ok, and one where 100% do is ok too (though it fools no kid over 4), but a competition where 80% of kids win awards is cruel.

One of the best things you can be for your kids is an audience. Which doesn't mean being uncritically approving. That doesn't fool kids over 2. It means caring about what they care about.

To lecture someone on morality is implicitly to assume moral superiority over them. Adults do this to children, but not (unless they are clergy) to other adults.

One of the most surprising things about being a parent is the amount you have to improvise. Way more than in anything else I've done, despite this being probably the most commonly done thing I've done. I think it's because kids are incomparable generators of chaos.

Kids think their parents are experts, but in many respects they're complete noobs. If you're the oldest child, you're probably the first n-year old your parents have ever had to deal with.

Good thing to do with a 6 yo: type stories they dictate. At that age, the physical act of writing is a bottleneck, so this can release a torrent of imagination. They love seeing their stories printed, like “real” stories they read in books. And it's a fun thing to do together.

Good game to play with small children: go through the alphabet naming some category of things (countries, animals, professional football players) beginning with each letter.

When your child is 5, the two of you are actors in a play. When he's 10, it's more often the case that he and his friends are the actors, and you are the stage crew. One tends to mess up this transition. My trick is to make a conscious effort to notice which times I'm stage crew.

One of the surprising things about being a parent is the degree to which the instinctive protectiveness that kicks in transfers to other kids. You don't just notice when your kid gets too near the curb; you notice when any kid does.

Taught my kids a way to trick bad people. Most bad people assume everyone else has the same motives, so they'll believe you want to do x if they'd want to. E.g. a selfish person will believe you'd want to do something selfish.

Your parents miss you and wish you'd call. Later you'll miss them and wish you could.

Something I wish I'd done while my mother was still alive: I wish I'd written an essay, just for myself, about what she was like as a person. I knew her pretty well, but I'd know her better if I'd had to observe her and ask her questions in order to describe her in writing.

One way to tell what your kids have an aptitude for is what kinds of advice they listen to eagerly. This probably works for adults too, but not as well, because adults have learned to be diligent about things that bore them.

Explained liberal and conservative to my 10 yo and 7 yo on the way to school. I ended up describing them as forms of bias that each produced distinctive patterns of error when they hit the truth.

Parenting trick: When one of our kids does something really good (usually but not always at school) we give them the “royal treatment.” For the next couple days, all the rules are slightly bent. Stay up late? Candy with breakfast? Ok, since they're getting the royal treatment.

When my kids tell me things I didn't know, I always make a big deal about it in order to encourage them to learn more such things.

One thing you learn after having kids is what's the biggest favor you can do for anyone with kids: something that helps their kids.

I was trying to explain to my 7 yo how powerful it is to be able to read, because you can now learn anything from books instead of waiting for teachers to teach you. When I described a shelf of books as an army of robot teachers, he started to get it.