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?”
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.