parenting

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.

Trick that delights 7 year olds (n=1): Show how you can draw a pyramid with any shape base by drawing a polygon, drawing a dot above it, and drawing a line from each corner of the polygon to the dot.

When I was a kid, I thought mistakes were simply bad, and to be avoided. As an adult I realized many problems are best solved by working in two phases, one in which you let yourself make mistakes, followed by a second in which you aggressively fix them.

I talk to my kids as if they were naive colleagues. I think they learn a lot this way, and if not, it at least seems fairly harmless.

The idea of spending (small amounts of) “quality time” with your kids is dangerously mistaken, because the best moments happen at completely random times. You not only can't predict them, you may not even know they've happened.

Asked 7 yo how many Star Wars characters he could name. He named 59. Measured by space occupied in his brain, Star Wars is his Greek myths.

If there is a better background noise to have in your house than a 7 year old laughing, I can't imagine what it is.

Interesting game to play with kids: do back of the envelope calculations about what percentage of sentences have ever been said (on Earth), and encourage them to invent short sentences that probably never have been.

10 yo asked what age kids are the most difficult for parents. Told him newborns are the most overall load, but teenagers cause the highest spikes, because they have the highest ratio of power to judgment.