If lifestyles support it, and parents are so inclined, I'd worry less about teaching the first few years and more about reading to them and with them, esp. with some silliness and improvisation, hiking, camping, and shopping as a family, especially at local markets.
Spend meaningful, loving time together, and out in the world, as much of the small scale natural world as you can. Listen to their questions, answer when you can, learn the answers together when you can't.
If they are accustomed to hiking and camping, especially wild camping, they will learn much from you and will ask for more.
If you shop together at markets, they will start to develop a more complete relationship with their food supply and with the people working it.
Empathy and kindness and resilience will develop in those experiences.
Later, when they are closer to school age, be as honest with them as you can about the different personalities they will encounter, the conformist teachers and students, the rebels, the do gooders, the no goods, etc., and comfort them that their people may be there right away or may not be there for decades.
Some kids love learning at an early age. If not, it’s easy to find out. Don’t worry about teaching too soon.
Something I have learned as a new parent is your ability to force much of anything is kinda limited.
You can steer within their inclinations, but at some point kids are who they are.
yes, there are personalities, but, please do not teach them to stereotype.
exactly. unconscious bias is an observed psychologic phenomena and i have my doubts if an adult can opinate agnostically about all of them. sure you don't want your kids getting together with bullies but that's basic compassion. let them tie with people free
Thank you for sharing this, reading it was very inspirational for me, as a young guy whose looking forward to starting a family in the near future. Cheers!
> Spend meaningful, loving time together, and out in the world, as much of the small scale natural world as you can. Listen to their questions, answer when you can, learn the answers together when you can't.
Learn to tell them that you don't have all the answers, and there's a chance that the pair of you can work together to find it out, but there will always be some things that nobody knows yet.
But, most of all, I cam here to say - the foundation you're suggesting building is the strongest one we know of - safety in their emotions, having someone they can talk to, share their feelings with without ridicule or fear.
Start there and children always have someone they can talk to
Shopping as a family activity? That sounds very odd.
Not really. I took both kids shopping with me. One preschool age, one first grade. They got little quests to find things through the store.
Sadly COVID kinda of ended the tradition.
All well and good until they’re 5 or 6 and you find out all school admissions are gated by tests and performance. Oh unless you’re old money. Then your kids get in.
Elite early education minimal little long term benefit, people tend to revert to the mean over time. The education system has plenty of slack for intelligent individuals to excel, so play the long game.
Health and wellbeing pay the best dividends as you can maximize the nurture aspect of intelligence early and build resilience against unexpected hardships.
False. It massively increases access to good teachers and ultimately university.
Of course you can always go to a no name CSU. I’ve been on both sides of the divide. The education at a cal state is like elite high school or lower.
Not me teaching my kids this loser mentality that you’ll win/lose in life if you get/don’t get into certain private schools at the age fking five
> All well and good until they’re 5 or 6 and you find out all school admissions are gated by tests and performance.
Do you mean all private schools? I'm not sure public schools have admissions tests when they are 5 or 6, except maybe tests on what is being taught in school.
University is a different story obviously..
You can ask AI. Access to elite colleges is super conditioned on going to private elementary schools. North of 2x.
To simplify: C = elite colleges
P(C| private high school) = 2 P(C| affluent public high school)
P(C | private elementary) = 5P(C | affluent public schools) = 35 P(C)
Sure, but Chetty et al were measuring based on the top-1% of income, the private elementary schools are acting like filters based on income. Yes, they can buy more access to things that will weigh heavily on an admissions acceptance, but that's a filter by parental income which is well known...
I suppose the argument is that a hard working kid from a lower income family can test into a private elementary school on a scholarship?
I do not know what country you are in, but in the US school is free until college.
Yeah the public school that serves reheated fast food and bowls of cereal for lunch. I’m not making it up. That is the district wide menu.