Children are most hurt by low expectations. Especially young children.
There's subtlety to this, high demands are not high expectations. If there's consequences for not meeting some high standard you set for children, you're going to create a very life-destroying kind of learned helplessness. Kids shouldn't be punished for failure.
And if it's something dangerous to try, then of course it's gotta be something you limit.
But beyond that, just don't assume kids aren't ready for something without evidence. Let them try.
Completely agree. In various volunteering capacities (think STEM fairs, youth baseball umpiring, etc) I end up working with 8-12 year olds a lot and I seem to be better at this than a lot of my counterparts. You nailed it.
The secret is to treat the kid like an adult until they demonstrate a reason(s) not to. A GF one time asked me why I talked to her nephew “like that?” and I was so confused. She said “you talk to him the same way you talk to me” (ie. the way I talk to anyone). Nephew and I were shooting free throws in the driveway. We get along great. This was very rambly but I think about it all the time.
I’ve gotten the brattiest kids to calm down and accept the situation in meltdowns in youth baseball with the same approach.
I’m not claiming this always works. Many times the situation or kid themselves demonstrates they must be treated like a kid. That’s fine too.
I have very similar lived experiences to yours and would extend the age range well into the teenage years (and even sometimes beyond) due to the fact that many young adults are still very sheltered and suffer from the same environments and mindsets established 8 - 12.
Some warning signs are medical illnesses where a young adult is being sheltered as if they are still in a crisis state of that illness, even though they've grown well beyond it and may benefit from being treating like any normal individual.
I have the same knack with kids, I’ve had it forever. “Oh you’re going to be such a good parent” was something I heard constantly.
It’s different when one’s own kids, and it takes extra patience to have the same skill set as you do with “stranger” kids. Without getting into it too much, being in a position of “authority” with a “stranger” kid changes the dynamic as compared to one’s own kids.
I dunno if that makes sense, but I’ve found it to be true for me.
I also seemed to have figured it out with my own kids, it just takes more work and more patience.
Kids generally are nicer and more well behaved to people other than their parents. It's masking, their parent may feed and love them no matter what but a stranger has little obligation and could do God knows what. It also just takes energy to mask so they may have to take it out of their parents instead later, when they run out of that masking energy.
A normal life preservation strategy is to be more neutral around people you know less, which seems baked into human instinct.
It makes my blood boil that my kid comes from the nursery saying things like "I did an ouchie". Kids don't naturally speak like this, they are taught like this. He's 3. At home he speaks his parents languages and he sounds like a 5 year old because we don't dumb it down for him. In English he sounds like every other English 3 year old in the nursery.
As someone who has a 2.5 year old learning multiple languages, I think a problem with English is that it's very verbose; we use full sentences to express things that can be expressed in other languages with only 1-2 words. And of course shorter sentences are easier for children as there's less grammar to be learned.
And specifically for expressing you hurt yourself, we teach children to express that they're hurt far earlier than they learn actual speech. So from ~1 we teach them to say "Ow" (or some variation), but then the words change from that to "hurt", and into a full sentence "I hurt myself", which is also redundant (myself and I imply the same thing, so why do we use both in that sentence in English?).
Anyhow just a thought as I'm feeding my son breakfast. "Would you like some breakfast" in English turns into 2 words in his second language.
Your understanding of how formality levels in English function is perhaps not entirely complete: native speakers of English convey usually convey the sentiment with as little as "Breakfast?" or "Hungry?" when talking with family. In the child's second language, would the maitre'd at the restaurant of a fine hotel ask a two word question, or rather bury those in respectful filler?
"Ow" and friends, by the way, are interjections to express sudden pain, functioning analogously to an adult's swearing. They're not full sentences about the pain and its source.
> Your understanding of how formality levels in English function is perhaps not entirely complete: native speakers of English convey usually convey
It's kind of hilarious that you assume I'm not a native English speaker because I speak more languages... I'm a native English speaker who just happens to have grown up with 2 other languages and have a wife that speaks 4+ languages. On top of that I've taken a bunch of university level English courses.
Yes, I'm aware that people shorten sentences into statements when speaking to those they're familiar with. I do it as well.
Here's a thought experiment:
- If a toddler speaks in short statements it's "baby talk"
- If an immigrant speaks in short statements it's "broken English"
- If a native speaker speaks in short statements it's vernacular or slang
Or:
- If a toddler makes up words it's "baby talk"
- If an immigrant makes up words they're uneducated
- If a native speaker makes up words it's a dialect
Most of those incorrectly use the linguistic terminology (in particular, "dialect", "baby talk", "slang") but, yes, congratulations on discovering that context plays a role in communication.
"Would you like some breakfast" isn't quite so overly wordy that I'd say it sounds unnatural, but it absolutely is not the bare minimum for idiomatic English.
"Do you want breakfast?" is perfectly grammatical, and "Want breakfast?" would be a totally normal phrasing, even if some might argue that eliding the subject isn't technically correct.
No it doesn't. I don't ask my colleague "Would you care to go to the bar and drink a beer after work?" I say "Grab a beer later?" As does every other normal person I know. "Get lunch?" Etc.
Baby Todd is a real phenomenon caused by kids not being able to say complex words. You want to say those complex words to them and they will repeat them back and they may make a baby version of it which is fine but it’s good to for you to keep using the complex words and the correct pronunciation so they learn.
Every one of my kids has a name that is hard for a baby to pronounce so they have a baby nickname, but we let them grow out of it.
How does this have anything to do with the culture war? This is just a discussion of culture and how its changing unrelated to what you are referring to.
I'm not denying the phenomenon exists. But to try to say that adults would be upset if teachers spoke to their children like they weren't developmentally challenged is completely ridiculous.
It is just a different sound for the same thing. There is nothing dumber about "I did an ouchie" then "I got hurt". Ouchie is more infantile, but not stupider.
"I did [a noun]" is 'stupider', i.e. not grammatically correct English, i.e. a formulation that people will look down on you for using as you age. Sometimes you have to teach children things they'll eventually have to unlearn, but this is not one of those occasions.
“I did [a noun]” is grammatically correct English object-verb-direct-object sentence structure.
Depending on the noun, it may not the most idiomatic way of expressing the sentiment it intends to communicate, but that is a different issue. (On the other hand, idiom is context dependent, and the objection here seems to be that it is idiomatic in at least one context, but that people prefer that children exclusively learn some other preferred idiom. But if you don't have this diversity, children don't get to learn and practice context switching as early, and that's an important skill, too.)
"I did a runner" British idiom means I ran away without paying. The only problem with "I did a water" is I don't know what "a water" is without context. If person A said "I did a shot" and person B said "I did a water", it would make perfect sense.
Feel free to teach your child whatever you’d like, language is totally fungible.
The reason I’d suggest not to is because speaking in this way will, in fact, cause people to think less highly of you.
It’s not a matter of principle and “formal correctness” is pretty meaningless in human language, but “don’t speak in a way that a substantial number of people regard as incorrect” is a meaningful goal!
I would argue that people who think less of a three or five years old because the kid said "I did an ouchie" are simultaneously irrelevant and frankly dumb themselves. Kids life wont be affected at all.
Your claim is really based on fairly absurd notion that a sentence normally used in relation to the kids will somehow set the kid apart from their peers ... who listen to the exact same sentences. As in, the problem of kids speech somehow damaging kids long term is literally non existent in real world.
Miniscule percentage of parents takes offense on it and nobody else cares.
Obviously we’re talking about kids acquiring language, I.e. should the response be to nudge them toward more accepted language as they develop, or make up silly overintellectualized arguments like “hmm, well I can understand what they mean! [insightful face emoji]”
“Aww cute!” responses to incorrect language is how kids develop speech impediments.
> Children are most hurt by low expectations. Especially young children.
I feel children's programming is reflecting those low expectations.
Daniel Tiger's fine, but an episode tends to be so focused on some narrow little thing. The older Mr. Rogers show it's based on tended to be much more wide-ranging, and often had segments introducing parts of the real adult world to a kid.
And there's stuff like Blippi, where you have a man engaging in extremely literal and unimaginative play, being "educational" by teaching colors over and over.
I think treating partial goals as bonuses is a good thing. Any goal that can be seen as a fun bonus challenge becomes more psychologically rewarding than if it's treated as a requirement?
At least I find that works when motivating myself. I didn't expect that I would finish this big skirace this year. But having it as a bonus goal made it very rewarding when I actually did finish it.
I wish we kind of celebrated failures and treated them as learning opportunities.
One of my main complains about my upbringing is that it didn't demand much of us, and it didn't provide opportunities to extend our wings and do and learn about cool stuff, while failures were treated as the end of the world.
Looking back, what was your parents' relationship to anxiety (especially low-level anxiety)?
I have felt similar to your sentiment as I raise my 2.5 year old, and as I investigate more, true failure was always insulated by my parent's anxiety preventing a true experience of outcomes. "Don't climb on that ledge because it's wet and you could fall" rather than a climb and tumble off a 2 inch curb with likely no consequence. "Don't eat that meat if it's still pink", etc.
I used to think I hated children. No, I hate bad parenting. Friends had kids and talked to them like adults (not when they were toddlers, obviously) and the kids turned out awesome. I think it’s easy to handicap children by limiting your expectations of them.
This is the framework my wife and I use with our boys as well. Let them explore things, use regular words, even if you think they don't understand them (they do).
Like you said, set the bar high, but keep in mind they're still kids and failure should never be punished. We found that doing that for some time results in them setting the bar high for themselves _all on their own now_. Their confidence is beaming, and they're never afraid to try new things, or try again after failing.
The safest and best approach, as far as my limited parenting & school volunteering experience has demonstrated, is to go in with the assumption that the kids are just as smart as you and that they only suffer from lack of life experience.
Yes, the fact base kids have is limited due to limited experience & education, but they are able to learn and reason just as well as adolescents and adults, and should be treated like that. What they need is exposure to reasoning methods, clear explanations of logical fallacies, and necessary background information that will help them both articulate complex thoughts and set context for their reasoning.
I would argue that, in many cases, kids are "smarter" than adults because their lack of experience also correlates to increased creativity. Rather than pattern matching based on experience they'll frequently try out-of-the-box methods to solve problems -- this should never be discouraged.
This may be the correct attitude towards school-age kids, but is plainly wrong when dealing with toddlers. For one thing, very young children are usually unable to empathize. So they are unable to understand why it's bad to seize their cousin's toy, they are unable to understand why it's bad to leave a mess for someone else to clean up - they can be taught a set of rules of behavior, but they won't really get the principle underlying those rules until their brain grows more and develops the ability to imagine themselves in other people's shoes.
From around 8 years old (depending on the child), this is probably an accurate assumption. Many children younger than that do not have a fully-developed theory of mind to understand different perspectives on the same issue. This may not matter too much for natural science topics, but it does impact their ability to comprehend social or political issues.
Sure, but also as an adult, you're expected to have learned some resilience to failure. You're expected to be able to be able to withstand some criticism and see negativity as a chance to improve.
I know it doesn't always work that way, but a lot of times our failures aren't just "on us", but affect others.
You are being too generous. Talk to most people over 50 (not even dragging current politics into this). Some have (still) some critical thinking, but a lot of them have their opinions set in stone, ego adequately high, and criticism is taken very defensively, you end up in 'other' camp, stonewalled.
It may not be the audience here so much, but average folks out there?
Those kids today. Have you tried telling them they're wrong? The idea that you might have actually learned things, rather than spending fifty years staring at a blank wall utterly passes them by. Cancel you as soon as look at you, most of 'em.
I'm amused that the original ageist response ("old people suck") is left alone and the parody of the original ageist response ("young people suck") is downvoted. I would expect a bit better from HN readers, though any community that becomes popular enough devolves to average-at-best.
Thanks. I'm torn on a response. On the one hand, HN was always bad at reading between the lines - even quite broad lines. On the other hand, maybe I'm just not as funny as I think I am, and that's what they're downvoting.
This should not be surprising to anyone who has a preschooler. They're also way better at problem-solving than most people expect, it's just that you often don't want them solving their "problems".
When my kid was 18 months old, we had gated him off from a playroom with a bunch of toys used by his older brother that were not baby-safe. We had a DoorMonkey [1] placed up high, about 5 feet tall, so that only adults could reach. My kid gets a chair from across the room, pushes it next to the door, climbs up on top of it, unlatches the DoorMonkey, pushes open the door, climbs down from the chair, enters the playroom, looks at me, and says "Bye!" At that moment my wife gets out of the bathroom, sees the tableau, says "____? What are you doing?" and my toddler says "Uh oh."
I have a similar story about our child, at a similar age! He waited until I'd left the room before dragging a chair away from the dining table and then climbing it, in order to reach a toy I'd accidentally placed on a high shelf on the book-case.
When I came back he immediately knew he'd been caught. Though I wasn't at all mad, it was a wakeup-call that from then on placing things too high was probably a challenge for him, rather than an absolute protection.
100%, my son will be 2 next month and he's even started saying his own name in the tone we do when we're telling him it's not safe and then giggling to himself!
He can recognise a lot of birds, trees, flowers (daffodils, primroses, hyacinths, tulips) coming out in the garden at the moment, only needs to be told what it is once or twice for it to stick.
My kid did the exact same thing with the phrase "be careful!" in the same intonation I used
Except in her case it meant "Witness me!!, as I do something exceedingly dangerous!", or alternatively "Look at the aftermath of this dangerous thing I just did, see the blood?"
Mine is two years, three months and has recently started trying to loid the magnetic child safety cabinet locks in the kitchen with any piece of strong cardboard she finds. I do not know how she came to the realization that that should work, but it definitely feels like we underestimated her.
Luckily she's only succeeded once so far, but nevertheless we're trying to figure out how to make sure the knives are safely out of reach (because she's also figured out how to climb the counter with a chair, obviously) without it becoming too inconvenient for us as well.
My kid is about the same age. We recently bought a safety lock to prevent him from getting into cupboard under our sink. It had great reviews on Amazon.
The first time he went into the kitchen after I had installed it, he notices it immediately, walks straight up to it, grasps it with both hands like an adult would, and has it unlatched within 5 seconds. He then proceeds to look at me like "Is this some sort of test?"
This is tangent, but your comment reminds me of this essay that floats around HN every so often about how limiting school is. Young children are absolutely capable of greatness beyond what we ever ask of them, and most of us are okay with them growing up in the rigid, ordained box of modern public schooling:
https://map.simonsarris.com/p/school-is-not-enough
I prefer my kids going to school then being limited by what a single household can teach them. Modern schooling is way better then what conservative attacks on it claim. And I would strongly preferred to live in a country with functional public school system then one without it.
The main conservative complaint is that without competition for your tax money, public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers. Middle grounds like keeping public schools but let them compete with private ones, using vouchers, for whatever reason reaches this contrived argument of certain interests being scared that a parent may decide another school is a better pick for their child's voucher. If public schools are best parents will be happy to select them, so why not find out?
"public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers"
Public schools are not companies with a monopoly, nor do they have consumers, these are very loaded terms. Do you speak of all infrastructure in this way? Do you say the police have consumers? Or the firefighters a monopoly on putting out fires? Roads a monopoly on letting cars drive over them?
This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way.
Public service has to be unprofitable in many cases, its first mission is to bring a service to the population, not to compete with the private sector. I once visited Maripasoula, a <10k pop town in the middle of the Amazon only accessible by river or small (10-20 passenger) propeller plane. I was fascinated to see it has: a post office (that doubles as a bank), a modern high school with dorms, firefighters and a police station. No private sector actor is going to provide any such service to this population in these conditions. These services do not improve by competition, because there can be none, yet they exist and work well. Crazy, that.
Where there is a mix of private and public, the private sector only services where (be it location or target population wise) it is most profitable and leaves the rest to the public sector to fend with. That does not in itself indicate it functions better, only that it only goes for the lowest hanging fruit by essence of why it exists: to maximize profit. The private sector is not in the business of making its life complicated, the end goal of any company is to provide the least possible for the highest price possible.
In the case of schooling, private schools' only merit is being inaccessible to the poorer populations, hence giving kids a network that sits higher on the social ladder. Generalize this and you find that it no longer brings anything worthwhile to the table, except for those with arbitrary educational constraints such as religious ones. Not that this "benefit" is particularly defensible to begin with.
>Public schools are not companies with a monopoly, nor do they have consumers, these are very loaded terms. Do you speak of all infrastructure in this way? Do you say the police have consumers? Or the firefighters a monopoly on putting out fires? Roads a monopoly on letting cars drive over them?
I am not a conservative. The monopoly and consumer term is applied correctly whether you find it loaded or not. The police have a monopoly on legal initiated violence yes, although for instance many towns have had private fire trash etc that fulfilled needs well. I did not call them companies, I think this is a straw man attack. On roads, miles around me the roads are publicly accessible private easements, you cannot even get to my town on a tax funded road.
You also presuppose competing schools must be for profit which is absolutely false. In many cases they are non profit.
>This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way.
No need, I'm only claiming the voucher system, which isn't even my ideal system (again I am not a conservative), lets parents make a choice without first and foremost having to chase the almighty dollar as the conventional public system forces them to do before sending their kid to another school. It's not just competition but diversity of options giving the poor options where before only the rich had them .
I insist that "monopoly" is not the correct term. There is a much more precise term (with fewer associations): exclusivity. Saying "the heart has a monopoly on pumping blood" is understandable, but a better sentence would be "blood is pumped in the body by the heart only". Why use words that come from certain fields to describe things outside those fields? This introduces spurious (or intentional) meaning behind the things being said: "a school is a parasite because it takes resources from the community to exist", how do you like that sentence? It's a valid and true sentence, but I think you'll be uneasy to say that. There are parasites that benefit their host, nothing wrong with what I said, it's technically correct! I swear, I have nothing against schools, it's just a word!
Terms such as "monopoly" = exclusivity or "consumers" = users come with certain associations similar to "parasite" = dependent. I didn't say sentences using those terms are not understandable, I said they are loaded, and I stand by that.
I agree with this so much. Imo a lot of the far right's argument is based on reducing "waste" Which they promptly redefine as "profit" and now everything is fixed.
A sibling comment nailed most of it, but a few other thoughts:
- There are some students with disabilities that are extremely expensive to serve. Private schools don’t want them. Small public schools don’t want them.
If you take the pool of education dollars, divide by the number of students, and issue vouchers for that amount, you’ll get private schools siphoning off the highest margin kids, and public schools in a death spiral. That may feel more “fair” to you as a parent of a low-needs kid, but we live in a society, not a Mad Max-style dystopia.
I have two low-needs/high-performing kids. Vouchers would definitely benefit my family. Public school frustrates me to no end. But I want to make it better, not retreat to an enclave and let the plebeians eat each other.
- Schools in many ways look like a “natural monopoly”. Duplicating facilities (playgrounds, cafeterias, gyms, etc.) is economically inefficient. Ditto for specialty instructors (art/music/PE). You don’t want 10 schools competing for 300 kids, just like you don’t want 10 electric companies competing for 3000 homes. The goal is to craft policies that avoid as many of the downsides of monopolies as possible. I wish I saw the opposition to public schools digging in on the reasons they’re performing poorly. I do think there are viable reforms if the political will materializes.
You don't want competition. The only competition a school can have is by proxy measurements, and then you are deep into that age old problem that what you measure will decide the outcome.
Just like paying programmers for each bug they fix, which will drive the production of bugs to fix, paying schools for grading children will earn you a lot of highly graded children.
What we need is a respect for the profession. Treat good teachers with a lot of social respect, pay them well so they don't need to think about anything else, and give them a lot of opportunity to educate children as best they see fit. Just like we do with the best doctors.
Nah, it is not. It really is not true that this would be the only main complaint. They also complain about content they dont like existing, about public schools existing on principle, about made up gender issues and so on and so forth.
Conservatives do want to privatize them tho, mostly so that selected few can get richer.
Exactly. Education has a long long way to improve, but the alternative to mediocre public schooling is better public schooling, not homeschool which is even worse than a mediocre school.
Yeah as someone who was homeschooled, I don’t know that I would ever attempt it myself. I’m simply not qualified to teach a whole lot beyond the most bare of basics, except in the narrow band representing my experience and interests. To act otherwise would constitute an embarrassing level of hubris on my part.
There’s a lot of good in modern schooling. It’s not perfect, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater as is so frequently proposed is not the solution here.
Pretty much any teacher will tell you it's because parents aren't involved and treat school like daycare. When Mom and dad come home and veg out on their phones and TV after work, the kids learn that as well. The ones that succeed have parents that are involved with their schooling which is less and less likely these days. Teachers are quitting left and right because of it.
Lol kids are in school 30+ hours a week. When you look at the basic curricula they have to learn it is 99% on the school if it cannot be taught in that time frame, even if the kid is going home to a 4 hour shift in the slave labor camps and only ghouls for parents.
There are many reasonable criticisms of modern public schooling, but the claim that's it's completely broken (and needs burnt to the ground, as many conservatives will claim) is hyperbole and unhelpful to making actual productive change.
And the notion that private schooling (in general) is better is hard to believe. When we looked at private schools for our son, test scores and college admittance were only marginally higher and much of the gap was simple selection bias (private schools are not legally required to take all students, so don't deal with disabled, disadvantaged, or otherwise non-exceptional students). The only time private was substantially better was hyper-elite, hyper-expensive schools (Sidwell Friends, DC vs Paul VI, Fairfax vs the publics in FCPS).
I did checked them. And while it is not perfect, it is not a massive horrible disaster conservatives like to make it. It is just not unfixably broken as it is called. Compared to Europe, it does fine, being above average or around there depending on the test.
Also, America do tend to be country of extremes, so it has some very good public schools and some bad ones. Bad ones being in poor place. And it just so happen that the countries doing better tend to have less poverty and less issues related to it.
My own experience is I went to an amazingly pre school. Like teachers invite students and their families for dinner at their own house, let kids do what they wanted during free time unless and until they actually did something bad. That freedom and trust created an environment where I taught myself how to ride bikes during preschool recesses. No teacher came running out to tell me the right way, they just watched. And they just had real bikes for preschoolers to use at their own comfort freely accessible. Needless to say by the time I got the first grade I had a hard time adapting.
I have no idea if the less restrained model works long term, I suspect not when society is so intermixed and rigid. I joined the STEM Pipeline (introduced by the NSF in the 1970s and continues to this day) like so many others.
This argument is immensely popular. It looks a bit like a warmed over Rousseau - just shake off the chains of the old fashioned education system, give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor, and they'll do pretty well.
Let's look at a few counterpoints:
- Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale.
- Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority).
Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world.
Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything.
But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results
> give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor
Aristocratic tutoring works. The whole issue with it is that it's not affordable except for some kind of extreme super elite, hence why the rest of us have to make do with mass education, supplemented with some very limited individual tutoring and "tiger parenting".
Feels like AI could fix this, learning with a llm companion that never is exhausted and always encourages you to follow your intuition and curiosity is already better than 99% of teachers on a public school (sadly)
not blaming the teachers, but the system, one teacher 30 students will never work well
They are basically lacking the experience and have limited knowledge of the world around them. And us adults often fail to understand their mental model, since we usually won't connect the same dots, but there is definitely logic to their reasoning. It's best to try and ask more questions to know how they've come to some ridiculous idea, and they usually reveal one or two steps that I wouldn't think about.
Maybe it's not that we don't value it, but that we don't recognize it. I've run into a number of ostensibly less-educated people who nonetheless made astute observations about their economic incentives. Generally a lot of game-like situations seem to have players who understand the game in some way without having any formal instruction, and without being what we normally think of a being particularly intelligent.
I have a relative who does well at poker, despite not finishing school. A drainage guy I know has a good understanding of the business and where the opportunities are. In general a bunch of people in the trades seem to "get it". I've run into a bunch of these people who you don't think of as being intelligent, but if you frame something as a game, they know how to play.
None of these people could be taught high school calculus, for instance, but they are still intelligent in a way that's useful to them.
If we're talking about kids, from about the age of four they learn to trick you. "Dad, you have to give me ice cream. Mom says so. Don't wake her up." And it gets more and more sophisticated as they get older.
> a bunch of people in the trades seem to "get it".
I think this is a few things:
- The people in the trades who get to running their own business have (by nature of survival bias) developed two skills at a good level: doing that trade and running a business
- Trades, because they involve material output and safety, have relatively little tolerance for the kinds of bozos who can slip under the radar in the white-collar and service sector worlds.
Socially, emotionally, physically for example are ways people can be intelligent that is ignored in regular schooling.
Intelligence is largely related to STEM and memory in most instances. But there are a vast number of other ways to be intelligent. Perhaps you excel at emotionally connecting with people, maybe you're really good at cooking or tooling approaches. All of these are ignored in school.
School is nothing more then a checkbox along your path, you need to be able to read, write, do math, etc. But we ignore a large amount of our populace who may excel at grunt work, or maybe they are really good at leadership.
Just because you don't know y=mx+b or struggle at reasoning/logistical challenges does not mean you are not valuable to society. Maybe your 300lbs of rock solid muscle and in a past live would have been a top tier hunter. We do appreciate some amount of sports, but even that stops unless you're in the top 1-2% of the country.
This is off base. Socially intelligent people occupy all of the best paid and most powerful positions in society. Social manipulation is the most valued kind of intelligence in America, far more than academic intelligence.
Social intelligence is how you capture all of the added value of a trade, leaving none for the other guy. But you have to generate value in the first place, otherwise you can use social intelligence only for theft.
Exactly, it's useful for theft. Taking the value other people produce is the whole benefit of social intelligence. If you can convince someone that a scam is a good deal, you don't need to create any value at all. This is the origin of, among others, the political class.
The question was not about if being manipulative socially later in life is not a benefit. Of course it is a benefit.
But you get graded based on your ability to read, write, do math, memorize data points. Not on your ability to lie to your teacher in a believable manner.
You may excel later in life, but it's not like you can enter Yale because you can manipulate people.
You also need a certain level of other intelligence to properly manipulate people, or at least a certain level of self narcissism.
I mean you kind of proved my point, perhaps we should be teaching/discussing social skills.
General intelligence and social intelligence are correlated, which makes discussion difficult. Yale's a good example, though. Applicants need a base level of academic achievement to get in, but it's not actually that high. They didn't even require test scores for the last few years. If that were the main criterion, the whole school would be East Asian. Instead, what matters is marketing yourself. Knowing people, or building a narrative the admissions committee is looking for. Social intelligence.
I completely agree that social skills should be emphasized in school-not to reward the people who are already adept, but to impress on the others that they're the primary determinant of success.
One thing that always strikes me in assessments of intelligence in young children (specially in comparisons with animals) is that they focus on what children can do, where as the really remarkable thing about young children is how fast they can learn.
Some languages are supposed to be very difficult & mentally taxing to learn, because they have many conjugations. But a native speaker with very low intelligence (however you measure it) has zero trouble conjugating it all correctly.
> TIL Psychologist László Polgár theorized that any child could become a genius in a chosen field with early training. As an experiment, he trained his daughters in chess from age 4. All three went on to become chess prodigies, and the youngest, Judit, is considered the best female player in history
There was a 3-part BBC documentary called "My Brilliant Brain" with one that featured Susan, who was the oldest and is today one of the best live chess commentators in the world. The doc talks about her father's theory and practice. His most important understanding was that the child must choose the endeavor of their own free will, and then he merely helped them optimize their learning curve.
Susan has a great quote about showing up to a men's chess club, when she was still young. She said, "I don't think I ever beat a healthy man." Because they were always not feeling well, or whatever lame excuse they conjured up.
The other two parts of the series are on different topics, but are also interesting, but Susan's is our favorite, and I got them long before our son started chess.
And Laszlo's book on chess problems is on my son's bookshelf. It has more than 5000 "problems, combinations, and games". It's been replaced by chess.com's and lichess's puzzle games, but it is still the reference book on chess puzzles, to my understanding.
The problem there is that just because you can do it doesn't mean it's good for them. I have two cousins who were trained at playing classical instruments from extremely young age(like 2 years old), one of them went on to become a very successful and well known violinist, but......she hates it. She will be the first one to say that the constant almost daily lessons were an absolute nightmare and that she's had no childhood because of it, and it also locked her into being a violinist despite whatever else she might have wanted to do.
Great "achievement" for the parents, but I wouldn't personally do that to my child.
The part of the Polgár story that amazes me the most is that all three daughters showed enough interest and engagement in chess for the experiment to work so successfully. Because with my own children, I’ve seen again and again that you can encourage and expose them to certain interests, but they’re their own people - many of the things I exposed them to and tried to get them excited about just weren’t interesting to them.
And that’s completely fine. I was never forceful about it and they have their own deep interests in things that I just never got into or understood. I just find it surprising that in some families, these exceptional skills and interests are so readily passed from one generation to the next.
anybody who has spent time with kids can attest to this
i have a 2.5 year old and its extremely interesting just how much her thinking is clearly 'logical', but it operates in what i like to call 'toddler logic'.
If you ask kids questions, and really listen, their lines of thinking are very clearly following an internal logic. It just isnt one that is entirely compatible with 'adult' reasoning - unless the adult in the room intentionally chooses to communicate in 'toddler logic' operators. Most adults are, sadly and imo, not very good at this!
sometimes the chain of logic and premise is grounded in a different ontology entirely (this is what i am referring to as 'toddler logic' for shorthand). this doesn't invalidate the conclusions or chain of logic used to derive them, when you (adult) is using different ontological anchors, which leads to different conclusions.
being able to inhabit the Other's (toddler's) ontological world and navigate it with them helps sharpen their reasoning skills!
they can figure out the Adult Ontology stuff later and apply those reasoning skills then. It's important to let kids be kids sometimes :) Encouraging their conclusions, and building confidence in their reasoning abilities, these are important endeavors in their own right.
I’ve seen this often. My son is 3 and often tells us his reasoning: “we need to run for the bus because it doesn’t wait for us!”
He always says it like he isn't sure we know about buses yet making me think it’s hard to model others as separate minds with differing information until much older. But his modeling of the world logic is very solid. He can easily use multiple tools to reach high up snacks, or build complex block forts, or reason about what will happen “we will grow up and then go to kindergarten!”
My daughter who is 3 is only recently poddy-trained. She now knows to go to the bathroom next to her room. Before she was trained we had a "portable" toilet (think plastic bowl sitting in a toy-like toilet shell basically) she would occasionally use in her room.
Similarly we've recently trained her when she's done with eating to bring the plate to me or my wife to clean/put up (she can't reach any countertops).
Today she had to go and my wife was in the shower so she couldn't use her normal bathroom. She used her portable toilet, picked it up, and brought it to me to clean :).
This sort of "logic" happens all the time every day and I probably miss 90% of it but I definitely thought of it when I read your question.
My daughter has a number of stuffed animals, and she's attached to one in particular named Eloise.
Often, when we're having trouble persuading her to do something, I can tell her Eloise wants to do that thing. I'll use teeth brushing as an example.
Eloise, being an independent 'person' of sorts in my daughter's mind, accepts the premise that Eloise would want to brush her teeth, (we remind her, Eloise doesnt want cavities, and my daughter agrees with Eloise: cavities are bad!). So we go and pretend to brush Eloise's teeth in the bathroom. Once Eloise is done, my daughter is usually all too ready to brush her own teeth.
As one might imagine, this tactic would not work on most adults. but toddler logic ontology imbues her stuffed animals with a sort of pseudo-agency (sometimes daughter insists Eloise does NOT want to brush her teeth or whatever, but that doesnt happen often, funnily enough).
I blame the laws applying children for why this misconception is so widely spread. If companies hired children more people would realize how capable they are. Instead now they have to segregate and start their own companies or work for free where they won't coexist with adults. Adults have a superiority complex over children and don't want them to compete with them as it would shatter their ego.
I am unable to think of a single animal behavior popularly ascribed to intelligence but in fact explainable by rote instinct. Do you have an example?
OTOH there are plenty of animal behaviors that can only be explained by intelligence: seeing-eye dogs perform a task which is economically useful for humans yet far beyond the ability of AI (even if the robotics mech eng issues are resolved). But it also doesn't really make sense that one of my cats is "instinctually" able to understanding my words while the other cat is "instinctually" able to outsmart me when we play with toys. The more sensible explanation is cats are intelligent and intellectually diverse.
Kid's are underestimated all the time. Some personal anecdotes that I think show off that kids know more that we expect of them:
My daughter routinely remembered things, while 3 and 4, that happened a year and sometimes longer ago. She would bring them up, like "last time we were here, was before my last (2nd) birthday". Me: "wow, how do you remember that?"
My friend recalls being ~2yo and deducing how to move a chair and pull a drawer to reach the top of the clothes dresser. After climbing to the top, she recalls sitting, enjoying the view, not knowing how to get down, and crying for help.
My very earliest memory is before I was two. It involved an inflatable weighted balloon, the one's typically with a clown on it and if you bat it down, it rocks back upright. I saw one that was a friendly cop. I can recall several elements of the memory. I recall playing with one of those colorful wire sculpture things where you slide the blocks around like an abacus on drugs, went over to the the balloon cop, and thought to myself, "that is a good guy, why would you a good guy on a toy you hit? It should be a clown." Then I smacked it and went over to see my mom who was at the counter. Looking back, that feels like a lot of reasoning for a <2yo. Years later, when telling my mom that story for the first time, she said that the building where that was was for appointments we had when I was a year and a half old.
It is possible to talk to young children in a grown up way faster than people think, at least for those that do not have recent experience with toddlers.
My son is 2 1/2 and making sure we know he wants to do things his own way.
But if you take time to explain a situation like an adult he backs down eventually. Or, it could be I am just boring him to death and he gives in to shut me up.
I would like to be sympathetic to this, because it is true that as a child I was free to do what I pleased at "bedtime" the rule being that I may not leave my room or disturb my parents, so e.g. reading until daylight is fine, playing music is not, but whether I'm "in bed" let alone "asleep" is on me. In fact of course almost always I would end up asleep, maybe not exactly when I "should" be asleep, but likely as soon as you'd end up getting a reluctant child to actually sleep if you're trying to enforce that.
However, we know lots of children left to their own devices get over-tired, they should sleep but they don't and then they're much worse for it the next day. So in practice most parents are doing the right thing by insisting that children should sleep when they were "supposed" to rather than leaving them to their own devices as mine did.
I have a friend who is an angry drunk. The sort of person who door staff may need to kick out of a bar before they start a fight. In his 20s and 30s, loud arguments about nothing of consequence and even occasional violence were a likely end to a previously enjoyable evening. But although he's still an angry drunk he eventually got good enough at understanding his own emotional state that by his 40s he would just leave. Instead of "We need to all go home or J might kick off" it's "Bye J, see you next week" because he's just realised he feels angry about nothing and he has ordered himself a ride home and is leaving, no fuss.
This ability to self-regulate is often not something children are good at, but it's important. There's a difference between reasoning that if you eat the whole cake you'll feel bad and not eating the whole cake because you'll feel bad
The reasoning is perfectly solid and how this conversation should go between two adults. When children talk about wanting to be adults, this is a large part of what they mean: adults are allowed to apply rules and logic consistently and fairly. If children do it they are called insolent and disrepectful
Kids are more like lawyers than philosophers. They will argue the letter of the law and cite precedent if it is to their advantage, but avoid mentioning it if it's against them.
> it actually make sense to want the kid to go to sleep sooner then adults
Yes, but it isn't enough if you know that, the child has to know that, and actually agree with the reasons. If the reason is "young people need more sleep, you will be so tired tomorrow" you can make the child see that reason (let them stay up once, show the consequences, hope it doesn't backfire). You still get push back, but not for it being unfair. If the reason is that the parents want time for themselves then the child is right that it's unfair, and the better solution would be "alone time for everyone. You in your room, we in the living room, internet shuts off at 9". Similarly "we eat dinner together" is a fair rule as long as everyone is held to the same standard. You still get push back, but a fair rule is much easier to enforce than an unfair one.
I think part of the issue is that the child often knows that the adults reasoning is wrong or even deceptive, and as you point out that will feel unfair.
As a child, I often read until 2-3am, and was just fine the following day (wish I could do that now). Any actual enforced attempt at going to sleep would have felt unfair because it'd have been earlier than I needed.
What my parents actually cared about was that I was in my room, and that I got up without being cranky or letting it affect school the following day.
It's much easier to "sell" the child on that, by being honest about wanting quiet time and wanting to make sure the child isn't too tired, than convincing them a bedtime they will have secretly violated multiple times without feeling too tired is reasonable.
So from pretty early, my "bedtime" was "alone time" as you suggest, with the proviso that if I couldn't get up without being prodded in the morning that was evidence I was taking the piss, and the consequence would be tightening up of the actual bedtime for a while. That felt fair, and honest, and the rules were understandable, and meant I often stayed up way later than my parents would have thought was reasonable, but since it worked, it was fine, and I self-regulated.
> just not so much at recognizing what’s unfair to others
Or just don't care lol. Children love pushing boundaries. Sometimes it's good (learning a sport, improving a skill, taking on the bigger, scarier feature at the playground) and sometimes it's annoying (wanting more ice cream, staying up late, etc...). I'm convinced it's just part of growing up.
They'll often recognise it just fine if the reasoning is spelled out. They can usually understand the logic, but might struggle to come up with all the steps by themselves.
It's also a common communications failure, in that you'll do far better not just with children, but with adults to, if you provide a reason instead of assuming that the other party know why you're making the request you're making.
Instead you're inviting pattern matching - the child will have been told to go to bed because it is late, so it's a natural statement to make if you don't understand why the parent is stating it.
Explain the steps, and the consequence of failure in a way that the child can relate to, and you're likely to get a very different reaction("come home, because it's late and you need to go to bed so you're not too tired to play tomorrow").
But really, adding a "because ..." tends to improve compliance even when the reasoning isn't very sound, and even with adults. It's scarily effective as long as the ask isn't too great.
Lots of people saying that this is completely obvious. I'm not so sure, but the article summary is not much help there - we are almost at the end when the researcher explains what she claims the advance is. A better article would start by explaining the advance, diving deeper into it, and then following up with how she showed this. Something to think about when we're trying to communicate complex ideas.
Lots of happy examples in this thread. Let me add mine.
My 3 year old vastly prefers complex carnatic music to cocomelon (and its ilk). He can listen to a 15 minute, intricate song without losing interest, and will ask for it in a loop. Children can handle a lot more complexity than we generally assume.
I agree that it's worth investigating...I was just expecting more detailed analysis from an academic paper. The story linked basically says "3-5 year-olds can classify stuff into groups."
For what it's worth, I have a 2- and 5-year-old, so I'd love to know more about how their brains are developing.
Just to clarify the slightly ambiguous title, it's that preschoolers can reason better than some adults thought they can, and not (as I first thought) that they can reason better than how we adults do our own thinking.
Sorry for sounding ornery, but it's plainly obvious to every parent I've interacted with that most preschool kids have well developed categorization skills for their toys, coloring objects, etc.
Better than scientists think they could reason. Scientists also believe cats can't recognize themselves in a mirror. Observational studies are extremely error prone.
They aren’t really scientists though, they are social “scientists”. I.E. someone that feels the need to validate their pseudo science as actual science in order to fake credibility.
While watching the Apollo 11 documentary with my four year old, he asked about the "beep beep" alarm during the landing. I explained that it was the low-fuel alarm.
He gasped in shock and exclaimed: "How will they get back home to Earth?"
That was impressive enough, but then he concocted a rescue mission where a rocket would rendezvous with them and refuel their ship so that they could get home.
That's pretty much the current NASA plan for humanity's return to the Moon!
What distresses me about all this is that we are handling children like if they were a separate species....just use your memory! Of course they can reason better than we think, did everyone forget making plans and having chats with other preschoolers as a preschooler? Everyone has been one! No exceptions!
And yet we act like if kids were a separate state of matter or something.
This strange mental separation can only bring in bad results.
Getting things like this clarified can be a challenge.
I've a hobby interest in exploring what science education might look like if we could apply much greater expertise. For example, K-1 does descriptive material properties, but it's ad hoc and crufty. Happily, industry has some nicer descriptive ontologies. So what might it look like to adapt those instead? And how might that then be leveraged, to teach other things better?
Now rheological quasi-properties provide a way to quantify dynamic material properties. Like sticky, squishy, slimy, ...-y. Which raises the obvious question: Could we do Ashby charts[1], xkcd-ishly simple and discrete, in K-1? Like, foods sticky vs slimy?
Well, 2D sort-into-piles is a K thing, with axes ordered and categorical. But... having both axis ordered is very rare. Button number-of-holes vs color, sure. But number-of-holes vs number-of-sides, strangely not. So is this a real developmental bottleneck? Or just the commonplace "we teach it, but we don't really use it, so there's little incentive to teach it well"? Good question - I've found it hard to get feedback like that.
I wish there was an HN-like community, with education researchers and master teachers.
Children are most hurt by low expectations. Especially young children.
There's subtlety to this, high demands are not high expectations. If there's consequences for not meeting some high standard you set for children, you're going to create a very life-destroying kind of learned helplessness. Kids shouldn't be punished for failure.
And if it's something dangerous to try, then of course it's gotta be something you limit.
But beyond that, just don't assume kids aren't ready for something without evidence. Let them try.
Completely agree. In various volunteering capacities (think STEM fairs, youth baseball umpiring, etc) I end up working with 8-12 year olds a lot and I seem to be better at this than a lot of my counterparts. You nailed it.
The secret is to treat the kid like an adult until they demonstrate a reason(s) not to. A GF one time asked me why I talked to her nephew “like that?” and I was so confused. She said “you talk to him the same way you talk to me” (ie. the way I talk to anyone). Nephew and I were shooting free throws in the driveway. We get along great. This was very rambly but I think about it all the time.
I’ve gotten the brattiest kids to calm down and accept the situation in meltdowns in youth baseball with the same approach.
I’m not claiming this always works. Many times the situation or kid themselves demonstrates they must be treated like a kid. That’s fine too.
I have very similar lived experiences to yours and would extend the age range well into the teenage years (and even sometimes beyond) due to the fact that many young adults are still very sheltered and suffer from the same environments and mindsets established 8 - 12.
Some warning signs are medical illnesses where a young adult is being sheltered as if they are still in a crisis state of that illness, even though they've grown well beyond it and may benefit from being treating like any normal individual.
I have the same knack with kids, I’ve had it forever. “Oh you’re going to be such a good parent” was something I heard constantly.
It’s different when one’s own kids, and it takes extra patience to have the same skill set as you do with “stranger” kids. Without getting into it too much, being in a position of “authority” with a “stranger” kid changes the dynamic as compared to one’s own kids.
I dunno if that makes sense, but I’ve found it to be true for me.
I also seemed to have figured it out with my own kids, it just takes more work and more patience.
Kids generally are nicer and more well behaved to people other than their parents. It's masking, their parent may feed and love them no matter what but a stranger has little obligation and could do God knows what. It also just takes energy to mask so they may have to take it out of their parents instead later, when they run out of that masking energy.
A normal life preservation strategy is to be more neutral around people you know less, which seems baked into human instinct.
That definitely makes sense. Appreciate the point.
It makes my blood boil that my kid comes from the nursery saying things like "I did an ouchie". Kids don't naturally speak like this, they are taught like this. He's 3. At home he speaks his parents languages and he sounds like a 5 year old because we don't dumb it down for him. In English he sounds like every other English 3 year old in the nursery.
As someone who has a 2.5 year old learning multiple languages, I think a problem with English is that it's very verbose; we use full sentences to express things that can be expressed in other languages with only 1-2 words. And of course shorter sentences are easier for children as there's less grammar to be learned.
And specifically for expressing you hurt yourself, we teach children to express that they're hurt far earlier than they learn actual speech. So from ~1 we teach them to say "Ow" (or some variation), but then the words change from that to "hurt", and into a full sentence "I hurt myself", which is also redundant (myself and I imply the same thing, so why do we use both in that sentence in English?).
Anyhow just a thought as I'm feeding my son breakfast. "Would you like some breakfast" in English turns into 2 words in his second language.
Your understanding of how formality levels in English function is perhaps not entirely complete: native speakers of English convey usually convey the sentiment with as little as "Breakfast?" or "Hungry?" when talking with family. In the child's second language, would the maitre'd at the restaurant of a fine hotel ask a two word question, or rather bury those in respectful filler?
"Ow" and friends, by the way, are interjections to express sudden pain, functioning analogously to an adult's swearing. They're not full sentences about the pain and its source.
> Your understanding of how formality levels in English function is perhaps not entirely complete: native speakers of English convey usually convey
It's kind of hilarious that you assume I'm not a native English speaker because I speak more languages... I'm a native English speaker who just happens to have grown up with 2 other languages and have a wife that speaks 4+ languages. On top of that I've taken a bunch of university level English courses.
Yes, I'm aware that people shorten sentences into statements when speaking to those they're familiar with. I do it as well.
Here's a thought experiment:
- If a toddler speaks in short statements it's "baby talk"
- If an immigrant speaks in short statements it's "broken English"
- If a native speaker speaks in short statements it's vernacular or slang
Or:
- If a toddler makes up words it's "baby talk"
- If an immigrant makes up words they're uneducated
- If a native speaker makes up words it's a dialect
Most of those incorrectly use the linguistic terminology (in particular, "dialect", "baby talk", "slang") but, yes, congratulations on discovering that context plays a role in communication.
Ah so you want to be snarky to try assert intellectual superiority but actually have nothing to say. Gotcha.
I don’t get it, you can’t just ask “want breakfast?”
You can and you do but it sounds "babyish". That's my point. Whereas in some other languages it's idiomatic.
I think you’re overthinking it. I’ve been talking to my kids like they’re just normal people since they were born.
“Oh how old are they, 5? Nope, just turned 3. They speak so well!” shrug
The second language must be biasing you somehow, it’s not hard to talk to your kids.
It's not about how I talk to my kid; he's picking up 2 languages just fine (trying a third but I'll admit I'm slacking a little on that one).
It's about the perception of how children speak in English.
> The second language must be biasing you somehow
"Would you like some breakfast" isn't quite so overly wordy that I'd say it sounds unnatural, but it absolutely is not the bare minimum for idiomatic English.
"Do you want breakfast?" is perfectly grammatical, and "Want breakfast?" would be a totally normal phrasing, even if some might argue that eliding the subject isn't technically correct.
There's even the in-between "You want breakfast?" that relies on the tonal shift at the end of the sentence used for questions.
No it doesn't. I don't ask my colleague "Would you care to go to the bar and drink a beer after work?" I say "Grab a beer later?" As does every other normal person I know. "Get lunch?" Etc.
Even “Lunch?” is enough with someone you know well.
And preschool teachers talk this way because they're desperately afraid of hurting parents' feelings
I really think baby talk is a phenomenon that pre-dates helicopter parenting
Baby Todd is a real phenomenon caused by kids not being able to say complex words. You want to say those complex words to them and they will repeat them back and they may make a baby version of it which is fine but it’s good to for you to keep using the complex words and the correct pronunciation so they learn.
Every one of my kids has a name that is hard for a baby to pronounce so they have a baby nickname, but we let them grow out of it.
I blame Ms Rachel.
Please don't inflame these otherwise reasonable comment sections with low effort culture war rhetoric.
How does this have anything to do with the culture war? This is just a discussion of culture and how its changing unrelated to what you are referring to.
Do you even understand the argument being made by the person I was replying to?
It's true though. Talk to any teacher or childcare provider.
I'm not denying the phenomenon exists. But to try to say that adults would be upset if teachers spoke to their children like they weren't developmentally challenged is completely ridiculous.
It is just a different sound for the same thing. There is nothing dumber about "I did an ouchie" then "I got hurt". Ouchie is more infantile, but not stupider.
"I did [a noun]" is 'stupider', i.e. not grammatically correct English, i.e. a formulation that people will look down on you for using as you age. Sometimes you have to teach children things they'll eventually have to unlearn, but this is not one of those occasions.
“I did [a noun]” is grammatically correct English object-verb-direct-object sentence structure.
Depending on the noun, it may not the most idiomatic way of expressing the sentiment it intends to communicate, but that is a different issue. (On the other hand, idiom is context dependent, and the objection here seems to be that it is idiomatic in at least one context, but that people prefer that children exclusively learn some other preferred idiom. But if you don't have this diversity, children don't get to learn and practice context switching as early, and that's an important skill, too.)
Please provide examples
Off the top of my head:
* I did a puzzle.
* I did a bad thing.
* I did a backflip.
Or, since this is just normal English, it's exactly the kind of thing that ChatGPT is good at, so here's a dozen more examples if you want: https://chatgpt.com/share/67e6d457-5ff4-8002-a5c7-15040f3d22... .
Ah yes, "I did a [thing that a person performs or does]" is valid.
Is "an ouchie" a thing that someone performs or does?
>“I did [a noun]” is grammatically correct English object-verb-direct-object sentence structure.
I'm going to need some examples here because I'm filling in nouns to that structure and it does not sound correct. "I did [a] water." Huh?
"I did a runner" British idiom means I ran away without paying. The only problem with "I did a water" is I don't know what "a water" is without context. If person A said "I did a shot" and person B said "I did a water", it would make perfect sense.
I can't offhand think of a case where that construction is appropriate for a noun that isn't a nominalized verb.
I did a dance.
I did a presentation.
So things that people do, of which "ouchies" is not
Why can't you do an ouchie? It sounds weird, but I also know exactly what it means.
Feel free to teach your child whatever you’d like, language is totally fungible.
The reason I’d suggest not to is because speaking in this way will, in fact, cause people to think less highly of you.
It’s not a matter of principle and “formal correctness” is pretty meaningless in human language, but “don’t speak in a way that a substantial number of people regard as incorrect” is a meaningful goal!
I would argue that people who think less of a three or five years old because the kid said "I did an ouchie" are simultaneously irrelevant and frankly dumb themselves. Kids life wont be affected at all.
Your claim is really based on fairly absurd notion that a sentence normally used in relation to the kids will somehow set the kid apart from their peers ... who listen to the exact same sentences. As in, the problem of kids speech somehow damaging kids long term is literally non existent in real world.
Miniscule percentage of parents takes offense on it and nobody else cares.
Obviously we’re talking about kids acquiring language, I.e. should the response be to nudge them toward more accepted language as they develop, or make up silly overintellectualized arguments like “hmm, well I can understand what they mean! [insightful face emoji]”
“Aww cute!” responses to incorrect language is how kids develop speech impediments.
I did art. I did postgrad. I did work(n). I did dishes. I did Paris. I did the walls, but hired someone who did the roof.
Not idiomatic for all nouns, esp those for which there's a more applicable verb.
"1;
Well, it is grammatically wrong.
> Children are most hurt by low expectations. Especially young children.
I feel children's programming is reflecting those low expectations.
Daniel Tiger's fine, but an episode tends to be so focused on some narrow little thing. The older Mr. Rogers show it's based on tended to be much more wide-ranging, and often had segments introducing parts of the real adult world to a kid.
And there's stuff like Blippi, where you have a man engaging in extremely literal and unimaginative play, being "educational" by teaching colors over and over.
Oh, yeah for sure. Children's television is seems more oriented toward addiction than genuine education more often than I'd like.
"Trash Truck" and Pocoyo.
"High demands are not high expectations." Holy crap that is a great phrase!
I think treating partial goals as bonuses is a good thing. Any goal that can be seen as a fun bonus challenge becomes more psychologically rewarding than if it's treated as a requirement?
At least I find that works when motivating myself. I didn't expect that I would finish this big skirace this year. But having it as a bonus goal made it very rewarding when I actually did finish it.
I wish we kind of celebrated failures and treated them as learning opportunities.
One of my main complains about my upbringing is that it didn't demand much of us, and it didn't provide opportunities to extend our wings and do and learn about cool stuff, while failures were treated as the end of the world.
Looking back, what was your parents' relationship to anxiety (especially low-level anxiety)?
I have felt similar to your sentiment as I raise my 2.5 year old, and as I investigate more, true failure was always insulated by my parent's anxiety preventing a true experience of outcomes. "Don't climb on that ledge because it's wet and you could fall" rather than a climb and tumble off a 2 inch curb with likely no consequence. "Don't eat that meat if it's still pink", etc.
I used to think I hated children. No, I hate bad parenting. Friends had kids and talked to them like adults (not when they were toddlers, obviously) and the kids turned out awesome. I think it’s easy to handicap children by limiting your expectations of them.
My cousin needed speech therapy because my aunt accidentally formed her own language with him in over-doing the baby talk.
Ironically, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone I've ever met.
This is the framework my wife and I use with our boys as well. Let them explore things, use regular words, even if you think they don't understand them (they do).
Like you said, set the bar high, but keep in mind they're still kids and failure should never be punished. We found that doing that for some time results in them setting the bar high for themselves _all on their own now_. Their confidence is beaming, and they're never afraid to try new things, or try again after failing.
The safest and best approach, as far as my limited parenting & school volunteering experience has demonstrated, is to go in with the assumption that the kids are just as smart as you and that they only suffer from lack of life experience.
Yes, the fact base kids have is limited due to limited experience & education, but they are able to learn and reason just as well as adolescents and adults, and should be treated like that. What they need is exposure to reasoning methods, clear explanations of logical fallacies, and necessary background information that will help them both articulate complex thoughts and set context for their reasoning.
I would argue that, in many cases, kids are "smarter" than adults because their lack of experience also correlates to increased creativity. Rather than pattern matching based on experience they'll frequently try out-of-the-box methods to solve problems -- this should never be discouraged.
This may be the correct attitude towards school-age kids, but is plainly wrong when dealing with toddlers. For one thing, very young children are usually unable to empathize. So they are unable to understand why it's bad to seize their cousin's toy, they are unable to understand why it's bad to leave a mess for someone else to clean up - they can be taught a set of rules of behavior, but they won't really get the principle underlying those rules until their brain grows more and develops the ability to imagine themselves in other people's shoes.
From around 8 years old (depending on the child), this is probably an accurate assumption. Many children younger than that do not have a fully-developed theory of mind to understand different perspectives on the same issue. This may not matter too much for natural science topics, but it does impact their ability to comprehend social or political issues.
Could you add adults to those shouldn’t be punished for (most) failures?
Let’s be nice to each other and ourselves when try..and learn.
Sure, but also as an adult, you're expected to have learned some resilience to failure. You're expected to be able to be able to withstand some criticism and see negativity as a chance to improve.
I know it doesn't always work that way, but a lot of times our failures aren't just "on us", but affect others.
You are being too generous. Talk to most people over 50 (not even dragging current politics into this). Some have (still) some critical thinking, but a lot of them have their opinions set in stone, ego adequately high, and criticism is taken very defensively, you end up in 'other' camp, stonewalled.
It may not be the audience here so much, but average folks out there?
Those kids today. Have you tried telling them they're wrong? The idea that you might have actually learned things, rather than spending fifty years staring at a blank wall utterly passes them by. Cancel you as soon as look at you, most of 'em.
I'm amused that the original ageist response ("old people suck") is left alone and the parody of the original ageist response ("young people suck") is downvoted. I would expect a bit better from HN readers, though any community that becomes popular enough devolves to average-at-best.
Thanks. I'm torn on a response. On the one hand, HN was always bad at reading between the lines - even quite broad lines. On the other hand, maybe I'm just not as funny as I think I am, and that's what they're downvoting.
Agreed - the article about the study gives very basic examples, for example.
Children seem to demonstrate when given support to explore their curiosities as a gateway to learning (Similar to Reggio Emelia approaches).
This should not be surprising to anyone who has a preschooler. They're also way better at problem-solving than most people expect, it's just that you often don't want them solving their "problems".
When my kid was 18 months old, we had gated him off from a playroom with a bunch of toys used by his older brother that were not baby-safe. We had a DoorMonkey [1] placed up high, about 5 feet tall, so that only adults could reach. My kid gets a chair from across the room, pushes it next to the door, climbs up on top of it, unlatches the DoorMonkey, pushes open the door, climbs down from the chair, enters the playroom, looks at me, and says "Bye!" At that moment my wife gets out of the bathroom, sees the tableau, says "____? What are you doing?" and my toddler says "Uh oh."
[1] https://doormonkey.com/
I have a similar story about our child, at a similar age! He waited until I'd left the room before dragging a chair away from the dining table and then climbing it, in order to reach a toy I'd accidentally placed on a high shelf on the book-case.
When I came back he immediately knew he'd been caught. Though I wasn't at all mad, it was a wakeup-call that from then on placing things too high was probably a challenge for him, rather than an absolute protection.
We covet that which we can see. Put it in a box and it ceases to exist.
100%, my son will be 2 next month and he's even started saying his own name in the tone we do when we're telling him it's not safe and then giggling to himself!
He can recognise a lot of birds, trees, flowers (daffodils, primroses, hyacinths, tulips) coming out in the garden at the moment, only needs to be told what it is once or twice for it to stick.
My kid did the exact same thing with the phrase "be careful!" in the same intonation I used
Except in her case it meant "Witness me!!, as I do something exceedingly dangerous!", or alternatively "Look at the aftermath of this dangerous thing I just did, see the blood?"
Mine is two years, three months and has recently started trying to loid the magnetic child safety cabinet locks in the kitchen with any piece of strong cardboard she finds. I do not know how she came to the realization that that should work, but it definitely feels like we underestimated her.
Luckily she's only succeeded once so far, but nevertheless we're trying to figure out how to make sure the knives are safely out of reach (because she's also figured out how to climb the counter with a chair, obviously) without it becoming too inconvenient for us as well.
My kid is about the same age. We recently bought a safety lock to prevent him from getting into cupboard under our sink. It had great reviews on Amazon.
The first time he went into the kitchen after I had installed it, he notices it immediately, walks straight up to it, grasps it with both hands like an adult would, and has it unlatched within 5 seconds. He then proceeds to look at me like "Is this some sort of test?"
I thought this was somewhat obvious. Kids are really smart in their limited context. It’s communication they need to learn.
This is similar with people. Many people are quite intelligent, just not in a way we value or understand.
This is tangent, but your comment reminds me of this essay that floats around HN every so often about how limiting school is. Young children are absolutely capable of greatness beyond what we ever ask of them, and most of us are okay with them growing up in the rigid, ordained box of modern public schooling: https://map.simonsarris.com/p/school-is-not-enough
I prefer my kids going to school then being limited by what a single household can teach them. Modern schooling is way better then what conservative attacks on it claim. And I would strongly preferred to live in a country with functional public school system then one without it.
The main conservative complaint is that without competition for your tax money, public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers. Middle grounds like keeping public schools but let them compete with private ones, using vouchers, for whatever reason reaches this contrived argument of certain interests being scared that a parent may decide another school is a better pick for their child's voucher. If public schools are best parents will be happy to select them, so why not find out?
"public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers"
Public schools are not companies with a monopoly, nor do they have consumers, these are very loaded terms. Do you speak of all infrastructure in this way? Do you say the police have consumers? Or the firefighters a monopoly on putting out fires? Roads a monopoly on letting cars drive over them?
This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way.
Public service has to be unprofitable in many cases, its first mission is to bring a service to the population, not to compete with the private sector. I once visited Maripasoula, a <10k pop town in the middle of the Amazon only accessible by river or small (10-20 passenger) propeller plane. I was fascinated to see it has: a post office (that doubles as a bank), a modern high school with dorms, firefighters and a police station. No private sector actor is going to provide any such service to this population in these conditions. These services do not improve by competition, because there can be none, yet they exist and work well. Crazy, that.
Where there is a mix of private and public, the private sector only services where (be it location or target population wise) it is most profitable and leaves the rest to the public sector to fend with. That does not in itself indicate it functions better, only that it only goes for the lowest hanging fruit by essence of why it exists: to maximize profit. The private sector is not in the business of making its life complicated, the end goal of any company is to provide the least possible for the highest price possible.
In the case of schooling, private schools' only merit is being inaccessible to the poorer populations, hence giving kids a network that sits higher on the social ladder. Generalize this and you find that it no longer brings anything worthwhile to the table, except for those with arbitrary educational constraints such as religious ones. Not that this "benefit" is particularly defensible to begin with.
>Public schools are not companies with a monopoly, nor do they have consumers, these are very loaded terms. Do you speak of all infrastructure in this way? Do you say the police have consumers? Or the firefighters a monopoly on putting out fires? Roads a monopoly on letting cars drive over them?
I am not a conservative. The monopoly and consumer term is applied correctly whether you find it loaded or not. The police have a monopoly on legal initiated violence yes, although for instance many towns have had private fire trash etc that fulfilled needs well. I did not call them companies, I think this is a straw man attack. On roads, miles around me the roads are publicly accessible private easements, you cannot even get to my town on a tax funded road.
You also presuppose competing schools must be for profit which is absolutely false. In many cases they are non profit.
>This world view that everything relates to money first and foremost, lives on markets, only improves by competition, should justify its existence in some measurable wealth producing way is very dangerous in my opinion, because not everything can work this way.
No need, I'm only claiming the voucher system, which isn't even my ideal system (again I am not a conservative), lets parents make a choice without first and foremost having to chase the almighty dollar as the conventional public system forces them to do before sending their kid to another school. It's not just competition but diversity of options giving the poor options where before only the rich had them .
I insist that "monopoly" is not the correct term. There is a much more precise term (with fewer associations): exclusivity. Saying "the heart has a monopoly on pumping blood" is understandable, but a better sentence would be "blood is pumped in the body by the heart only". Why use words that come from certain fields to describe things outside those fields? This introduces spurious (or intentional) meaning behind the things being said: "a school is a parasite because it takes resources from the community to exist", how do you like that sentence? It's a valid and true sentence, but I think you'll be uneasy to say that. There are parasites that benefit their host, nothing wrong with what I said, it's technically correct! I swear, I have nothing against schools, it's just a word!
Terms such as "monopoly" = exclusivity or "consumers" = users come with certain associations similar to "parasite" = dependent. I didn't say sentences using those terms are not understandable, I said they are loaded, and I stand by that.
I agree with this so much. Imo a lot of the far right's argument is based on reducing "waste" Which they promptly redefine as "profit" and now everything is fixed.
A sibling comment nailed most of it, but a few other thoughts:
- There are some students with disabilities that are extremely expensive to serve. Private schools don’t want them. Small public schools don’t want them.
If you take the pool of education dollars, divide by the number of students, and issue vouchers for that amount, you’ll get private schools siphoning off the highest margin kids, and public schools in a death spiral. That may feel more “fair” to you as a parent of a low-needs kid, but we live in a society, not a Mad Max-style dystopia.
I have two low-needs/high-performing kids. Vouchers would definitely benefit my family. Public school frustrates me to no end. But I want to make it better, not retreat to an enclave and let the plebeians eat each other.
- Schools in many ways look like a “natural monopoly”. Duplicating facilities (playgrounds, cafeterias, gyms, etc.) is economically inefficient. Ditto for specialty instructors (art/music/PE). You don’t want 10 schools competing for 300 kids, just like you don’t want 10 electric companies competing for 3000 homes. The goal is to craft policies that avoid as many of the downsides of monopolies as possible. I wish I saw the opposition to public schools digging in on the reasons they’re performing poorly. I do think there are viable reforms if the political will materializes.
You don't want competition. The only competition a school can have is by proxy measurements, and then you are deep into that age old problem that what you measure will decide the outcome.
Just like paying programmers for each bug they fix, which will drive the production of bugs to fix, paying schools for grading children will earn you a lot of highly graded children.
What we need is a respect for the profession. Treat good teachers with a lot of social respect, pay them well so they don't need to think about anything else, and give them a lot of opportunity to educate children as best they see fit. Just like we do with the best doctors.
Nah, it is not. It really is not true that this would be the only main complaint. They also complain about content they dont like existing, about public schools existing on principle, about made up gender issues and so on and so forth.
Conservatives do want to privatize them tho, mostly so that selected few can get richer.
Exactly. Education has a long long way to improve, but the alternative to mediocre public schooling is better public schooling, not homeschool which is even worse than a mediocre school.
We have the data. Homeschooling outcomes are better. This isn't up in the air, we know the answer.
I would love to see "the data" you're alluding to because everything I've read points to the opposite.
Yeah as someone who was homeschooled, I don’t know that I would ever attempt it myself. I’m simply not qualified to teach a whole lot beyond the most bare of basics, except in the narrow band representing my experience and interests. To act otherwise would constitute an embarrassing level of hubris on my part.
There’s a lot of good in modern schooling. It’s not perfect, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater as is so frequently proposed is not the solution here.
I don't think you need to trust what "conservatives claim" when you see the test scores and literacy rates.
American public schooling is and has been broken for awhile.
Pretty much any teacher will tell you it's because parents aren't involved and treat school like daycare. When Mom and dad come home and veg out on their phones and TV after work, the kids learn that as well. The ones that succeed have parents that are involved with their schooling which is less and less likely these days. Teachers are quitting left and right because of it.
Of course they would say that.
Blaming the parents and kids is just a scapegoat.
But yes, the kids that succeed are the ones that the parents are involved, because the teachers are useless.
The quality of teachers has gone way down, especially since federal student loans.
Anyone can become a teacher, it's a default path, and it shows.
You're part of the problem and know nothing of the shift that these teachers have seen over the last 30 years.
I've experienced terrible teachers (especially math teachers) and had to teach myself.
I've seen good schools crumble due to terrible policies and teachers.
You're enabling the problem by apologizing for these poor performing teachers.
Literally all of 8th grade was learning how to count to 10 in other languages and some stupid cross-stitching art. In Math!!!
Luckily I learned through programming on my own time, but once you're behind from one shitty math teacher, it's hard to catch up.
[flagged]
A nice excuse to give up. Bye.
Next time, try to bolster your point instead of ad-hominem attacks.
Lol kids are in school 30+ hours a week. When you look at the basic curricula they have to learn it is 99% on the school if it cannot be taught in that time frame, even if the kid is going home to a 4 hour shift in the slave labor camps and only ghouls for parents.
There are many reasonable criticisms of modern public schooling, but the claim that's it's completely broken (and needs burnt to the ground, as many conservatives will claim) is hyperbole and unhelpful to making actual productive change.
And the notion that private schooling (in general) is better is hard to believe. When we looked at private schools for our son, test scores and college admittance were only marginally higher and much of the gap was simple selection bias (private schools are not legally required to take all students, so don't deal with disabled, disadvantaged, or otherwise non-exceptional students). The only time private was substantially better was hyper-elite, hyper-expensive schools (Sidwell Friends, DC vs Paul VI, Fairfax vs the publics in FCPS).
I did checked them. And while it is not perfect, it is not a massive horrible disaster conservatives like to make it. It is just not unfixably broken as it is called. Compared to Europe, it does fine, being above average or around there depending on the test.
Also, America do tend to be country of extremes, so it has some very good public schools and some bad ones. Bad ones being in poor place. And it just so happen that the countries doing better tend to have less poverty and less issues related to it.
My own experience is I went to an amazingly pre school. Like teachers invite students and their families for dinner at their own house, let kids do what they wanted during free time unless and until they actually did something bad. That freedom and trust created an environment where I taught myself how to ride bikes during preschool recesses. No teacher came running out to tell me the right way, they just watched. And they just had real bikes for preschoolers to use at their own comfort freely accessible. Needless to say by the time I got the first grade I had a hard time adapting.
I have no idea if the less restrained model works long term, I suspect not when society is so intermixed and rigid. I joined the STEM Pipeline (introduced by the NSF in the 1970s and continues to this day) like so many others.
This argument is immensely popular. It looks a bit like a warmed over Rousseau - just shake off the chains of the old fashioned education system, give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor, and they'll do pretty well.
Let's look at a few counterpoints:
- Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale.
- Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority).
Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world.
Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything.
But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results
> give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor
Aristocratic tutoring works. The whole issue with it is that it's not affordable except for some kind of extreme super elite, hence why the rest of us have to make do with mass education, supplemented with some very limited individual tutoring and "tiger parenting".
Feels like AI could fix this, learning with a llm companion that never is exhausted and always encourages you to follow your intuition and curiosity is already better than 99% of teachers on a public school (sadly) not blaming the teachers, but the system, one teacher 30 students will never work well
Yes, this is also somewhat obvious (speaking as a teacher).
They are basically lacking the experience and have limited knowledge of the world around them. And us adults often fail to understand their mental model, since we usually won't connect the same dots, but there is definitely logic to their reasoning. It's best to try and ask more questions to know how they've come to some ridiculous idea, and they usually reveal one or two steps that I wouldn't think about.
Can you elaborate on ways people are intelligent that we don't value?
Maybe it's not that we don't value it, but that we don't recognize it. I've run into a number of ostensibly less-educated people who nonetheless made astute observations about their economic incentives. Generally a lot of game-like situations seem to have players who understand the game in some way without having any formal instruction, and without being what we normally think of a being particularly intelligent.
I have a relative who does well at poker, despite not finishing school. A drainage guy I know has a good understanding of the business and where the opportunities are. In general a bunch of people in the trades seem to "get it". I've run into a bunch of these people who you don't think of as being intelligent, but if you frame something as a game, they know how to play.
None of these people could be taught high school calculus, for instance, but they are still intelligent in a way that's useful to them.
If we're talking about kids, from about the age of four they learn to trick you. "Dad, you have to give me ice cream. Mom says so. Don't wake her up." And it gets more and more sophisticated as they get older.
> a bunch of people in the trades seem to "get it".
I think this is a few things:
- The people in the trades who get to running their own business have (by nature of survival bias) developed two skills at a good level: doing that trade and running a business
- Trades, because they involve material output and safety, have relatively little tolerance for the kinds of bozos who can slip under the radar in the white-collar and service sector worlds.
Socially, emotionally, physically for example are ways people can be intelligent that is ignored in regular schooling.
Intelligence is largely related to STEM and memory in most instances. But there are a vast number of other ways to be intelligent. Perhaps you excel at emotionally connecting with people, maybe you're really good at cooking or tooling approaches. All of these are ignored in school.
School is nothing more then a checkbox along your path, you need to be able to read, write, do math, etc. But we ignore a large amount of our populace who may excel at grunt work, or maybe they are really good at leadership.
Just because you don't know y=mx+b or struggle at reasoning/logistical challenges does not mean you are not valuable to society. Maybe your 300lbs of rock solid muscle and in a past live would have been a top tier hunter. We do appreciate some amount of sports, but even that stops unless you're in the top 1-2% of the country.
This is off base. Socially intelligent people occupy all of the best paid and most powerful positions in society. Social manipulation is the most valued kind of intelligence in America, far more than academic intelligence.
Social intelligence is how you capture all of the added value of a trade, leaving none for the other guy. But you have to generate value in the first place, otherwise you can use social intelligence only for theft.
Exactly, it's useful for theft. Taking the value other people produce is the whole benefit of social intelligence. If you can convince someone that a scam is a good deal, you don't need to create any value at all. This is the origin of, among others, the political class.
>Taking the value other people produce is the whole benefit of social intelligence.
This is myopic almost to the point of satire. You really can't think of a single other benefit of social intelligence?
Of course it has other benefits. The context of the conversation was in terms of advancement in society,
The question was not about if being manipulative socially later in life is not a benefit. Of course it is a benefit.
But you get graded based on your ability to read, write, do math, memorize data points. Not on your ability to lie to your teacher in a believable manner.
You may excel later in life, but it's not like you can enter Yale because you can manipulate people.
You also need a certain level of other intelligence to properly manipulate people, or at least a certain level of self narcissism.
I mean you kind of proved my point, perhaps we should be teaching/discussing social skills.
General intelligence and social intelligence are correlated, which makes discussion difficult. Yale's a good example, though. Applicants need a base level of academic achievement to get in, but it's not actually that high. They didn't even require test scores for the last few years. If that were the main criterion, the whole school would be East Asian. Instead, what matters is marketing yourself. Knowing people, or building a narrative the admissions committee is looking for. Social intelligence.
I completely agree that social skills should be emphasized in school-not to reward the people who are already adept, but to impress on the others that they're the primary determinant of success.
> Social manipulation is the most valued kind of intelligence in America
It's incorrect to think that's limited to America. Humans are mostly powerless against the charm of narcissists and other sociopaths.
You see it over and over throughout human history all over the world.
One thing that always strikes me in assessments of intelligence in young children (specially in comparisons with animals) is that they focus on what children can do, where as the really remarkable thing about young children is how fast they can learn.
I think society highly values fast learners.
People put it on applications all the time.
In adults, certainly.
In things like the study in the article, and in young children in general, not really.
Some languages are supposed to be very difficult & mentally taxing to learn, because they have many conjugations. But a native speaker with very low intelligence (however you measure it) has zero trouble conjugating it all correctly.
> TIL Psychologist László Polgár theorized that any child could become a genius in a chosen field with early training. As an experiment, he trained his daughters in chess from age 4. All three went on to become chess prodigies, and the youngest, Judit, is considered the best female player in history
https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/1d9gjeh/til_psycholo...
There was a 3-part BBC documentary called "My Brilliant Brain" with one that featured Susan, who was the oldest and is today one of the best live chess commentators in the world. The doc talks about her father's theory and practice. His most important understanding was that the child must choose the endeavor of their own free will, and then he merely helped them optimize their learning curve.
Susan has a great quote about showing up to a men's chess club, when she was still young. She said, "I don't think I ever beat a healthy man." Because they were always not feeling well, or whatever lame excuse they conjured up.
The other two parts of the series are on different topics, but are also interesting, but Susan's is our favorite, and I got them long before our son started chess.
And Laszlo's book on chess problems is on my son's bookshelf. It has more than 5000 "problems, combinations, and games". It's been replaced by chess.com's and lichess's puzzle games, but it is still the reference book on chess puzzles, to my understanding.
The problem there is that just because you can do it doesn't mean it's good for them. I have two cousins who were trained at playing classical instruments from extremely young age(like 2 years old), one of them went on to become a very successful and well known violinist, but......she hates it. She will be the first one to say that the constant almost daily lessons were an absolute nightmare and that she's had no childhood because of it, and it also locked her into being a violinist despite whatever else she might have wanted to do.
Great "achievement" for the parents, but I wouldn't personally do that to my child.
The part of the Polgár story that amazes me the most is that all three daughters showed enough interest and engagement in chess for the experiment to work so successfully. Because with my own children, I’ve seen again and again that you can encourage and expose them to certain interests, but they’re their own people - many of the things I exposed them to and tried to get them excited about just weren’t interesting to them.
And that’s completely fine. I was never forceful about it and they have their own deep interests in things that I just never got into or understood. I just find it surprising that in some families, these exceptional skills and interests are so readily passed from one generation to the next.
anybody who has spent time with kids can attest to this
i have a 2.5 year old and its extremely interesting just how much her thinking is clearly 'logical', but it operates in what i like to call 'toddler logic'.
If you ask kids questions, and really listen, their lines of thinking are very clearly following an internal logic. It just isnt one that is entirely compatible with 'adult' reasoning - unless the adult in the room intentionally chooses to communicate in 'toddler logic' operators. Most adults are, sadly and imo, not very good at this!
The logic is sound, but all logic depends on the initial premises put forth.
I can concoct some flawless chain of logic leading to some conclusion but it’s all for naught if the premises it is based on are invalid.
An intelligent listener can listen and find where the base misunderstanding is and teach from there. Teaching from the false conclusion is a mistake.
i dont think this is always true.
sometimes the chain of logic and premise is grounded in a different ontology entirely (this is what i am referring to as 'toddler logic' for shorthand). this doesn't invalidate the conclusions or chain of logic used to derive them, when you (adult) is using different ontological anchors, which leads to different conclusions.
being able to inhabit the Other's (toddler's) ontological world and navigate it with them helps sharpen their reasoning skills!
they can figure out the Adult Ontology stuff later and apply those reasoning skills then. It's important to let kids be kids sometimes :) Encouraging their conclusions, and building confidence in their reasoning abilities, these are important endeavors in their own right.
I’ve seen this often. My son is 3 and often tells us his reasoning: “we need to run for the bus because it doesn’t wait for us!”
He always says it like he isn't sure we know about buses yet making me think it’s hard to model others as separate minds with differing information until much older. But his modeling of the world logic is very solid. He can easily use multiple tools to reach high up snacks, or build complex block forts, or reason about what will happen “we will grow up and then go to kindergarten!”
Can you give some examples? Super interesting to me as someone with no children
I have one that happened about 30 minutes ago :)
My daughter who is 3 is only recently poddy-trained. She now knows to go to the bathroom next to her room. Before she was trained we had a "portable" toilet (think plastic bowl sitting in a toy-like toilet shell basically) she would occasionally use in her room.
Similarly we've recently trained her when she's done with eating to bring the plate to me or my wife to clean/put up (she can't reach any countertops).
Today she had to go and my wife was in the shower so she couldn't use her normal bathroom. She used her portable toilet, picked it up, and brought it to me to clean :).
This sort of "logic" happens all the time every day and I probably miss 90% of it but I definitely thought of it when I read your question.
My daughter has a number of stuffed animals, and she's attached to one in particular named Eloise.
Often, when we're having trouble persuading her to do something, I can tell her Eloise wants to do that thing. I'll use teeth brushing as an example.
Eloise, being an independent 'person' of sorts in my daughter's mind, accepts the premise that Eloise would want to brush her teeth, (we remind her, Eloise doesnt want cavities, and my daughter agrees with Eloise: cavities are bad!). So we go and pretend to brush Eloise's teeth in the bathroom. Once Eloise is done, my daughter is usually all too ready to brush her own teeth.
As one might imagine, this tactic would not work on most adults. but toddler logic ontology imbues her stuffed animals with a sort of pseudo-agency (sometimes daughter insists Eloise does NOT want to brush her teeth or whatever, but that doesnt happen often, funnily enough).
Two kids were like 1 and 3 and the older wanted a toy for himself, so he told the younger “hot food no touch”.
I blame the laws applying children for why this misconception is so widely spread. If companies hired children more people would realize how capable they are. Instead now they have to segregate and start their own companies or work for free where they won't coexist with adults. Adults have a superiority complex over children and don't want them to compete with them as it would shatter their ego.
My wife is a Montessori teacher. I showed this to her; she said that the attribute game described is used at the 2.5 year old level in her school.
So yes, I’d say people woefully underestimate the abilities of children.
And birds. And fish. And…
We seem to have a very very strong bias towards assuming less/no intelligence in anything that isn’t an adult human.
I disagree. People often anthropomorphise animals and ascribe intelligence to actions that are clearly only instinctive.
And people ascribe intelligence to Eliza, a 200-line Basic program.
I am unable to think of a single animal behavior popularly ascribed to intelligence but in fact explainable by rote instinct. Do you have an example?
OTOH there are plenty of animal behaviors that can only be explained by intelligence: seeing-eye dogs perform a task which is economically useful for humans yet far beyond the ability of AI (even if the robotics mech eng issues are resolved). But it also doesn't really make sense that one of my cats is "instinctually" able to understanding my words while the other cat is "instinctually" able to outsmart me when we play with toys. The more sensible explanation is cats are intelligent and intellectually diverse.
Squirrels burying acorns, "wily" foxes, beaver dams, migration, etc. etc. etc.
Kid's are underestimated all the time. Some personal anecdotes that I think show off that kids know more that we expect of them:
My daughter routinely remembered things, while 3 and 4, that happened a year and sometimes longer ago. She would bring them up, like "last time we were here, was before my last (2nd) birthday". Me: "wow, how do you remember that?"
My friend recalls being ~2yo and deducing how to move a chair and pull a drawer to reach the top of the clothes dresser. After climbing to the top, she recalls sitting, enjoying the view, not knowing how to get down, and crying for help.
My very earliest memory is before I was two. It involved an inflatable weighted balloon, the one's typically with a clown on it and if you bat it down, it rocks back upright. I saw one that was a friendly cop. I can recall several elements of the memory. I recall playing with one of those colorful wire sculpture things where you slide the blocks around like an abacus on drugs, went over to the the balloon cop, and thought to myself, "that is a good guy, why would you a good guy on a toy you hit? It should be a clown." Then I smacked it and went over to see my mom who was at the counter. Looking back, that feels like a lot of reasoning for a <2yo. Years later, when telling my mom that story for the first time, she said that the building where that was was for appointments we had when I was a year and a half old.
It is possible to talk to young children in a grown up way faster than people think, at least for those that do not have recent experience with toddlers.
My son is 2 1/2 and making sure we know he wants to do things his own way.
But if you take time to explain a situation like an adult he backs down eventually. Or, it could be I am just boring him to death and he gives in to shut me up.
OTOH adults reason worse than we think, practice suggests
A lot of my childhood memories are of being frustrated at how stupid adults seemed to think I was.
If you work with children, don't underestimate them.
Very likely.
And sometimes I am afraid we destroy it by laughing at them for it.
Recent example, someone I know:
Parent: you have to come home
Child: No
P: It's getting late
C: Go to bed
Of course it is hilarious, but the reasoning is absolutely on point.
I would like to be sympathetic to this, because it is true that as a child I was free to do what I pleased at "bedtime" the rule being that I may not leave my room or disturb my parents, so e.g. reading until daylight is fine, playing music is not, but whether I'm "in bed" let alone "asleep" is on me. In fact of course almost always I would end up asleep, maybe not exactly when I "should" be asleep, but likely as soon as you'd end up getting a reluctant child to actually sleep if you're trying to enforce that.
However, we know lots of children left to their own devices get over-tired, they should sleep but they don't and then they're much worse for it the next day. So in practice most parents are doing the right thing by insisting that children should sleep when they were "supposed" to rather than leaving them to their own devices as mine did.
I have a friend who is an angry drunk. The sort of person who door staff may need to kick out of a bar before they start a fight. In his 20s and 30s, loud arguments about nothing of consequence and even occasional violence were a likely end to a previously enjoyable evening. But although he's still an angry drunk he eventually got good enough at understanding his own emotional state that by his 40s he would just leave. Instead of "We need to all go home or J might kick off" it's "Bye J, see you next week" because he's just realised he feels angry about nothing and he has ordered himself a ride home and is leaving, no fuss.
This ability to self-regulate is often not something children are good at, but it's important. There's a difference between reasoning that if you eat the whole cake you'll feel bad and not eating the whole cake because you'll feel bad
The reasoning is perfectly solid and how this conversation should go between two adults. When children talk about wanting to be adults, this is a large part of what they mean: adults are allowed to apply rules and logic consistently and fairly. If children do it they are called insolent and disrepectful
Kids don't apply logic or rules consistently nor fairly. They frequently misinterpret them on purpose and evaluate them in spectacularly unfair ways.
Also, it actually make sense to want the kid to go to sleep sooner then adults and also to go home for dinner or whatever.
Kids are more like lawyers than philosophers. They will argue the letter of the law and cite precedent if it is to their advantage, but avoid mentioning it if it's against them.
> it actually make sense to want the kid to go to sleep sooner then adults
Yes, but it isn't enough if you know that, the child has to know that, and actually agree with the reasons. If the reason is "young people need more sleep, you will be so tired tomorrow" you can make the child see that reason (let them stay up once, show the consequences, hope it doesn't backfire). You still get push back, but not for it being unfair. If the reason is that the parents want time for themselves then the child is right that it's unfair, and the better solution would be "alone time for everyone. You in your room, we in the living room, internet shuts off at 9". Similarly "we eat dinner together" is a fair rule as long as everyone is held to the same standard. You still get push back, but a fair rule is much easier to enforce than an unfair one.
I think part of the issue is that the child often knows that the adults reasoning is wrong or even deceptive, and as you point out that will feel unfair.
As a child, I often read until 2-3am, and was just fine the following day (wish I could do that now). Any actual enforced attempt at going to sleep would have felt unfair because it'd have been earlier than I needed.
What my parents actually cared about was that I was in my room, and that I got up without being cranky or letting it affect school the following day.
It's much easier to "sell" the child on that, by being honest about wanting quiet time and wanting to make sure the child isn't too tired, than convincing them a bedtime they will have secretly violated multiple times without feeling too tired is reasonable.
So from pretty early, my "bedtime" was "alone time" as you suggest, with the proviso that if I couldn't get up without being prodded in the morning that was evidence I was taking the piss, and the consequence would be tightening up of the actual bedtime for a while. That felt fair, and honest, and the rules were understandable, and meant I often stayed up way later than my parents would have thought was reasonable, but since it worked, it was fine, and I self-regulated.
Yea, I think that "self-regulation" is one of the most important things we should be encouraging kids to learn and feel confident in.
Kids are spectacularly good at recognizing what’s unfair to them, just not so much at recognizing what’s unfair to others
> just not so much at recognizing what’s unfair to others
Or just don't care lol. Children love pushing boundaries. Sometimes it's good (learning a sport, improving a skill, taking on the bigger, scarier feature at the playground) and sometimes it's annoying (wanting more ice cream, staying up late, etc...). I'm convinced it's just part of growing up.
They'll often recognise it just fine if the reasoning is spelled out. They can usually understand the logic, but might struggle to come up with all the steps by themselves.
This depends on the kid.
I guess that laughter provides a lot of context that helps learning.
Whenever I laugh in such situations I make sure to point out that my child was right.
It's also a common communications failure, in that you'll do far better not just with children, but with adults to, if you provide a reason instead of assuming that the other party know why you're making the request you're making.
Instead you're inviting pattern matching - the child will have been told to go to bed because it is late, so it's a natural statement to make if you don't understand why the parent is stating it.
Explain the steps, and the consequence of failure in a way that the child can relate to, and you're likely to get a very different reaction("come home, because it's late and you need to go to bed so you're not too tired to play tomorrow").
But really, adding a "because ..." tends to improve compliance even when the reasoning isn't very sound, and even with adults. It's scarily effective as long as the ask isn't too great.
Lots of people saying that this is completely obvious. I'm not so sure, but the article summary is not much help there - we are almost at the end when the researcher explains what she claims the advance is. A better article would start by explaining the advance, diving deeper into it, and then following up with how she showed this. Something to think about when we're trying to communicate complex ideas.
Lots of happy examples in this thread. Let me add mine.
My 3 year old vastly prefers complex carnatic music to cocomelon (and its ilk). He can listen to a 15 minute, intricate song without losing interest, and will ask for it in a loop. Children can handle a lot more complexity than we generally assume.
Why on earth would you think kids are bad at reasoning? Early on we lack experience necessary for as much reliance on derivative thinking.
I think their biggest enemy is distorted valuation/importance. Like sweets and toys could easily "sway" reasoning.
I agree with the conclusion but I’m confused about the study…
It sounds like the author effectively spent a day at a children’s museum grocery exhibit and wrote a paper about it.
Is there more to the underlying paper than the summary suggests?
Anyone who has watched a 4-year-old for any length of time would conclude that at least some of them are capable of classification.
Just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's not worth investigating.
And there are many people who believe that children under 7 can't truly reason, so it's not even as obvious as it seems.
I agree that it's worth investigating...I was just expecting more detailed analysis from an academic paper. The story linked basically says "3-5 year-olds can classify stuff into groups."
For what it's worth, I have a 2- and 5-year-old, so I'd love to know more about how their brains are developing.
I've enjoyed the work of Laura Schulz[1] (MIT).
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=%22...
Just to clarify the slightly ambiguous title, it's that preschoolers can reason better than some adults thought they can, and not (as I first thought) that they can reason better than how we adults do our own thinking.
Sorry for sounding ornery, but it's plainly obvious to every parent I've interacted with that most preschool kids have well developed categorization skills for their toys, coloring objects, etc.
This will be helpful to learn from, unsure how parents might feel if they need a study to validate what they have suspected in their lives.
Little humans seem to get smarter from generation to generation.
Better than scientists think they could reason. Scientists also believe cats can't recognize themselves in a mirror. Observational studies are extremely error prone.
They aren’t really scientists though, they are social “scientists”. I.E. someone that feels the need to validate their pseudo science as actual science in order to fake credibility.
While watching the Apollo 11 documentary with my four year old, he asked about the "beep beep" alarm during the landing. I explained that it was the low-fuel alarm.
He gasped in shock and exclaimed: "How will they get back home to Earth?"
That was impressive enough, but then he concocted a rescue mission where a rocket would rendezvous with them and refuel their ship so that they could get home.
That's pretty much the current NASA plan for humanity's return to the Moon!
But are they conscious?
I think this is a good satirical comment, pointing out all the "water is wet" studies about animal consciousness.
Thank you for this. It is appreciated by me, if no one else.
were you?
Maybe they are just a clump of cells.
The title is somewhat unfortunate.
What distresses me about all this is that we are handling children like if they were a separate species....just use your memory! Of course they can reason better than we think, did everyone forget making plans and having chats with other preschoolers as a preschooler? Everyone has been one! No exceptions! And yet we act like if kids were a separate state of matter or something.
This strange mental separation can only bring in bad results.
I always suspected those researchers weren't so bright.
;-)
Getting things like this clarified can be a challenge.
I've a hobby interest in exploring what science education might look like if we could apply much greater expertise. For example, K-1 does descriptive material properties, but it's ad hoc and crufty. Happily, industry has some nicer descriptive ontologies. So what might it look like to adapt those instead? And how might that then be leveraged, to teach other things better?
Now rheological quasi-properties provide a way to quantify dynamic material properties. Like sticky, squishy, slimy, ...-y. Which raises the obvious question: Could we do Ashby charts[1], xkcd-ishly simple and discrete, in K-1? Like, foods sticky vs slimy?
Well, 2D sort-into-piles is a K thing, with axes ordered and categorical. But... having both axis ordered is very rare. Button number-of-holes vs color, sure. But number-of-holes vs number-of-sides, strangely not. So is this a real developmental bottleneck? Or just the commonplace "we teach it, but we don't really use it, so there's little incentive to teach it well"? Good question - I've found it hard to get feedback like that.
I wish there was an HN-like community, with education researchers and master teachers.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=ashby+charts
[flagged]
Would be nice. Someone should slam it.