I believe in the creative power of boredom. Boredom and lack of distractions amongst kids create the most creative environment and nurture real interest and exploration.
Today's kids are oversaturated with distractions and their lives are fully planned around activities. So they live according to templates, but not according to their own motivators.
Then again, having a child myself (10 months old) I have noticed many parents have so many activities and things planned themselves that they distract their children (read consume content on iPads) in order to pacify them. It's a circle.
I have to agree with this. I grew up in a village (pop < 250) in the mountains, and those were some of the most creative years of my life. When the entire town jokes that watching grass grow or paint dry is a fun thing to do in summer, you quickly learn to entertain yourself in novel ways.
As a side note, one other thing I think this has done is make me comfortable with silence. During the summer break when I would do long camping trips, sometimes I could go days without speaking, and I enjoyed it. Now I see people all around who seem to need and want something going on at all times. Since I no longer live in the mountains, meditation outside helps assuage my need for silence and solitude, but I am considering building an isolation tank.
On subject, I agree that freedom begets creativity. I love that I could mark a place on the forest service map, list my supplies, and say "if Im not back by sundown on day 3, then call the forest service". Thats a level of independence and freedom that was encouraged in my family that has served me well in many areas since.
Go rent an isolation tank, as someone who built one.
They take up a lot of space, changing water, filling with epson salts, etc is a not fun.
But maybe there are better systems nowadays, I built mine in the 80s.
I had to move it once, I had a friend who owned a herse and we loaded it on top. Must have looked like we were carrying the coffin of a 1500 pound man.
I posted almost exactly the same comment back in November.
I think boredom and unstructured time without any parents around was one of the most important parts of my own childhood.
Kids are so good at entertaining themselves with basically nothing! Its uncomfortable for kids to be bored but they quickly learn the entertain themselves, especially when around other kids. Its actually kind of amazing.
They never learn this skill if they aren't given the chance.
Scott Adams (Dilbert guy) says that boredom is what gave him his creativity.
We actively did this with our kid from the start. We didn't play with her that much, she figured out how to entertain herself perfectly fine. (We didn't ignore her, before someone reads too much into it.) Just don't "train" the child into expecting that entertainment is produced by a third party at all times and they'll figure out to keep themselves happy.
Now, at age 3, she can be in the back seat for a 1-1.5 hour car trip WITHOUT ANY ENTERTAINMENT WHATSOEVER. Just looking out the window thinking, asking questions about stuff she sees, maybe singing something. No DVD player, books, game consoles, phones or anything.
100% agreement. I can't get over how valuable boredom was for me and my sibilings growing up, and how challenging it is to give my kids any kind of similar value/opportunity.
I'd love to know if anyone has seen research, books, or articles on this (pm me).
From its inception in 1942 until 1994, the search recognized more than 2000 precocious teenagers as finalists. But just 1 percent ended up making the National Academy of Sciences, and just eight have won Nobel Prizes.
Just eight have won Nobel Prizes? What a bunch of dunces. But wait, only 870 people have ever won a Nobel Prize. So these numbskulls have only managed to win 1% of all Nobel Prizes ever.
If your parenting standard is "Nobel Prize or the gutter" there's a serious problem.
>So having fewer rules supposedly leads to more creative children, but do those kids do well later in life?
Is having no rules a steadfast rule? Chew on that one for a while :)
And while you're thinking about that, realize that most children growing up in poor environments don't have many rules to follow. Few people would consider poor communities as bastions of creativity (not to say there isn't creative things happening in these communities, just they are not perceived that way).
The problem with this article and others like it is the subjects - children - are not one thing in a vacuum. Some children will thrive in a structureless home life. But most won't. Some children will thrive with rigid structure. But most won't. So what's the answer? It depends on the kid. From my experience, most children need some sort of structure in their lives. They simply don't have the faculties to deal with the complexity of how life is today. That's what the parent is for. But to go overboard with rules generally doesn't work very well either.
I feel that raising your child like so (having fewer rules) in fact parallels doing well later in life. The measure of success, especially here on hacker news, feels heavily skewed towards making money, success in the Silicon Valley, etc. But while some creative lifestyles may not make enough money (poets, writers, artists) I would argue that they would end up living more fulfilling lives, following their intrinsic motivations rather than any socially constructed notion of success.
My point was children, in the abstract, are easy to overgeneralize. In reality, it's difficult to say how any given child will react to any given stimuli. Few rules might work for one child but not the next...and there is no rhyme or reason to it.
Children are complicated things. Just as adults are complicated things.
In raising my own child in this manner, I am not so much fostering creativity, but not suppressing the person who is already there. We should enable everyone to be the best possible person. We raise or lower all of those around us.
And also consider people who win a science Nobel tend to be pretty old. Suppose you have to be ~55 or so to win one, you'd have to be born latest in ~1960, probably doing the contest in the late 1970s. And I would guess the field of finalists got bigger as the contest got older.
You may have to be 55 or so; but the work was done 20 years ago.
"What's more, after 1985 about 60% of physics, 52% of chemistry, and 49% of medicine prizes were awarded following a post-discovery delay of more than 20 years."
Yeah, Bill Gates never won the Nobel prize. Neither did Steve Jobs. Or Donald Trump for that matter.
Look carefully at a normal curve. If your kid is slightly above average, say C+, then they are doing better than 50% of the poulation. That is already pretty good.
By all means, encourage and assist them to do better than that, but lay off the judgements. A Happy kid who runs a daycare center in the city, is someone that you should be proud of, because believe me, society in general is proud of people like that and does not judge them because they failed to win a Nobel prize.
If your kid can wake up every morning and honestly say, every day in every way I am getting better and better and better, then you are a superlative parent.
Yes! I was a C student. I had it drummed into me that wasn't good enough. It took me many years to realise I am good enough and to work past all that negative re-enforcement that was thrown at me every day for several years. Now I have a great job, a lovely wife and two beautiful children. I live in a lovely house in west London. I am financially independent and I love going to work every morning. If that isn't "good enough" then god knows what is!
They mention just 1% have won Nobel Prizes, and then in the next sentence say "For every Lisa Randall who revolutionizes theoretical physics, there are many dozens who fall far short of their potential."
Lisa Randall didn't win a Nobel Prize in physics (yet), though she is in he National Academy of Sciences. So I guess you must have one or the other honour to be judged a success.
Meanwhile her collaborator Raman Sundrum (of the Randall-Sundrum model, which Lisa Randall is most famous for) is neither a Nobel laureate nor on the National Academy of Sciences.
But one day if he does win the Nobel, his Success status changes overnight?
i dont have kids but, .4% rate of winning the nobel prize is way better than the 0.00000124% rate of the rest of the world. And "stepping back" may lead to much less success than pushing a kid to practice and i'd take that risk of .4% creativity vs the rest of the population.
Similar to how people mention the Terman study didn't enrol two future Nobelists because they just barely missed the cutoff and so this proves IQ tests are bunk.
It would have been much better to cite the SMPY longitudinal results for a meaningful idea of how child prodigies fare.
I scanned it, and it seems to suggest that IQ 'is kind of bunk' - that it's more effective to evaluate mathematical reasoning, alone.
But, what I find more interesting is that not all mathematically precocious achieve, and very many achievers were not mathematically precocious. So, what's going on in the middle?
It's cool to see that 2000 kids out of 400M were high achievers, but how do we get, say, 1M high achievers out of the next 400M?
I took their achievement percentages (# of individuals in top positions 40 years later), and did some rough calculations.
The SMPY cohorts seemed to perform much better than if one had randomly selected a 'top %1' individual from the total U.S. population. So, either the longitudinal study had an effect on the cohorts, or their original sampling method was biased.
By filtering out the 399M and telling them they suck (eg on standard test) so they should not even try. Then you'll have 1M of post traumatic survivors to label as high achievers.
Spurious cherry-picked statistics. I'm pretty sure most Westinghouse / Intel winners are doing exceptionally well, being in the top 1-10% of the society. A couple of such articles I'm reminded of:
All 8 of those Nobel Prizes were won by individuals who were finalists in 1968 or earlier. So for half of the years in that date range, not a single finalist has been awarded a Nobel Prize. Since 3 of those Nobel Prizes have been in the last 15 years, it is likely too early to tell what the final percentage of Nobel Laureates is among those 2000 finalists.
I see these sort of parents mostly as scumbags that accomplish little on their own and pass the burden of their own failings to their kids. Parents should expect at most their kids to achieve their level of success and no more. That's reasonable expectation. Anything more than that is a lottery and a fluke.
It's actually unreasonable for parents these days to expect that kids will achieve their own level of success, because the distribution of rewards in society now fall so much more disproportionally to the handful at the very top of any field than they did in their parent's generation, and the generation before that.
"Nobel prize or the gutter" is merely a logical conclusion in a world where only the very best at anything are valued.
I disagree. It's the same. Its just that too many people expect more of the reward, for less of the work and never realized just how much work it actually took to achieve these rewards in the first place.
I see it all the time with people trying to start businesses. They see the success stories and want a rich and profitable company in less than a year.
I believe it's the result of perceived instant gratification on the Internet and from the idea that started in the early 90s that 'everyone needs a trophy', which I saw first-hand.
I’ve met so many college graduates that either want a six-figure income right out of school, a management position within 6 months, or a flex schedule at every job. It's not just a want, they feel entitled to it.
It's why Bernie Sanders is so popular among the youth: he's promising many rewards without any of the work.
That's anecdotal at best. According to a good deal I've read, the "new generation" actually does have quite a few problems previous generations never had to deal with. My father was able to buy his parents house after a few years of work. Anecdotally, I've been working full time and going to school and I can't even put much of a dent in my loans. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/01/09/the_mos...
My parents are smart people with degrees from public land-grant universities but they are not world-class at anything. They had stable, good-paying jobs with proper pensions, and could easily afford to buy a home big enough for a family. It cost about twice their annual income.
They "won the lottery" with me in that I had an innate interest in technology and got into computers and networks in the mid 1980s. I ended up at a public land-grant college, but even if I hadn't, I happened to have the right skills at the right time to ride the .com boom and acquire experience despite my lack of pedigree (and 20 years on, it no longer matters what school I went to.) I busted ass and continue to do so, but I'm not blind to my fortune. And yet, I do not and have never had a pension, and I have always spent 2-4x the fraction of my income on housing than my parents did, for worse housing. Most of my generation was not so lucky as me, but at least they were about to get jobs and build a resume.
My kids are young and if they're just as smart and hard-working as me, they're fucked. The ladder has been pulled up, and pedigree is a lot more important starting out now than it was when I was younger. (I know, I've been a hiring manager for years - and in technology which is a MUCH more egalitarian field than most due to demand.) To give my kids an advantage I've moved to a small country in Western Europe so they can grow up multilingual and have cultural exposure that might make them attractive to elite schools in the event that we've "won the lottery" with their natural abilities. And if they don't, if nothing else, they have access to less expensive housing, education and health care, and live in a society that's much more egalitarian than the US - one that might give them a shot at "just a living" without exposure to the worst predatory aspects of American poverty.
All this is to say, no, things aren't the same. Yes, one still has to work very hard to be the best (one also must be very lucky to be the very best.) The difference is, there was once "good enough to make a decent living" and now, not so much. This isn't about meritocracy, this is about the distribution of reward (across the spectrum of "merit" if you like.)
I dunno how you define "without any of the work" but I see plenty of young people graduating college with poor opportunities. Unemployment for 20-24 year olds is over 9%. The average student graduating with a 4-year degree from a public non-profit school has about $30k in debt. $100k is high, but they do need to cover that debt. They need to make more (adjusted for inflation) than their parents did at that age because their parents weren't saddled with all that debt. Instead they're sitting at 9% unemployment. Some degree programs are more rigorous than others but it seems like the current generation put in 4 years of strong work. Their parents generation didn't do that. And it wasn't the recipe for success they were told it would be.
>Its just that too many people expect more of the reward, for less of the work and never realized just how much work it actually took to achieve these rewards in the first place.
Businesses actively look for more work for less reward. I'm not sure why the other side shouldn't counter that.
Yes they will ask for those things and it's your job as a business to tell them no. They can reduce their demands or go someplace else.
I think wages have been flat anyway, so why wouldn't you expect some sort of push back when people start realizing that?
>> It's actually unreasonable for parents these days to expect that kids will achieve their own level of success, because the distribution of rewards in society now fall so much more disproportionally to the handful at the very top of any field than they did in their parent's generation, and the generation before that.
"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's
longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to
make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bow from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrow may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable." * - "The Prophet" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951) p.17-18.
Most parents that enforce their own ideals and values on their children are narcissistic. They either do not love their children or have so poor an understanding of love itself that they cannot love properly.
+1 for the apt, beautiful quote
-1 for the blanket over-generalization
I'm a loving father of two brilliant girls (7 and 9), and while I strive to be a "stable bow", parenting is an ongoing, dynamic and constantly-evolving relationship. And I'll never apologize for trying to instill them with my most deeply-held values and ideals. I try to do so by living and demonstrating these values, and encouraging them to discover their merits for themselves. It's not about merely enforcing rules. But until you find yourself responsible for another human being's very life, making assertions about the nature of parenthood is futile.
Agreed...I told my 4 children that their mother and I were guided by two principles:
1} That we wanted them to become a "good" person...we let them puzzle out what a "good" person was, to the extent possible, tried to model the behavior we hoped for, and pointed out obvious examples of good behavior in everyday life...
2} That we wished them a "happy" life...to that end we encouraged any interests they expressed, and did our best to share in the joys they discovered for themselves...
We exposed them to as many new opportunities and interests as possible, then let them choose which they would like to repeat...this part was by far the most difficult because of varied interests...
When there were disagreements between them--sibling rivalry--we encouraged them to solve problems themselves...can't count the number of times we said things like, "You both want to sit in that chair at the same time, but that's not possible...how can you solve this problem?"
Parenting is likely the most difficult job on the plant...so far everything seems to be on track...
I understand your point. It's a dynamic, lifelong occupation that demands your whole and its demands change with its stages.
However, I was not really over-generalizing. I wrote "Most parents..."
I'd encourage you to not make stark black-and-white statements about parenting, or judgements about parents who are doing it differently. I certainly wouldn't go about dismissing a parent's love for their child.
In this case, sure, there's almost certainly some children who should be left to develop their own ideals and values as part of maximizing their own potential and finding their own path. There are a whole lot more children who need to be taught some ideals and values, or they'll grow up to be an adult completely without them, and society will be poorer for it. Determining which group any particular child belongs to is the primary caregiver's job, not yours.
My comment was not a blanket generalization the word "Most..." tells.
I do not imply that one should leave the child without values but that one should let the child pick up these values in a more natural, guided learning, not in a coerced acceptance of unwritten standards.
Let the parents be present to guide them in picking up the right values without forcing anything on them. Let them know the reason why something is more acceptable; don't tell them it's just acceptable and must be followed.
It's pretty clear that the groups being referred to are children who can be left to develop themselves and children who need more guidance, as outlined in the beginning of that paragraph.
People who do not give values and ideals to their children leave a vacuum for the culture to fill, which largely speaking consists of:
The State: eg "Hey kid, fight this war!"
The Media: eg "Hey kid, hate today's designated weirdos!"
The Corporations: eg "Hey kid, buy this crap!"
The Usurers: eg "Hey kid, enslave yourself in debt!"
None of which have a personal relationship with the child or a vested interest in their well being. You may disagree with another parent's values, but at the very least (on average) that other parent is at least sincere and cares about their own kid.
And the perennial complaint "but what if someone teaches their kids BAD values" will never be solved. Plenty of parents probably think YOU'RE teaching your own kids poisonous lies just as damaging as you perceive them to be doing. That's just life.
I agree "that's just life". And many parents who think you're doing it wrong believe they're doing it right - by trying to make their parents achieve the dreams they left unfulfilled. That's narcissism.
I do not imply that one should leave the child without values but that one should let the child pick up these values in a more natural, guided learning, not in a coerced acceptance of unwritten standards.
Let the parents be present to guide them in picking up the right values without forcing anything on them. Let them know the reason why something is more acceptable; don't tell them it's just acceptable and must be followed.
Life and human behavior is dynamic so the right way varies with individuals.
You have a hidden assumption that the values and ideals of the parents would be different than the State/Media/Corporations/Usurers/Society etc. That might be a shaky assumption to put your argument on.
I don't have that assumption; plenty of people share the values of their surrounding culture. My point is that parents have a direct and specific interest in caring about their specific kids, but the strong powerful influencers out there (advertisers, media, propagandists, politicians) do not.
Children are more likely to be perceived as an end in themselves to their own parents, and as simply a means to an end by these other entities.
Also: everyone talking about raising their kids with the ideals of critical thinking and of picking their own values: that's still a value that's apparently important enough for you to instill in your child that you went to great lengths to instill it. Something tells me you wouldn't be happy with them embracing an opposing value, like, say, blind adherence to authority figures, and believing everything they read, and letting other people browbeat them and tell them what to do with their lives.
Most children learn a lot of habits and values by unconsciously picking them up off their parents. They learn from your actions what is correct and incorrect behavior without you having to directly teach it. Good behaviour is comprised of the union of two sets: behaviour that you allow, and behaviour that you partake in. If these sets overlap then you can be pretty sure that your child will learn 'good behaviour' as defined by you.
I would also add that many beneficial social movements favouring equality among humans have been contested by adults who were brought up to share their parents' values. I hesitate to say that most children do not care about colour or sexuality until they are taught by their parents that differences are bad, or see their parents reactions to people who are 'different'.
That's true. Much of their behaviors also seem to come pre-written on their minds.
Stephen Pinker talks about it in his book "The Blank Slate - a Modern Denial of Human Nature".
Most of parents' efforts seem to leave little impression on the child's nature in the long run. Even the forcefully imparted moral values are held not as innate nature but as second nature which can either break under societal pressure or throw the child into confusion.
So far, you have gone deeper than what I wrote to correctly guess what I intended. Thanks.
I may reword my post to be more context specific. Or, maybe, I'll make a new article explaining my stance in the context I intend.
> Most parents that enforce their own ideals and values on their children are narcissistic.
Which I took to mean that they don't agree with enforcing rules (which come from values) on children. I think if you have children, you know that this just won't work. Without rules and boundaries, kids will literally kill themselves.
That's quite true. I now see where the problem comes from. I did not apply the right words to convey my intended message. You can blame me for that.
The topic is about raising creative children and I actually intended to criticize imposing ideals and ambitions on children, or forcing them to a religion or cultural practice that is just preferred by the parents but not generally true or acceptable.
For example, I have severally witnessed parents coercing their children to take up a career in a particular field without regard to the children's strengths and weaknesses, just because the said fields are appealing to the parents. Some I've seen even threatened to discontinue the children's upkeep should they dissent.
I have also seen parents become alienated from their children due to religious differences: the child prefers to make his life more about his service to society through his career but his parents want him to be more religious and devout. Sometimes the parents go against any form of reasoning that conflicts with the tenets of their religion.
Such cases are the intended targets of my original comment and the quote I added.
Sorry for the confusion.
That should be "don't enforce on your children any values".
I mean to criticize virulently demanding that one's children follow a predetermined set of values because their parents hold them to be true, especially when those values are mostly cultural assumptions.
The way you describe 'love' there seems romanticized, and it seems odd that you suggest that there is a 'proper' way to love. That seems to me like suggesting there's a "proper" way to be angry. It's an emotion. You might suggest that anger needs to be well-managed to avoid destructiveness, but you wouldn't speak of 'the proper way' to be angry.
Of course there is a proper way to love - to put the interest and development of the loved person in perspective always. That becomes complex as you learn to love every other person in whose life you're invested, and to love humanity in general. The complexity increases as you factor yourself into the whole picture by loving yourself.
However, the 'activity of loving' does not occur in those distinct parts sequentially but simultaneously: they all form the activity.
Love is not so much an emotion as it is a decision, an activity. It is work in itself, not a feeling. Really, love starts when the feeling diminishes in the face of reality.
This quote only reveals a complete and utter lack of understanding of parenting and child development. I cannot imagine anyone who thinks this to be "beautiful" being a parent or a good one if they are. This quote, and the ideology behind it, are nothing less than disgusting.
The parent's job is to lay down a solid foundation onto which a person will be constructed. In some cases the parent is a filter. For example, the vast majority of Muslims are good people, no different from anyone else. Good parenting is what made these children immune to the pulls of derranged radical elements in that culture. Good parenting is what ensures the vast majority of those children cannot be swayed away from being good decent human beings.
That's just one example. Many more in history. There's a reason for which all cults try to get to children as early as possible. Parents are the only line of defense.
The vast majority of Muslims are good people due to good parenting. I guess the good parents 'did not force' the deranged radical elements of the surrounding culture on the children.
Most victims of such sick cultures acquire it helplessly: some parent figure forced it on them in the guise of something - maybe tradition, maybe religion.
Vast majority of muslims are not really surrounded by a sick culture as you imagine from outside or what you watch on TV. For example, Turkey is a 70M country. There are surely sick (or radical) religious sub-cultures in Turkey but I don't think they are more than 5% of the population. Most people are nice people trying to have a happy life. Not much different from American people. And they would not turn into suicide bombers even without good parents.
The statement doesn't mean you have no guardianship of your children. You do but not an ownership of their future.
The next statement, "They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself", explains that, and so does the rest of the quote.
I realize we have almost taken the quote out of its context. It talks about the children's future - their dreams and aspirations.
Empathy is the highest form of understanding. When raising a child, i would certainly start there.
That's all that is needed from a parent: genuine, and fully embodied empathy.
Backing off is not the answer. Neither is controlling. Engaging empathically is all that we as parents need to do. There are two concepts here: engagement And empathy.
True empathy is easier to achieve in parent->child relationship than any other kind of relationship.
Engage empathically. The child will lead their own growth as a conversation with you, the parent, and their environment. So listening deeply (beneath the words and behavior) to the child is the first order of business, not backing off.
Parengs should spend time being with their kids rather than take time away from their kids to write crappy articles or comment on HN (An advise that I should take, too, obviouslh :)
Empathy is always a good place to start; and I generally agree with what you've said. However...
> True empathy is easier to achieve in parent->child relationship than any other kind of relationship.
I disagree with the above statement. Empathy is easiest when attachments are fewest. This does not describe the typical parent-child relationship. I think parent->child empathy may be easy for many because they are very much like their children and their children are going through very similar experiences to their own. I, on the other hand, have lead a very different life than the life my child is very fortunate to be living. I am fortunate my child is similar to me in many aspects so I do get glimpses of understanding; but my child is also very different from me so it is not always easy.
Not to toot my own horn, but people have praised me for both my empathy towards others and my parenting skills. I work very hard at being a good parent. I am very attentive. I listen. I consult. I read. I think, and I act. But I find empathy to be probably most difficult in this relationship than in any other I've had.
I too think you're a very good parent because you are engaging with the goal of arriving af empathy, no matter how hard may be. That's the key I suppose, not how hard or easy it is. Thanks.
> They become doctors who heal their patients without fighting to fix the broken medical system or lawyers who defend clients on unfair charges but do not try to transform the laws themselves.
The author assumes many parents intend their children to be pioneers in their field. Despite the memes, many asian parents largely steer their children to conservative paths: work hard, risk little, and grow steady wealth. The child may not become a household name, but they are unlikely to end up bankrupt either and the parents are content for the child to securely occupy the upper-middle class. There's not really a push for the child to be "the next Steve Jobs" so long as they get enough ammo to 1-up the local parents at the next social.
Yeah, that sentence made me cringe. If they become good doctors that's already a massive win for our society and for them, but that sentence make it sound like they're losers.
Yes, I should specify east asian. By my perception at least Indian asians have a more entrepreneurial spirit and I see more of them as founders. I admire that, and I'd be interested to hear how their upbringing differs, ie, what ways they were encouraged, pressures, values.
Creative people tend to set their own goals. Winning Nobel Prizes or revolutionizing a field might not be what they want out of life. A 'boring' day job that supports the family can be the perfect tool to let you spend the rest of your time on hobbies and passions.
I am an underachiever in my career, to be sure. But I have made a lot of art, climbed many mountains, hiked what seems like every trail in Colorado, and learned a few crafts, while also maintaining a marriage and raising a family. I'm happy with my life, no matter what the world thinks of it.
I don't even want anymore for my kids to win Nobel prizes or the equivalent in other fields. If it becomes their passion, sure, I'll support them. But I won't push them to be the absolute best, or wathever it is that tiger parents supposedly are doing to make their kids geniuses or CEOs. I'm pretty sure I don't even want that life for them, as the CEOs and the geniuses I've met either led very stressful lives or were downright assholes (but I'm sure there are many exceptions). I found out, soon after my first one was born (I have two), that all I wish for them is: a happy and meaningful life, health, and that they have a good heart. If they never amount to nothing money/carrer wise, well, so what?
I think genetics is a big confounding variable here. If creative parents enforce fewer rules and creative parents have creative children, creative children will have fewer rules even if having fewer rules has nothing to do with creativity. In this scenario, if some atypical creative parents enforce many rules their children will still be creative, and backing off won't help your children if you are not creative.
The argument that this article makes is somewhat muddled, but if I'm understanding correctly: child prodigies don't end up advancing their fields to the extent that their early talent might suggest because by and large they're not original/creative, which is because they learned at an early age to conform to well-defined standards of success instead of pushing the envelope. So we get "excellent sheep," or masters of using ordinary methods who still receive nice but ordinary results.
But 0.5% of the Westinghouse pool winning Nobels is still far better than the population average. What this article tells me is something that seems pretty obvious: that raw ability is correlated to being recognized by society for acts of genius, but so are other things, including both the "thinking out of the box"-ness that the author trumpets as well as entirely extrinsic and random factors (ie the Nobel committee likes you, your style of work or area of focus happens to align with or be amplified by a prevailing intellectual trend, etc). Prodigies don't always succeed in pushing the enelope because it's vanishingly unlikely for anyone to do so; they still do a sight better at it than most.
I worked in a lab with a professor who spent a portion of time training new graduate students to be creative again (tons of handouts on it and so on). It can be taught to some degree; our brains don't just stop changing completely in adulthood (its just harder).
Also 8/2000 got Nobel prizes? Thats some pretty good odds.
"just" 8 have won nobels and "just" 1% end up in the national academy of sciences? this is unimpressive compared to what?
this article is just bad science and lazy writing. before we can even entertain his conjecture we need two data sets, easily calculable by anyone with freshman college math:
x% of child prodigies become nobel prize winners or national science foundation award winners. the distribution of other scientific achievements for such prodigies has a median of y and spread of z.
a% of STEM college graduates become nobel prize winners / national academy members. the distribution of other accolades is b with a spread of c.
x,y,z compares how with a,b,c
the results can be interpreted different ways but at least we have a starting point for rational discussion. the rest of his article is mere conjecture with emotional posturing with an agenda.
Don't you find it disturbing that behavioral genetics, as a field, is unable to find actual genetic evidence for its most replicated correlations? (See the response to your linked article.) Rather than reevaluating their assumptions, instead they've decided to punt to the idea that it _must_ be that it's actually many small effects that they just happen to be unable to measure?
Additionally, if you were a parent, what would be the practical advice from this finding?
Mostly I find that it keeps me from worrying too much. My wife and I can just do our best and not be concerned that we are causing irreparable damage. (It also keeps me from caring about parenting fads like TFA. Whatever works for our family is probably good enough.)
I'll take the lack of response as an admission that you were at best unaware and are now embarrassed by your ignorance, or at worst don't actually believe what you're posting as fact on the internet.
A question for the journalist, how long would you expect your culture and society and economy to survive if all 2000 were actually "revolutionary adult creators"?
Another good question is why smart people have to be slaves. If a smart person wants to spend their life meditating, or serving the poor, or in a religious vocation, the journalists unhappiness about their decision is sad for the journalist, but I'm not really seeing the problem for the person. I'd even double down, and in a culture that's strongly anti-intellectual, a smart dude might very well see that his best course thru life of maximized happiness and love, is a non- or less- intellectual career. Sort of an "Atlas Shrugged" attitude. A "winner takes all" system doesn't motivate everyone, much like the lottery, the winners are those who don't play.
I like the headline, but I felt the rest of the article didn't really live up to it.
The setup is intriguing - for instance, the notion that micromanaged children will become excellent concert violinists, but may not become ground breaking classical composers (let alone the next Bob Dylan).
The example put forth in the article to support this assertion is... Itzak Perlman. A wonderful violinist and (I don't know him at all, this is what I've read) a generous spirit as well. But aside form a foray into jazz that I thought wasn't especially notable, Perlman's greatness is more or less as a concert violinist. Interesting to hear he was rejected from music school, but this seems a very odd example.
Why not focus on someone like Stefan Grapelli, who started playing at an older age, asked a busker in the paris metro how to play the violin (who laughed the question)? Why not look into the careers and lives of musicians who made their mark through creativity rather than virtuosity? I really like violin, from a lot of angles. I enjoy the amazing precision of the great classical musicians, but I do find myself even more intrigued by musicians like Steve Wickham (who played with U2 and the water boys, among others). I do tend to agree with the article that the micromanagement many young classical musicians go through in their quest to play perfectly may indeed vastly reduce the possibility that the musician will be able to put together an interesting track for "Sunday Bloody Sunday" or collaborate with a rock musician to produce something like Fisherman's Blues. These things may in fact be inversely correlated.
There's a lot here, unfortunately, I just don't think it was explored in interesting directions by the article.
I have a different interpretation. Most of the muscles that a parent gives to a child are the structured muscles to prevent one from failing. College, grad school are in some sense insurance. Therefore most of the upper middle class upbringing is guaranteeing insurance of a person's middle life or retirement.
Whereas the muscles that you learn from being independent are the muscles from conceptualizing, taking risks, creating, and learning from the experience. This is a completely different muscle than previous set of muscles.
It's not really about letting go or being too controlling. It's about building the right set of mental models so that someone can guide and create their own lives.
Most children are creative. I taught in a school for a year and there was only one child who had zero creativity (the exercise was to write a film plot and he basically reproduced the "Cool Runnings" story).
But the school system has had to prepare kids for adult life and repetitive boring jobs. That may change as the machines take over, so like Baudelaire we can truly become lovers of clouds.
Lived in a place where montessori was basically the only way of schooling and parenting was extremely hands off. Turns out children like structure and without one they ends up forming gangs at an alarming rate. Most grow out of it, but the pack mentality remains fostering xenophobia, while some other never get out of it and it's a huge social problem.
Won't name and shame so don't ask. I think some freedom to experiment is good, as long as one also gets plenty positive role models and strong sense of what's wrong.
I wondered about the "average of fewer than one rule" cited in the article. Some parents have zero rules? I consider myself a pretty liberal parent and we definitely have more than one rule. e.g., Don't be mean, brush your teeth, be careful crossing the street, take your shoes off inside the house. Even if you generalize those to "be good to others and to yourself," that's still a rule!
I wonder if "don't smash that block into the TV" counts as a rule? Or "don't eat that knife"? Or "don't play in traffic?" Or any other common sense thing that helps keep a young child alive for more than 24 hours?
This article is silly and evokes an extreme to try to make a point.
I think it depends on what you mean by "rule." I would say that we don't have any hard and fast rules that our daughter must obey simply because we say so. That doesn't mean we let her do anything particularly dangerous, but we try to explain why we say, "no," rather than just saying, "because I said so."
Exactly - that's been our approach too, at least once she reached ~3. "Brush your teeth because otherwise you get cavities." I'd still call that a rule but the article was vague.
Gangs aren't such a bad thing. I would say that I belonged to one, and I turned out all right.
Gangs provide a lot of opportunity for creativity, problem solving, strategy and tactics, self management, financial management, and leadership. And, the smart kids usually choose the best gang, in my experience.
The hardest part is transitioning from the gang life to something that's more upper-middle-class acceptable. In my experience, gaining access to education, capital, and social networks is hugely important. And, crossing the cultural gap has been something that I still struggle with 25 years later.
I'm pretty sure there are better ways to learn "creativity, problem solving, strategy and tactics, self management, financial management, and leadership" than one which can get you killed or thrown in jail for the rest of your life.
Interesting point. In Ireland almost every creche brands itself as Montessori but it's quite different (as in more relaxed) than what you'd see in California. Though what you're describing does not sound like Ireland.
>> First, can’t practice itself blind us to ways to improve our area of study? Research reveals that the more we practice, the more we become entrenched — trapped in familiar ways of thinking.
The only way practice traps you in familiar ways of thinking is if you focus practice only on the things that are familiar to you. Letting Anki help schedule your practices is a way to avoid this. Here is what I do.
- Review phase: Do exercises based on whatever is up for review.
- Attack the weakness phase: Spend extra time reteaching yourself the stuff one you feel you did poorly on.
- Project phase: As you work on interesting challenging projects, add new Anki cards as you encounter and learn new things.
It's a good technique which I think could be accessible to a lot of children. Let them choose the area of interest. Just instill in them a sense of discipline in whatever area THEY choose to pursue.
Yesterday I taped a piece of paper down on the kitchen table and got out the crayons. Was asked for a Yellow Submarine so held my 3 year old's hand and drew one with him. He was almost ecstatic at having an image appear from his hand.
Creativity is a mix of confidence, encouragement, hand holding, and structure.
If you don't give your kids an ethical framework, then the TV, their teachers, or their peers will. Unique people tend to not conform to standards? Not shocking at all, but this article is ridiculous. It's not the lawyer's job to rewrite how the criminal justice system works. It's not the doctor's job to reform healthcare laws. This is some anachronistic thinking that somehow thinks that people exist in vacuums. If the "cost" of parents bothering to actually raise their kids is that we're given more people who competently perform their jobs, then so be it. That's more important than getting some new style of architecture anyways.
Variety of experiences is the key. Traveling, big collection of coffee table books (these photo books of India and Himalaya are so wonderful), classical music, of course, and dance (much better than sports). Then a child will make her own patterns out of it.
Restricted, repetitive behavior is the root of all evil.
Except where it applies to bathing, eating, sleeping, practicing dance and sports, learning basics like the alphabet and how to read, math, and pretty much everything else that makes this generalization rather silly.
I do agree with the bit about a wealth of experiences, though.
I'm glad NYT writer and so many HN posters finally figured out the correct way to raise kids, and are sharing it here. I thought we'd have to wait another 5000 years for it.
Don’t you think hardware development might be a better start? My daughter’s 10 months old and still can’t read, let alone pick reasonable variable names. But she’s been able to hold the soldering iron for at least 6 months and I believe I see progress.
Anecdotally my son is 2 years old and he's getting really interested in what I'm doing on my laptop. I explained that I write code, except where I come from the words 'code' and 'cat' sound almost the same. So... my son deeply believes his dad deals a lot with cats. Ultimately he might be quite right - the Internet is all about cats ;)
I've heard that at 12 months Duplo's and Visual VHDL/Verilog editors become suitable for the child. You can get them started on very simple PLDs, move on to FPGAs along with some more palatable Assembly. If the child cannot solder BGAs by age 2, you may want to consult a child psychologist to check for development problems. They may suggest Agile or Kaizen, or a number of other frameworks to keep your daughter on her milestones.
Your comment gave us a lot of food for thought, so thank you. But the truth is we’re a very traditional family and this is our first child. We are trying hard to make the right choices for her.
So although your suggested milestones are most reasonable, we’re ultimately going to stick with analog for the time being. I’m saying this fully aware that she might not be able to lift her creations the better she gets, but we all have slight scoliosis from carrying too many school books. She will survive.
Once she’s comfortable with the basics and hopefully frustrated with the limitations, she’s going to be ready to embrace digital.
/switch to serious for a second. Do you have any suggestions for toys/games that are more facile than a soldering iron that delop or impart systems logic for 8-24 months?
Perhaps wooden building blocks with different colours and shapes? You can't go wrong with these - worst case they'll learn category theory ;) But to be fair (and completely serious now) I would not get too obsessed about that. Kids have a way of showing you what they find interesting at any given moment and I think it's best to just go with the flow without planning for specific outcomes.
My first-grade son was playing at 'DAP time' where they checked out a kit (blocks, string, whatever) and did whatever they wanted with it for 30 minutes. He had the box of keys.
Now, nobody checked out the box of keys - it was boring. Nothing you could build; no clear categories (too many kinds of old keys of too many shades of color). But the teacher noticed him taking them one at a time, dropping them over his shoulder, picking them up again and putting them in a row on the table.
She didn't disturb him - that was a rule of DAP time, nobody gets to interrupt you. But when he was done and had put them away, she asked "What did you find to do with the keys?"
He answered "I was putting them in order by sound". See, he was constructing a scale of sorts, by the sound they made when they hit the floor.
Wasn't another year when we discovered he had perfect pitch. Went on to master the piano and the cello before junior high; played in every school orchestra and event. He was playing professionally in High School (City orchestras; Orchestra Iowa) and competing at the national level.
Anyway, never underestimate the use of simple toys.
There's these very nice swiss wooden blocks that have pathways for marbles carved into them.They're a lot of fun, and dead simple to put together, but also quite expensive, at about 150EUR for a set of 50. I had some of them as a kid, and now I'm a competitive minecraft player, so there's that.
Since we're switching to serious, here's my thoughts on development. Totally unqualified, but here we go:
It doesn't really matter whether your kid can program at 5 or 15, whether he can read at 4 or 8. Nobody who puts in the effort doesn't get to a stage where they can do either of those things.
From my own observations (a limited set) what mattered is what you got up to when you already learned how to read, and you had vast swathes of time to spend either on reading things that you needed to know, or play video games (which you need to do as well, mind you). It's the kids who dedicated themselves to getting good at something who eventually did so. Academically and sports. And everything else.
Have you gotten her the beautiful Resistance Color Code charts yet? You can learn the colors and resistance values. A fantastic twofer if I may say so myself. :).
There is little sense in doing that at this time. That’s just my personal opinion.
The way I see it, she needs three skills to succeed. First, hold it the right way up and realize this thing is not an eye poker or lollipop. Second, develop a steady hand. The doctor says alcohol is bad for her, so there seems to be no easy way. Third and last but not least, learn resistor markings. I’m praying she didn’t inherit my color blindness.
When we’re there we can playfully discover Ohm’s Laws by letting her gut decide on the right voltage and current applied to her circuits. It’s going to be magic.
Today's kids are oversaturated with distractions and their lives are fully planned around activities. So they live according to templates, but not according to their own motivators.
Then again, having a child myself (10 months old) I have noticed many parents have so many activities and things planned themselves that they distract their children (read consume content on iPads) in order to pacify them. It's a circle.