Parenting

# Why? As a thrice-divorced man with 7 children, I have some resources for parents. *(That's a joke, I'm just preparing ahead.)* *** There have been small but specific areas of my life where I have noticed would have been easier if I had been taught something that used to be taught. For example, **faux cursive**. At university, lecturers didn't provide leceture notes (assholes) and spoke too quickly for me to write notes down (assholes) - perhaps because in their era (old men) they had been taught to write in cursive, which makes writing notes easier. There have been other areas where other people lack a skill that I was taught, and caused great frustration due to their inability to accept my reasoning about a problem. For example, **Bayesian probability**. A friend believed that if there are only 2 outcomes to an event, the chance of each outcome must be 50% - he genuinely, seriously believed this - and thus refused to take basic safety precautions (wearing seatbelts or helmets) because he didn't understand how safety equipment could reduce the chance of death if the chance is always 50%. This person of course makes many other dangerous lifestyle choices (e.g. smoking) and is an anarchist, which displays how a societal lack of basic mathematical knowledge might influence society. My computer skills have always been the biggest help in my life, but these weren't taught in school at all. They started from having an IT father, and continued due to a variety of possible reasons (Curiosity? Gaming? Taking myself too seriously as a kid thus making a professional website for myself? Being restricted to using a desktop computer while all the other kids had smartphones?). The most important thing is that **education requires friction**. Things shouldn't be easy. Fixing computers is how children learn how computers work. Planning and writing essays by hand is how they learn how to be legible and literate - not by typing a prompt into an AI and copying the answer.
# Links * Education * 'STEAM' education ([video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8h72JbCiTw) on why it is badly taught in schools but good in principle) * Tech * Scratch (programming IDE for children - there are other things like [BlockPy](https://github.com/blockpy-edu/BlockMirror/))
# Maths France and former Soviet states have better maths education, from what little I have seen of their materials. ## Why? I started thinking about child maths education when I got into preparing for nuclear war - I thought about post-apocalypse society and reasoned I would probably be some kind of engineer, so I went looking for torrents of agriculture techniques from self-sufficient communes (anarchist communes seem to design themselves to avoid large supply chains). The commune's massive library included educational materials for raising children. I obviously hated the maths education, so I thought it would be fun to re-think how to teach maths to a child version of myself. ## Logarithms Logarithms were only introduced to me at A-level, as the inverse of exponents. But before calculators were commonplace, logarithms were introduced much earlier, because they were used to manually multiply numbers. I think something was lost in this. There is no need to force students to multiply by hand too much, but knowing the motivation Matrices too were only introduced to me in my Further Maths IGCSE (which is much harder than Further Maths GCSE). I think the others in my maths class were only introduced to them at A-level. ## Offical Timeline According to [this](https://www.learningresources.co.uk/blog/early-years-maths-milestones/) timeline of milestones, children learn slower than I expected:
Age Name Description Suggestion Sign
7 months The concept of 'more' Use stacking toys to help them visualise that more objects leads to larger combined object
13 months Rote counting Counting, copying parent, without understanding Count stairs and other objects out loud
19 months Number recognition Associating spoken numbers to written numbers
24 months Recognising basic shapes Squares, circles, triangles Point out the shapes of objects
25 months Understanding '1' and '2' Unitary and pairs Play games about distributing/sharing objects
2.5 years Categorising Grouping objects by shape/colour/type
3 years One-to-one correspondence Of objects to a number word when counting Play games about counting items of exactly 1 type If the child touches each object exactly once while counting
3 years Basic understanding of size/quantity Concepts like big, small, more, less, same, different Ask if they want a 'big' or 'small' slice of cake, or whether they'd like 'more' or 'less' milk Child begins making such comparisons themselves or appropriately responding to your questions
4 years Counting to 20 Spontaneously counts to 20
4 years Simple patterns Recognise, create, and extend them Bring attention to such patterns when encountered, and creating their own with toys or drawings Starts identifying patterns or eagerly creating their own using toys, blocks, or crayons
5 years Basic addition/subtraction Using physical objects or fingers to solve simple problems Give them real-life situations - if they have two sweets and you give them one more, how many do they have now? Solves basic problems independently
5 years Concept of time Start recognising sequences of events and can follow routines with time references like 'morning,' 'afternoon,' or 'night.' Talk about daily routines, explaining when different activities happen throughout the day Starts referencing time in their conversations
5 years Recognising basic coins Understanding their value Involve child in small transactions like buying an ice cream, explaining each coin's value Correctly identifies coins and begins to comprehend their value
5 years Numbers [0,100] Playing number recognition games or using number flashcards Able to correctly identify, without hesitation, both single and double-digit numbers. Successfully calling out numbers from a random mix or correctly placing the numbers in sequential order are indicators of this achievement.
# Random Ideas ## Touch the Stove Punishments should ideally come from the parent but from the consequences - e.g. 'secretly' playing video games instead of sleeping, causing the child to be tired the next day. If you slap a child to prevent them from doing something that would hurt themselves, they learn to fear you instead of the dangerous thing. ## Representing Consequences to Children I've seen videos of people teaching their dogs not to do something, by representing the action with a toy dog and the toy dog dying. If animals are capable of learning-by-example, then human children must be too. Some lessons can thus probably be taught by pretending to injure yourself, to avoid the need for the child to hurt themselves. For example, pretend to get your finger stuck in a drawer, and act like it really really hurt.
# Internet ## Censorship The internet has more educational materials than any library. Kids should be able to use the internet without a parent *physically* supervising them, so that they can learn independently. However, parents should heavily restrict what content their children have access to. Parents should use a DNS filter to make 'dangerous' websites inaccessible, and should use a firewall to deliberately slow down connections to 'unwanted' websites (e.g. social media) so that the children get frustrated when using those websites but do not think you are responsible for it. Parents should let children be 'naughty' in safe ways. For example, confiscate smartphones before bed time, but 'forget' that your child can access the shared family computer, so the child can play video games or browse safe websites if bored. This reduces the 'sting' of strict parenting and thus reduces their instinct to rebel, which might otherwise appear in worse ways. For example, I used to get up very early so that I could play an online browser game I was addicted to (Astro Empires). It was ultimately harmless for me.