How to Help Your Child Be Happy and Brilliant

It's just up late, up late because of the kids. Usually they're up early.

Hey, a father of two or a mother of two should never apologize. Kids come first, and that's a good thing. And, and yeah, that's, that's priority number one, so I totally get it.

Awesome, awesome. It's been a while since we spoke.

Yeah, it has, it has. But I figure, you know, this way we get bigger chunks of Alana's development.

Yeah, you know, I think last time we spoke was before I went to Turkey again. And that was interesting. Yeah, just of all the reasons why our deal there might not work, Michael, me not getting on a plane was not going to be one of them.

Right.

That's basically what it was. But I tell you, Alana's— she's growing, starting to chart development for Logan too, which is not surprising, but I remember at this point when Alana was 6 months or 7 months old, I thought she'd never learn a thing. I couldn't see that she had learned anything. But now I'm not worried about that with Logan, and I figure osmosis will occur.

Do you think that you're better at perceiving change in Logan? Or that, I mean, 'cause they're definitely learning for sure. Logan's what, 7 months now, 8 months?

7 months, yeah, on the dot. Yeah, I mean, he knows his name. He's very attentive to sounds. He loves playing. He's a very intense listener. He's always got this real serious face listening. Loves his sister. Nothing entertains him more than watching his sister.

Well, you know, when they pay attention, and yeah, even little babies, I always watch where they're focusing their eyes. And you know, when they come out in the very beginning, they don't focus their eyes very much, but gradually they develop a lot more focus and tracking. And you know, I sort of imagine all these, you know, neuronal connections kind of happening as they sort of figure out what to focus on and how and what's going on in the world and, you know, just this intense, you know, survival-based, what's going on out there kind of thing.

That's for sure. Yeah, that's what he's got. So he's doing great, you know, he's easy and it's been a real joy.

Does Lana talk with him and try to engage him?

Oh yeah. In fact, Friday, I thought I was gonna have a slow day, so I just didn't call in the babysitter. I wound up being extremely busy. I was just on the phone the whole time and I had a contract to kind of spit out quick. And, uh, Alana was a big help and she watched, entertained, took care of her brother for the better part of 4 to 6 hours. Wow. And feed him and do things like that. But he's crying, Alana drops what she's doing and hangs out with him, engages him. He, you know, he tips over and he's on his back and uncomfortable. He's on his belly for too long, she'd pick him up. And it's not easy. She weighs 42 pounds and he's 21 pounds. So she's having to deadlift 50% of her body weight. And she's a champ. She's a real trooper. She takes a real strong interest and shows that she's a very loving, caring, and responsible child and sister.

Well, as you know, in traditional societies, young children would take care of even younger children. I think it was common for 4-year-olds to have significant childcare responsibilities. I'm impressed that a lot Alana could do it for 4 to 6 hours. That's way up there. But I think once upon a time it was really common. And I wonder if part of our kind of learned helplessness and irresponsibility in our society is that so many fewer young children have younger siblings and then typically there is either daycare or nannies or parents providing such intense care that they don't— you know, I'm sure it's partly, you know, Alana, partly the expectations and modelling you guys set. But that's fabulous, 4 to 6 hours of care for a 4-year-old is pretty impressive.

Yeah, and you know, a lot of that time she's sitting next to Logan playing her iPad or drawing, and Logan's, you know, he's not doing a whole lot aside from trying to grab her pens and things. So she's not like engaged in him for 6 hours by any means, but I was in my office for the better part of 4 to 6 hours here and there, and didn't have to do a whole lot. Alana did everything but feed him and change his diaper.

I once knew a woman who was the younger of 10 children, and she said she barely knew her parents, that her siblings basically did the whole show.

Yeah. 10 siblings, that's how it would work too.

Exactly, exactly. So what else is Alana up to? Is she reading a bit more, I imagine? Hey, Alana.

Let's ask her. Say hi. Say hello.

Hola, ¿qué tal? ¿Cómo estás?

Bien.

Bien. Maravillosa.

Yeah, well, so, as usual, I keep getting busier, and I really fear that I don't spend as much quality time teaching her to read and playing games in the last month or two that we were before. I carry Set everywhere I go, and we played it at a few coffee shops. I started off just by getting her to practice recognizing the patterns fast, like, what's this? 3 purple squiggles, what's that? 2 red diamonds. So she's getting really good at recognizing it. Hopefully that will spill over into when we actually play the game. I would say Alana's growth is just that her reading is still getting better. She loves it. She takes interest in it. She's always sitting down with her own books and practicing words. I gotta say, one thing she struggles with is, you know, she sounds like— she's like, we asked her to spell Logan, and in her head she goes, L-O-G-I-N, Logan.

Pretty good.

Yeah. And like, when I try to explain to her why there's silent words, there's silent letters, and exceptions to the rules, and irregular words and spellings in English, she just— it's frustrating to her. Like, she wants rules, she wants order.

Did you explain to her that since she knows Spanish, that Spanish is so much better in that respect?

I did. And so that's why she doesn't— like, she clearly understands Spanish. She can read a few words in Spanish. Like, I've had her read them, but it's not something that I focused on because We don't have a whole lot of Spanish language books. We have some, but just kids' books, because my Spanish is poor. Looks like I may be doing some time in business in Mexico, so once again, I'll be the only person with a Spanish surname who doesn't speak Spanish, just like California.

Yeah, well, you know, in Spanish, the other thing are kind of songs and verses, little poems. Maybe you can get short little poems or songs, because I bet she would love them. And then, you know, if you look at them written, she can read along as she sings them kind of thing.

Right. That's a good idea. But in general, her reading in English is getting a lot better. She's learned to memorize words. I mean, she's been— for a long time, she memorized the, as, a, and I, which is fair enough. But now she's memorized some phonics sounds like th, sl, you know, PR, he recognizes them and doesn't have to spend so long sounding them out. And she's getting really good at building the whole word. For a while, like if there was a 6-letter word, she just sounded out the first 3 letters and do it properly. So it was a challenge, but it was a process to get her to recognize the whole word and read the whole word. And she's really doing a great job.

Yeah, is she, are there entire small books she can basically read out loud?

Yeah, so after we spoke last time, you said go and find a book even that has one word per page. The simplest I could find was a book that has 3 or 4 words per page. And she hadn't read it in a while, otherwise she could have just guessed what the words were based on the photos. But so she had it, and so she sounded out, you know, blue shoes, red hat, green socks. And again, except for the difficult exceptions and pronunciations and silent letters, she can read it. Like, Alana has full confidence telling people that she can read. I can read. She'll tell a stranger.

Watch. Have you tried Dr. Seuss on her yet?

Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, we've been reading Dr. Seuss to her since day one.

Yeah.

Which isn't something that, for reasons unknown to me, I suppose I could ask my parents, but it's irrelevant to me. They didn't, they weren't fans of Dr. Seuss. They didn't allow Dr. Seuss books. I never read Green Eggs and Ham until I had, you know, like a nephew who had it when I was like in high school. I don't know why.

A lot of them have pretty minimal, I mean, Green Eggs and Ham is pretty minimal vocabulary. So I would expect pretty soon Alana could handle reading Dr. Seuss.

Yeah, no, no, I said she loves Dr. Seuss. Oh, The Places You'll Go is way up there on my list of favorite books of all time. Let me tell you what, that's like, I read that to pump myself up when I'm reading. There we go.

You should ask your parents why not Dr. Seuss, 'cause I absolutely love his work.

Yeah, I would assume James Dobson told them it was bad juju, so they didn't. No.

Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.

Kevin Barry's gonna be very impressed there.

So Set is developing and Reading is developing. How about Checkers? What's going on with Checkers?

I lost the board game. I haven't played with her in a couple of weeks. Connect Four, Checkers, and this other matching game that's a little more simple than Set, so that's why I've been playing it. It was in a little can. It's a little— it's a game where it's got maybe 50 round cards, and each card has has a large animal and then a number of smaller animals.

Right.

All the cards have one match with every other card. So it's a game to put them down side by side and spot the match first. It's not as difficult as Set, but it's the same principle, I think. And, I mean, Alana likes that game, and she's done well with it.

It's called Match?

No, it's a matching game.

OK.

So it's similar to Set in that the point is pattern recognition. It's just for 3-year-olds as opposed to 6 to 9.

I'm thinking we should kind of develop, you know, a curriculum. So on the one hand, there's a reading curriculum, simple to hard, a Spanish curriculum, a math curriculum, a game curriculum, because we're all kind of doing this ad hoc. And, but, you know, it sounds like you found a cool prerequisite to Set, so to speak, so that she can have fun and play this other game and get ready for Set.

Yeah, no, no, for sure. And I would love a simple curriculum for these things because ad hoc is great, but you know, a lot of my life is ad hoc, and in hindsight I should have planned it. So, you know, yeah, I don't want to make that same ongoing, you know, pattern with Alana.

Well, maybe when you're done, send me the name of this other game, all the Connect Four, maybe a list of games you're playing with her, and maybe one sentence age-appropriate, you know, maybe set is a bit of a stretch, but You know, in checkers, with checkers, she can do king me and all of that.

She can, yeah, no, she understands it. She knows that you have to have a queen or king in order to go backwards. And every time I play checkers with her, she gets better. We were at a coffee shop the other day and their checker set was missing a bunch of pieces. So I did what you said, I just took off half my board.

Yeah.

And we played a game. That's actually the last time that we played checkers was at at the coffee shop up on Fifth. But, you know, I've just been busy, Mike, and we'll get back in a better group soon. I had a lot of traveling come up unexpectedly the last couple of months. I was in Seattle, New York, short notice, and then—

Summer's crazy, summer's crazy for everyone. So, you know, in light of keeping this short, but so, you know, I do think that we're developing, so I think we've got two things going. It's kind of, you know, Well, 3 things. On the one hand, we're articulating, I think, a wonderful path of development for Alana and Logan, which I hope other people find valuable. And we're kind of talking about the practices. Second, you know, we're just, we're developing a list of materials, you know, games and so forth, books. And then third, actually, we're kind of documenting Alana's development. So hopefully You know, Facebook will keep, or Google will keep these things available. So years from now, you guys can go back and look at, you know, where Alana was along the way.

Yeah. No, it'll be fascinating. And I'll probably look back and laugh at why I was, you know, so personally worried or whatnot. But Alana's a great person. I can't tell you, like, she's just, she's a nice little friend to other people, but she's great with adults. People love her, like her to be around. Oh, she picked up swearing from me, of course. But she uses the word so perfectly. I'm very impressed.

For me, it is always appropriateness. You know, actually, at our school, my co-founder was a little bit shocked that sometimes students use profanity. He says, "Are you going to allow that?" You know, there's a notion that at schools you're not supposed to. And, you know, for me, it is, is it used appropriately? And there are sometimes where it's a certain sort of emphatic expression. Okay. Other times when it's kind of gratuitous and vulgar and not okay. And I like the idea of developing judgment about, you know, I'm not picky one way or another. I don't care if people ever do or don't. But, you know, if you're going to use those, you know, expressions, let's do it in a civilized way, so to speak.

Yeah, sparingly and well.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So we have to talk about that.

We're like, look, Lana, these are useful words. Daddy uses them at times. There are times and places and people that I try not to use them, and here's why.

Yeah.

So I asked her that if she uses those words, it's only with me, and it's like our thing.

Perfect.

And I also explained it's not a substitute for other adjectives. It's not a substitute for vocabulary or for expressing your feelings.

Did she seem to grok all this?

Yeah, to some extent. You talk to Alana long enough and she starts looking at squirrels.

Right, right. So this is probably the sort of thing that It'll take kind of years, but with years it'll sink in. Well, again, in honor of keeping it short, I'm gonna let you go and then let's try again next week and try to get back regular. Okay, good to talk to you, Ryan. Bye-bye.