How to Raise a Brilliant, Happy Child Naturally

I'm well, I'm well. I like the baseball cap.

Oh yeah, it's a hop, like to make beer.

Before I forget, one little bit of news. I don't know if I told you about Laura Deming. Do you know who Laura Deming is?

I don't think so.

So Laura Deming is a Thiel Fellow. She started studying you know, serious anti-aging, uh, biotechnology when she was about 12 or 13 at MIT. Right. And then she won a Thiel Fellowship based on her, uh, goal of creating an anti-aging, uh, company. And, uh, now she has a small— she's maybe 20, 21 now. She has a small venture capital firm, um, investing in anti-aging technologies. Wow. So she's kind of a superstar. The reason I bring her up is that her father, John Deming, is a friend of mine, and he saw our last broadcast about how you're educating Alana and the way you're looking at language and reading and games like Set and so forth. He said, this is exactly what we were doing with Laura when she was—

that's heartening.

Alana's a star, and we don't know the particular path to stardom, but This is why I feel such an urgency to get this word out here. I'm picturing hundreds of millions of poor kids around the world who could have fabulous lives without really any extra money from the outside if their parents started doing the kind of thing that you're doing.

Or internal solutions.

No, indeed.

I tell you, so the last few days I've been able to hang out with just Alana by herself, my wife, and Baby went to a wedding in Portland. Alana had a preschool orientation for her Spanish immersion school yesterday, and she starts school Monday, so we didn't want her to miss it. We paid a good amount of coin for it, so, and she's really excited about it. So we did that yesterday, and she was so excited. We got there early, and she did 3 different sessions because they had like 3 different hours where they, you know, cycle kids through, open house type thing. She insisted on staying for every single one. So she's great and she's just a great person.

But a little bit, you know, one of the ironies that sometimes happens, that happens sometimes, is when you raise kids really well so that, so that they don't necessarily need formal education, sometimes they really want it. I know it's different, but at our school that we just started, we just completed the first week of of the third year of school. And what we're finding is that our students this year are more focused and better behaved than ever before, and they're all really eager to take AP courses. I'm trying to get them to back off, like, hey, it's just an academic course, but they're almost competing to see who can take on the most conventional academics. You know, I think I mentioned I'm writing a book on educational consent and the notion that all education should be consensual. And so for me, it's one thing if you're forcing an institutional education on a child, in which case it's a form of, you know, prison or abuse. It's very different if the child is reaching out and saying, let me be part of this community, let me take this course, let me learn this. You know, the founder of Sudbury talks about these kids who hadn't learned any math until they were 12 or 13. And he basically made them beg to learn math before he let them do it. And then, you know, in a few months they learned all of K-8 math, you know, like that. So when kids really want it, hey, it's consensual, let them go for it, let them have it.

Yeah, lately Alana has been asking to paint. We've been watching that Bob Ross show on Netflix. Yeah, and she'll sit there for an hour at a time and watch him paint and then go grab little paintbrushes and practice the weird, the different strokes that he makes and whatnot. And I said, well, Lana, we'd love to do that. Get you oil-based paints, we'll get you a palette, or a palette, we'll give you an easel, set you up. I said, but it's not a 5-minute commitment, right? There's cost involved, there's time involved, there's only so many canvas. It's not like printer paper, you can't just go grab another 30 of them and, you know, Do it real quick. So she said okay. So we started off by getting her a little watercolor set that's on a palette, but it has all the paints, the whole thing.

Yeah.

And she sat down and she spent 45 minutes painting two different— not canvases, but little boards that had, they had numbers to match the colors we're supposed to put it in. She did a great job. She's, she's sweet and kind. And I'm most proud to say that she She can read a bit slowly through these Level 1 books. So we bought, or actually a friend bought 4 or 5 of them, so Levels 1 and 2. And Alana sat down the first night and read the first 10 pages of Danny the Dinosaur. She didn't pronounce all the words right. Museum was "moozeum," which is darn close for me. She's having trouble with the silent E's, but she's learning if there's an E on the end of the word, it makes the vowel preceding it a hard sound. E, not ah. And she can read. She's got the confidence. She'll sit down and suffer through dinosaur, long words, difficult words. I've realized that she's taught herself and/or has absorbed through whether it be media or iPad and whatnot, most of the phonics sounds. I've always felt bad that I haven't spent as much time as I wanted to working on TH and TR and the different phonics. Alana knows them. Pretty remarkable.

Again, we talked about this some, but I think One of the reasons I realized this week that I really don't care about most educational research, because education research is based on the prison model, and therefore it's invalid. Even the whole debate about phonics versus whole language learning, the fundamental premises of that debate are based on mass schooling. And I think in an organic environment where you're reading to her, you are giving her the basics of phonics. She's also really enthusiastic about figuring out how to read, I'm not surprised that she spontaneously gets, you know, things, the last few things she needs to kind of take off. And then the other thing is it sounds like she's at liftoff. I think of reading, you know, in terms of labor and time intensity, I think that if you raise a child the way you're doing it, pretty soon if you wanted to homeschool Alana, it'd be a piece of cake. But getting to reading fluency is kind of a critical piece And, you know, it looks like you're 80% there. She's kind of at liftoff.

Yeah, it's, um, it's so amazing. It was my goal from day one was that she would be a strong reader, precocious reader, um, and it seems to be working. So I'm over the moon, you know.

I'm very cool. Congrats. I'm going back on the painting. When you explain the cost issue, do you think she really kind of grokked the idea of what it means for something to cost and the commitment? That sounds like a pretty sophisticated conversation for a 4-year-old.

It is, and that's one that I've had with her before, and it certainly hasn't soaked in, but this one kind of did. She really is smart. Her reasoning skills are getting better and better. You know, we've talked about this in the past, even just a few months ago, if I'm like, "Alana, why do you like going to the playground?" "You know, because it's fun." "Well, what makes it fun?" "There's friends. There's playground. I like slides." She's really getting better at that. So I said, I told her, I said, there's the palette, there's the easel, you know, there's a cost involved. I think she does, because I told her that we won't get her things that have high costs that unless she's able to, you know, place her full attention for a period of time and, you know, make a commitment. So we talked about what that word means. I explained that she has a commitment to gymnastics. She's not going to preschool one day a week because she's going to gymnastics. We're going to add a second sport activity in the afternoon for her, I think, that day. By the way, she's doing great in that. She's the best kid in class in terms of she listens to the teacher. Teacher says line up, she lines up. If anything, she's too differential to her teammates or the little kids who don't pay attention, who don't listen, who are lackadaisical, who waste time. Drives me up a wall standing in the corner watching the kids waste time. All I ask is that Alana pay attention, listen to the teacher, and do the reps that she's asked to do. And, you know, so, but she's great.

No, no, sounds fabulous. I'm still interested in the kind of money, money thing. Have you done anything with money, like in terms of, you know, here you have a dollar, you can buy this or that, or $5, you can buy this or that, or have you worked at all on kind of getting her a sense of, I mean, some of this is, you know, economics and limited resources, to use fancy language, but yeah, how have you developed this whole idea of cost?

Well, she has a pretty large piggy bank in the shape of a globe, and whenever she finds money, she puts it in there. She knows that, um, that, uh, that you need money to buy things. She doesn't really understand the relative costs yet, and to be fair, I haven't really explained it to her about how, like, sometimes we'll go out somewhere and she'll say, hold on, I'm gonna bring money so we can buy stuff, and she grabs 2 or 3 pennies, puts it in her pocket, and off we go, right? So She knows that. We talk about how certain things in stores cost more than others, so we're getting this, not that, here's why. She knows that we work to make money, that sometimes when I'm on a phone call and she can't come and talk to me, it's because it's important and I'm trying to make money, which is all a bit vague, but it's now to the point where she asked the other day for us to buy her a computer so that she can type and make money.

Well, you know, it's definitely great for a 4-year-old. It does sound like you're ready to kind of have her, you know, go to the store with her own budget, whether it's her money or your money or whatever, and say, you know, let's, let's see what we can buy, and get her to start focusing. Her arithmetic's probably— does she do double-digit sums yet or just single-digit sums?

Um, single-digit sums, so I mean, well, 10, um, but we've only done single-digit, uh, adding and, uh, minusing, subtracting, uh, we could probably do more there.

I was going to say, it sounds like she's close to being ready to double-digit. And then, you know, things are so expensive anymore, it's hard to find— you don't want to get triple-digit.

You have to go to the dollar store, and even the dollar store is just a name at this point.

Right. But still, I think it would be a cool experiment, or cool to begin experimenting with combining the money and cost thing with the addition. And, you know, ultimately subtraction. Does she do subtraction as well?

Yeah, she does, she does. She has to do math with us in order to get her vitamins. And her vitamins are the closest thing in our household to candy, so she loves them. She'll sit down and do it.

It's an aside, but did I tell you about our math playground idea?

No.

Okay, so, you know, Magat and I are creating a school in Senegal We've got a house that's being built for us there, and we're probably going to go over Thanksgiving. But because building a school is going to take some money, as a precursor to that, we're doing a math playground. The idea is exactly what you're doing with Lana, basically, before she gets her vitamin. Before kids get to go on the playground, they have to solve a simple arithmetic problem and make it kind of fun and engaged and make math just part of the culture. When Alana does math, does she do it on paper or in her head or both?

We do it on her fingers, and over the last year or so of doing this, now she doesn't have to use fingers anymore for most of the simple 10 7, 5 2 type thing. But there is a difference, like when she's focused, she does a lot better than if she's trying to do it with half her brain.

Yeah. How about objects? Have you played around with physical objects?

Yeah, we have. Like when I'm cooking, she loves to help me cook, so she takes a butter knife and cuts mushrooms for me. She cuts them down to powder. There's nothing left, but I appreciate the help, of course. And so we'll do simple things like, well, Anna, you know, how many mushrooms do we have? And she can count up to 100 almost. Not perfectly, because she forgets how to say 70. She'll say 7-0. Right. But she learned that from Chutes and Ladders. That's how we got her to count. Higher and higher.

So, you know, at a Montessori preschool, they would have all these math materials that are really great because they have, you know, organized around powers of 10. And by the way, as another aside, I've heard that one theory as to why the Chinese are so fantastically good at math is long tradition of using abacuses. That may or may not—

we have one. I don't know how to use it effectively. I think I'm gonna go find a YouTube video on it.

Yeah, but I think this problem with powers of 10, just getting it ingrained early on. But does her preschool have something like, you know, Montessori materials or math manipulatives that are structured so that they can understand the relationship between ones, tens, hundreds, and so forth?

You know, I'm not sure. I don't think so. It seems to be fairly language-focused, which is fine for now. It's only half days, you know, it's not a true preschool or the whole day thing. It's as much for her to spend time with other little children because she doesn't get to do that as much as I think that might be optimal.

That makes total sense. I get the social thing and her wanting to do that, but it sounds like it might be time to start looking. You know, I know the Montessori world, but I know there's a very rich and diverse world of math manipulatives out there, and it might be worth beginning to shop around for some cool materials that you can have at home, because it sounds like, especially if you start combining this with shopping and money, that, you know, again, not pressuring her, but just like she's had this liftoff with respect to reading, I bet with the right materials, based on where she is now—counts to 100, can do, you know, simple addition and subtraction—with physical materials, she could probably start ramping up mathematically pretty well in the next year or two.

I think so. Alana has exceeded my wildest hopes in almost every way, shape, and form. So, come on, boy. Speaking of somebody just woke up. She's got 17-year-old hair.

Say hi. Hola, Alana. Buenos días. Hablas español? Buenos días.

Bien. We've been doing this game. So I found a local print shop that I use. There's a company called Whizzle Phonics that makes a Whizzle Phonics game. And there's 3 different levels. The first level are these cards. And, you know, we kind of make up the rules for the card game as we go along. I think that they could have had a better editor for their instructions. But, you know, so she learned the word leap, L-E-A-P, from this. She can read every single 3-letter word here very quickly. Kid, rag, dad, rub, cub, without, you know, c-u-b, but just c-u-b. Excellent. That's the other big leap that she's made all on her own, is sounding out words together rather than broken apart. And she has a hard time, she knows that she goes back to letter by letter by letter. Yep, yep.

Well, that's fantastic. Any other updates on the game front? Checkers or Set or other games?

We've been playing checkers. I found all the games except for Connect Four. We haven't played Set since I've been carrying it around, but we've been playing this game Spot It, which is a much, much easier, I guess, visual or pattern recognition game. Yeah, better than Set. Every single card has 6 or 7 or 8 animals and corresponds to one matching animal of different sizes on every other card. So whenever there's 2 cards down, it's all about who can find the match first. And she likes it? She does pretty well. I beat her most of the time, but she's doing very, very well with it. Are you still—

recap on checkers?

Yeah, so checkers, I play with no back row as usual, and Alana plays faster these days. She sees the jumps. I wouldn't quite say that she's turned the corner and is really working a clear strategy. But she's watching what I'm doing, and I try and talk her through her moves. She has a longer attention span. She certainly knows the point.

The other day she wanted to move backwards and said, "Oh, I can't because it's not a queen." I'm like, "Yes, that's right." Yeah, well, you know, I would say you're definitely stretching her, but the fact you're stretching her kind of with so much love and validation is fabulous. And yeah, I think it's just very gently over and over again exposing and immersing her to these ways of thinking and making it common. Yeah, this is how to do it. Alana, I hear you read. You know how to read? Yay! I'm so amazed. It's fantastic. You know how to read. That's so cool. Yeah.

One other thing that she gets a lot of, perhaps more than other children, although that's just my own point of view looking around, is that Alana does spend a lot of time listening and being around adults. It's part of the reason that there's not a lot of other kids in our neighborhood, so to speak. Most of the people that I and my wife interact with and hang out with, by and large, are adults without children. As a result, she's very mature. She has the confidence to speak in public, to speak to new people, to meet new people, to pipe up in conversation. Last night we went to a restaurant to watch some fights that were on a TV channel that we don't have because we don't have TV anymore. Went out, and a friend's fiancée was there, and Alana talked with her nonstop for an hour and a half. Whoa! Tell her what her day is. And so she really does have that confidence to interact and to associate with people older than her, and I feel like that's going to benefit her a lot long-term.

Immensely. I think I may have mentioned that I once knew two Stanford seniors who had gone to Montessori through K-8, through 8th grade, and they said the difference between their preparation and their— those would typically had simply gone to public schools is really no difference academically. The kids at public schools knew their chemistry and math, but that because they'd been in these small environments where there was lots of interaction with adults, even as a senior at Stanford, they were— and both said they were just much more comfortable talking to professors, engaging with adults, you know, naturally and maturely. And I think, you know, being passive in a conventional school for 13 years really limits a kid. Adult interaction, that's our lives. We interact with other human beings. Absolutely. Yeah, if you're behind the 8-ball on that one, you're behind.

Yeah, and that's actually one of my worries. She loves school so much that we're looking now into kindergartens. Somewhat hesitant, or somewhat, I would prefer, and we're gonna do a personalized approach somehow. There are a lot of good schools in our region, including the one started by Innovations Academy. That's a good one. There's a few others. We're going to apply and see if she likes it, if she's into it. We'll see. Montessori is another option, just a little bit more expensive.

Yeah. You'll learn a lot and she'll learn a lot about her experience in preschool. She does seem to— my sense is she's just so social, she probably will love it. She should. Whatever. I think Already, you've got her so well launched that at least till middle school, she'd be great in pretty much any environment. And you guys are doing such a great job at home. Once you have a good foundation, it's hard for school to do too much damage until you get to teenage years, and that's a whole other ballgame.

Right. Yeah, and by then, certainly, traditional school will not be on our horizon. I mean, I will be shocked if in a few years I eat those words. But there are some really positive traditional schools even.

But yeah, I think, yeah, you've got a few years to worry about it. Well, congrats. I'm so excited she's reading. That is fantastic. In the interest of keeping it short, maybe we'll wrap up today and hopefully see you next week.

Sounds good. Michael, thanks a lot for your time. OK, thanks, Ryan.

Bye-bye. Take care.