Ryan and Michael talking about raising Alana, Ryan's daughter

has been developing. I hear she was reading?

Yeah, yeah, that's the most exciting thing possibly in my whole life. Cool, cool. Been working with her on it for a while, you know, sounding out words. Letters have sounds, sounds form words, words form sentences which express thoughts. Like, that's the mantra. Yep. We sing it, we go through it. She's known her letters since she was a year and a half or something.

I just wanna pause and stop and acknowledge just how sophisticated all those statements are. It's a mantra, but do you have any sense for does she get what a thought is or when she got thoughts or, you know, each of those terms? A letter is pretty concrete, but you're going abstract.

Well, for sure. And I think we talked about before, that's the second verse of the ABCs. It comes from a composite memory of my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Lee, explaining how to read. And that's how I've always conceptualized reading. As the emphasis we place on information and on thoughts rather than yelling or rather than violence or spanking or whatnot.

Right.

I really appreciate expression and thought. She knows it's the only way to get a point across to me.

So just to be concrete, again, there's this whole Piaget thing where young children are not capable of abstract thoughts. And I think there's some truth to that. Some truth and some exaggeration there. But so what she is referring to initially when you talk about a thought is she says something and you acknowledge that she had a thought or something like that. You kind of walk me through that.

Whenever she talks, I'd be trying to— I mean, now she talks so much where it almost goes without saying, but before we'd be like, hey, thanks a lot for telling me that you're hungry, or thanks for expressing that you want to go outside, let's go, or here's why we can't. Or here's why it's not a good idea. It's raining, or Y and Z. You know, when you're trying to do the peaceful parenting thing, as far as I know, that's the only way to communicate with the kids. So you've got to do that a lot. And the more that we show them that we value their expression, the more that they'll express. Even with number 2, it's easier with him because we're practiced at it. With Alana, it was all trial by fire. But with Logan, it's a little easier. Maybe it's confirmation bias, but it's only 4 months. He doesn't cry as much as Alana did. He has a different personality. He's not as intense as Alana or me. He's more like Marlo, a little bit more mellow.

I have 2 grown kids, and when they were young, such different personalities, even in utero, you know, even in utero. And then they come out and you're, yep, they're very different.

Yeah, it's amazing.

So I'm thinking concretely, so the letters are concrete and words, you can talk about words, you know, oh, she said the word mom or dad and thought you're talking about expressions. So she knows that she says something that's an expression or a thought. And so I'm just kind of thinking of her putting together your very simple mantra so that at some point she goes through this process and it is magical.

It is, and it's all been her. You know, the last 6 months, Marlo and I especially— well, Marlo's been busy having a baby and breastfeeding, so she's been busy in her own way, but I've been extremely busy as well. So I haven't had as much time to spend one-on-one helping Alana read, reading her books. I feel really bad about it, but she's clearly picked up the ball because she's the one who will come up to us, especially to Marlo, and say, "Hey, I want to read." and she'll point to a word in a book and try and sound it out. Marlo helps her. So we kind of— so Marlo started a couple months ago doing a thing where, like, for a long time, whenever Alana wanted to have her vitamins, which are these little gummy chewables, which is closest she gets to candy, she has to do math problems. We taught her how to add and subtract on her fingers, right? Right, right. Like 5 or 6 math problems. And now when she wants treats or whatnot, she has to read words. So she runs and grabs a book and then practices reading one word. And then so she goes up to Marlo a couple nights ago, or a couple weeks ago, and says, "Hey, I want to read." So Marlo writes a couple of very simple sentences on paper, and Alana traces them to like practice the letters and sounds, and then reads them. Right. And it was simple stuff like, I wish I had the text open, but like, "The cat ate food." Simple stuff, 3 or 4-word sentences. You know, by the third night in a row, she was doing a really good job to the point where Marla was able to call me and say, "Hey, I think she can like read." Fantastic.

Very cool. How old is Alana right now?

Alana turns 4 in August, so she's about 3 and 2/3.

Okay, excellent. And one of the cool things in addition to kind of the cognitive processes is the motivation. And if you were to speculate, I can imagine at least two prongs of motivation. One is just kind of curious wondering, seeing you and Marlo reading and wondering what this is. And then second, attention. Again, attention is love. It sounds like you both give her attention for reading or even trying to read or anything related to deciphering text. So do you think it's some combination of wondering about what mom and dad are doing when they're reading and the fact she gets attention from it?

Definitely. I think that her— like, she sees us reading a lot, although we're reading the internet, we're reading phones, books the way we used to. We usually read books to her. I think part of her motivation is that Reading is how you learn, and learning is what her dad spends all day doing. So, you know, get on board.

She's soaking in a household where this is what, household rituals, I think of it as family rituals and mom and dad's rituals, and quite aside, even if she doesn't know what it is, you know, kids are great sponges and they imitate, and so it sounds like she just sees you doing this and she wants to do what dad does.

Yeah, I hope so. I've sang that darn second verse to the ABCs enough times. Osmosis, Mike, I'm a big believer. Yeah.

Well, you know, to some extent I'm always thinking about how I think you're doing just such a fabulous job with Alana and she's growing so beautifully. And it'd be, I feel as if this is not rocket science and so many more parents could do a much better job. And one of the things I see is, you know, there's all of this hullabaloo about stress over academics and school and so forth, but I think if you get somebody like Alana started this young where she's naturally reading, loving learning and thinking, she will be a great capable performer without any stress. And of course, you know, you'll make sure she doesn't need to go through stress, but there's so much anxiety about learning and ability And if you do it organically like you're doing, it's just no big deal. So, you know, that's why I wanna unpack it so other people can get, hey, you give them attention and love, you model what they're supposed to be doing, you spell it out a little bit, voilà.

Yeah, no, it's amazing. And I have to give Alana a lot of the credit because like I said, for 6 months, it went from exhaustive daily rituals to, Marlo being laid up, being pregnant, me being extremely busy in the year and whatnot, and then baby comes and I'm traveling. I've been on the road for 2 weeks. I was in Turkey before that. We were in Hawaii, which was nice. Got to just kind of hang out, but I was on the phone the whole time. Yep, yep.

Very cool. No, she deserves a lot of credit. Any other highlights of progress with Lana over the last, it's been almost a month, I think.

Just that, you know, like in Hawaii, all of our friends and family are just blown away by how mature she is and how easy she is to be with. Her cousins are— she has these two wonderful cousins on Oahu. They're a little bit higher maintenance to hang out with for the grandparents and to be with than Alana is. And, you know, I don't know all the reasons for it, but Alana is very low maintenance. She's easy to be with. I attribute this to my anti-stroller stance and to Just Alana learning to abide. Like, yeah, she hung out with us a lot. We took her out everywhere. Um, you know, we don't hit her, we don't yell at her, we don't have meaningless arbitrary rules or purposeless arbitrary rules. Everything we say or do is grounded in some logic or opinion or fact that we express to her and communicate, and also abide by ourselves. Yeah, yeah, that's made the big difference. Like, that's why she's able to just get along and abide If anything, she has a real hard time being with children and people who don't abide. When she sees a parent hit a kid, she is terrified. She is just freaked out. Like when she sees kids have to do, like go in timeout for nothing. Like she'll be playing with some kids and like some parent decides that the kid didn't listen well enough from halfway across the room as the parent shouted over their glass of wine, go in timeout. Alana will go and stand with the kid in timeout like in solidarity. Like she doesn't know what's going on.

Yeah, I know, that's funny. It's sad but funny.

The game. So that's pretty cool.

Yeah, and again, I'm not surprised at all. And some of this, you know, there's always possible there's a genetic component, and Alana deserves credit, and I think, as you say, all the peaceful parenting you're doing and giving the kid explanations and, yeah, modeling it, all of this just makes everything so much easier. So congrats, and I'm glad Alana's doing so well.

I'm really excited. In fact, when we started doing these video Hangouts when she was a little bit over a year, if I recall correctly, one of the goals that I had for it was for her to read before she was 4. Actually, she said 3 and a half. She's just about there, so I think that by the time she hits 4 in August, she'll be reading even better and we can check that one off the list.

Excellent, excellent. Well, I want to keep these short, so it's good to be back on track. Give my best to Marlo and Alana, and what's the new one's name again?

Logan.

Call him Logan.

Yeah.

Okay, good to be back in touch, Brian. See you next week.

Take care. Bye-bye.