How to Help Your Child Be Happy and Brilliant

keep hearing your own voice. It's a—

yeah, yeah. So does Logan know his own name?

Yeah, he knows his name. He knows his Hawaiian name as well. If you say Logan or Kaoliuliokapai'aina, he'll look, you know.

Excellent.

He's very curious. He's doing very well. Um, he's pretty big. He's 21 pounds and he turns 9 months next week. Wow. Um, just about crawling. Last night I saw him scooting across the, the living room on his knees to get his toys, so he's He's getting it figured out.

He's definitely tracking. I see him checking, checking things out.

Yeah, and he loves his sister, and, you know, she loves him. But man, nothing he likes more— he won't even go to sleep anymore until his sister is in the room with him.

All right, I, I would assume— I, I bet she loves that. I bet she loves being big sister.

She loves being big sister. She wishes he would go to sleep earlier so we could play checkers and watch little Einsteins and things like that, um, unfettered.

There we go. Does she get to stay up a little bit later than he does?

Yeah, you know, we've never really put our kids on a real strict, uh, timeline or bedtime. Um, we've kind of always had the attitude that they're on— that our children are on our schedule rather than the other way around. Yeah, so Alana is pretty flexible. There's some nights she's up late, we're out later, we come home later, we're having fun. Other nights we get her to bed early if we, you know, she has school in the morning. She's really pretty good about it.

What time does she have to wake up for school?

Um, I try and get up around 6:30 at the latest so I can feed her for an hour and a half. We don't have to leave till 8:30, but that way she's up. Um, you know, we get everything ready. 6:30 to 7:00, I suppose.

And I bet she still loves school.

Loves it. Oh, Loves it a lot.

That's for sure. Yeah. She's so social. I can see. And it's half day, right? Yeah.

It's just half day. Yeah. And you know, Alana is just as social with, with people my age, like with adults. We were at a little barbecue yesterday at Balboa Park for a friend. They were playing some ultimate frisbee and whatnot. And there was a handful of other little children there and Alana played with them. A little bit, but she was a lot more interested to just go sit with all the other groups of adults, male and female, and just chat with them. Yup. Ask them, "Hey, kick a soccer ball with me, help me with this Frisbee. Did you know I'm going to Hawaii on Christmas? My cousins are Aiden and Allie, my teachers are Miss Lesia." She's going on and on and on, holding court with people much, much older than her. So I'm proud of that.

Absolutely. And I want to point out that it's because you and your wife speak to her with respect and she trusts you, she has no reason to be afraid of you, and you're interested in what she says, um, yes, reason to be proud of her. But again, this is, this is, uh, in a certain sense, people want to educate their kids. And I'm starting to read a book, um, it's called, uh, what is it, something sheep. It's about how elite college students, um, are, are kind of just so geared towards ambition that they are not reflective. They're depressed, basically. You know, it's about how— what a mess elite college students are these days. But, you know, and then people put all their pressure on their kids later on. And what I want to get people to see is, you know, just do what you're doing. You think and talk and you relate to them, you know. So Alana, at this age, by means of doing what she's doing, she's just going to be fine without this stress later on, you know.

She has confidence, you know, and I like that. We're nothing without confidence, so that's a big part of it.

And what's interesting is, you know, there's an upward spiral. So the more interesting she is as a human being from an adult perspective, the more likely unfamiliar adults will engage her in conversation. And actually, she's already the point where she can probably engage them in conversation, you know.

Yes, she does, whether it's at that park or at my local bar where I take her for breakfast now and then on Sundays. She has no problem. She'll sit right next to someone and just— and I love how she believes that her conversation, her things are just as interesting to others as it is to her. She will sit there and tell them all about her cousins and how her cousin bought her a new dress and it's very pretty and do you want to see it sometime? You seem nice, so why don't you come over and play?

Yeah, and adults love it. People love it, you know. And she is blessed with just a fun, cool personality. I totally get that.

Oh, she is.

But yeah, you know, you can imagine, you know, and you probably see parents at the park where they snap at their children or they yell at them or where they ignore them when the kids are trying to talk to them. And, you know, yeah, just all these micro second-by-second interactions where you're engaging in this flowering of her, you know, it'll make it so that school is so easy. Is her school bilingual?

No, it's just in Spanish.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Is her Spanish improving?

Yeah, it is. You know, her vocabulary is growing. Her comfort level with basic sentences is much higher than it was, you know, a year ago, even though she knew it at the time, she's able to speak it. Alana's really become proud of the fact that she speaks Spanish and she's learning Spanish because all the times we've told her that we're proud of it and that we value it has really seemed to rub off. She used to be kind of shy about it, and now she loves telling people, "And I speak Spanish." Really?

Maravilloso.

You know, yeah.

Are most of the other students at the school native speakers or 50/50?

Unfortunately not. Unfortunately, it's 100% gringo. Alana is by far the best Spanish speaker in her class, and that's largely due, with all respect to the Yak Academy, to Tía Andrea, who taught Alana Spanish from an infant. So Alana has a big advantage because she's one of the only students who spent any amount of time actually immersed in a Spanish-speaking home. So the only thing I don't like about her school is that Alana is, you know, she's the best speaker in her class, so she's helping the other kids come up. I wish there was 3 or 4 kids in that class who really spoke Spanish and that was dragging Alana along.

Yeah. On the other hand, it's great to, you know, it's great for her ego. She is the best. Is the teacher a native speaker?

Yes, they all are. Excellent. And, you know, being in San Diego, they're authentic immigrants as well. So, and they love Alana. They note that she doesn't speak Spanish with an English accent. And again, that's thanks to Tía. But Alana's sweet and she listens well. I guess now, and so that she's in the little, she's in the 4-year-old class now, so they keep points on if you're listening to the teacher and whatnot. And Alana was very proud to tell me the other day she got 7 points. All right, Lucius got 0 points. And speaking of Lucius, I bring him up because Alana was writing a card to Lucius Whenever she has a spare minute, she grabs pens and paper and writes cards to people. Thank you cards, hello cards. She's very sweet, and she's trying to write. And I'm just pulling out my phone so I can show you the picture of how she wrote it. So she was trying to spell Lucius. And I was cooking, and Marla was in the other room. And so we were— where is it? There it is. So she's asking how to spell it. I said, well, why don't you write it first, Alana, and then I'll show you. So she wrote it as this. I don't know if you can see it.

I can't very clearly, but go ahead and explain to me.

L-O-O-C-I-U-S. Fabulous. Lucius. He spells it L-U-C-I-U-S. And she's going to spell it with an S-H, but she phonetically sounded out a relatively difficult word. Say hi, Alana.

Hey, Alana, how you doing? Good.

Yeah.

¿Puedes hablar español?

Sí.

Maravilloso.

Gracias. Gracias.

Yeah, no, that's great that she's spelling, you know, and you're right, phonetically it's actually a pretty good shot.

Yeah, you know, and she even spells her, I don't know if Selena's like, I don't know if the word dyslexic is correct, but She gets her Bs and Ds mixed up. She writes her Ss and Ns backwards. But I think it's cute and I like it. It kind of looks like ancient Greek.

So there you go. And also patience. I think a lot of it is not stressing over that stuff. Yeah, you know, stressing over that stuff just makes it worse, you know. And at some point you keyboard and it's done. And, you know, handwriting is going to be an esoteric skill relatively soon, if not already.

And as it stands, I mean, I have terrible handwriting. I couldn't even be a doctor. My handwriting is so terrible.

So, yeah, it's hard for me to fill out a form by hand anymore. You know, I can do my signature, but beyond that, it feels strange. It does feel like I'm practicing an ancient art somehow.

Exactly. But one thing we talked about last week was trying to do some financial literacy with Alana and try to get that going. So we've been putting thought into it and An idea that I had a while ago that I never really executed with Alana, but I think the time is ripe is, you know, she wants to learn to make money. She's really interested in that. She knows that money allows us to buy things. Yup. So we are looking for ways for her to make money, and both inside the home and outside of the home. And my idea for outside of the home was to set up a tent at Balboa Park on the big promenade there with all the other vendors and offer financial services. Where she can make change for people in pesos, euros, dollars, and Bitcoin.

Wow.

And I'm gonna— we're gonna make a list of all the darn services that I think that we can brainstorm that she can offer. Sing the second verse to the ABCs, teach you how to read, help you learn to use an abacus. All right, your children for 20 minutes, leave your kids there to play for a few minutes while the parents get coffee or whatever, something like that. And we're just gonna post up and see if she can make a buck or two.

You know what, I love all of those. What might be really cool is if she gets the basic abacus, for her to teach other kids math. And parents all over are worried about their kids' math. How cool would it be if you had a 4-year-old offering abacus-based math lessons to other kids? You know, and, you know, say, suppose you could like, you know, in 10 minutes I'll teach them how to do, you know, X or Y, you know, something, count to 1 to 10 or add 2 numbers or something. And I think parents would love to, and Alana could do it. That's what's amazing is I could see Alana with all earnestness, okay, this is how you do it, you know, and walking them through it.

Yeah, she could. And so we've been working with her on our counting, so now she understands how to count by tens, not just by ones. Really trying to hammer in what you said a couple weeks ago about teaching her, you know, tens, hundreds. That's how our language works, our language of math. So she knows now the difference between counting by ones and then counting by tens. She can count by tens to 100. So we're going to keep working on it. And we've been watching YouTube videos about how to use her abacus. So—

Very cool. Yeah, abacus is very powerful. And I think that would be a blast. You know, if you do it, I think try to videotape whatever you do. I think it'll be super cool footage. Just because she's such a character, you know, she is so bright and articulate, but she's also funny, you know.

Yeah, and she's really sweet, you know. She's so earnest. Like, Alana gets just as excited about little things as she does about big things. If you buy her, if you give her a sticker or you buy her a new dress, she has the same, oh man, Uncle Gene bought me this. He's so nice. Thank you. It's really something.

You know what else you can do, and maybe this is already part of it, is, you know, if you have a little table, you could create a little, you know, a sign and kind of a skirt for the table with, you know, Alana's services. And I bet she would have a blast preparing it at home and then going and setting it up out there. Yeah, you know how in Charlie Brown, you know, there's a lemonade stand or the psychiatrist stand, I forget, but you know, have your own little cute stand. And you could create the Alana brand. I bet she could get the idea of a brand.

Yeah, I was thinking about calling my kids THC, the hot commodities, and then set them up. But yeah, for sure, we're gonna— so Alana's taking over my Snapchat account. I downloaded Snapchat so I could keep up with the kids. Yeah, and, uh, by the way, just from a business perspective, Snap— what they're doing is pretty, pretty incredible. Hey, hang on, brother. But Alana's been doing that, and she's basically running my Snapchat. And we're going to set her up and get her on Instagram or something.

Okay.

She's into it.

Well, this is all super fantastic, and we're probably kind of at our time limit. And it looks like Logan maybe needs some attention.

I think so. From his mother. Great stuff, Ryan.

Take care.

Bye-bye. Bye.