How to Help Your Child Become the Happy and Amazing Person She Was Meant to Be

school, and Friday was our last faculty meeting. Graduation's tomorrow night, so I'm finally landing this plane for this year, and it feels really, really good. I love, I love the kids, and we've got a great faculty, and it's really great to be done every year.

Sure, last day of school was always my favorite one, to be honest.

There we go, there we go. Well, we, we spend every week, we have 15 minutes at the end of the school week doing Announcements, Apologies, and Appreciations. And this, for our very last day of school, we had an hour-long version. And mostly kids just appreciate, appreciate each other and their guides, and it's just really sweet and warm. And insofar as there's a stereotype of teenagers as being kind of cynical and hard and self-indulgent, you know, our kids, we've created a culture, supported a culture where kids are just warm, authentic, and loving. It's quite wonderful.

That's awesome. I can tell you at your average school in Hawaii circa '80s and '90s, if you had a last day of the year to tell the teachers what you really thought, would not be an appreciation.

Hey, Alana, how are you doing?

Hey, come on, you're on camera. Watch out, sit down, sit down. No, we're not doing it. We're hanging out with Uncle Mike. We're not doing anything else. Come on.

Hey, Alana, can you say hi?

Hi.

Hi, how are you? Hi.

I'm good.

I hear, I hear you know how to read. You are learning how to read. Is that true?

Yes.

Wow, that's so exciting. I think reading is one of the most fun things on earth, and I'm so happy you get to do, learn how to do it.

Yeah, um, so we bought that game Set Yes. And it arrived in the mail, and I show it to Alana, and first thing she does is read it.

Yep.

And set, like a champ. So we're off to a good start.

Excellent. Have you had a chance to figure it out yet?

Yeah, you know, it took me a little while to figure it out, to be honest with you. I was like, boy, I'm not as smart as your average 8-year-old, clearly. But I got it figured out. Alana and I went through it. It was a little hard for her at first to kind of figure out, try and learn the 4 categories or the 4—

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It's maybe a little early, but you know, you could probably do a super simplified version where maybe you just take, you know, I forget what the simplest version is, but you know, super simple, maybe 2 different kinds of sets or something.

Sorry, my son just spit up everywhere, so I'm trying to wipe it.

Welcome to fatherhood. Anytime I go in somebody's car and they apologize for the car being dirty, I say, "Hey, I had kids. You haven't seen anything." Exactly right.

Exactly. So we're playing Sett and she's into it. She wants to understand the patterns because she likes pattern games. A lot of those are on iPad. I saw that Sett also has an app that I'm probably gonna look into getting too for her. Although I do like the fact of sitting around and having the family play with her because—

Oh yeah, and once you get going, of course, then there's the laughing and the dynamic and so forth.

But I think my next step with set is to show her 3 cards and say, why is this not a set?

There you go.

What's something like that? Or maybe we'll try and do a game where it's just, we'll do 2 categories, color and shading or something, or number and shape.

Yep.

Just try to simplify it for her.

So just a really simple thing I may have explained before, but I find it useful. There's something called concept teaching. Where in order to learn a concept, and this kind of gets into philosophy and categories and all sorts of things, but in order to learn a concept we point to 2, 3, 4 different versions. Oh, this is a dog, that's a dog. You mean the Great Dane and the Weimaraner and the dachshund are all dogs? Yeah, they're all dogs. Or, you know, tables. You know, big tables, small tables, coffee tables. Oh, those are all tables. And so our minds figure out what's in common. And then the next step is to see what's not a dog or not a table. And, you know, in my Socratic questioning, I do that, you know, and Socrates did in a certain sense as well. What is justice? You know, is this kind of an action? If I steal, is that just? No. If I, you know, divide things fairly, is that just? Well, yes. So, you know, just as a simple kind of way to think about things, and obviously you could do it with set too. What's a set? Well, this one's a set, this one's a set, this one's a set. Oh, this one's not, this one's not, this one's not. And you can just do that everywhere. And you know, for me, a lot of learning, which I think is not adequately recognized, is developing new categories in the mind. People think that vocabulary is simply a word, but I see, you know, beyond— well, I would say even concrete things like tables and chairs, it's an abstract category. And so, you know, you read what irony is in the dictionary, and if you're a 6th grader, blah blah blah, what?

You know, uh, irony is being killed by an insulin truck, according to my high school English teacher.

What was it? I missed that. Go ahead, go again.

Irony is a diabetic being killed by an insulin truck.

There we go, that's a great one, that's a great one. But you could see you could need 3 or 4, and then some non-irony as well. Yeah, um, but yeah, you know, and so, um, I, I'm, I'm very big on really consciously developing categories in children's minds and helping them understand categories. And, you know, I know you're interested in philosophy. What makes philosophy interesting is the boundaries between categories, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, set, it's pretty clear. Either it is a set or it's not. Although, actually, what makes the game interesting is, as you say, it can take a minute. There's some that are obvious, you know, the 3 green— if they're all 3 green things of the same kind, that's pretty easy. But there— I think one of the reasons it's a great abstract thinking game is you have to learn to differentiate you know, shapes and colors and categories and patterns to develop, to become quicker and quicker at ever more abstract sets.

Right, yeah, and you probably have to learn to take a risk if you're not sure on something, especially as a child, to try and beat your parent.

Absolutely, yeah. But the other thing is, I think once your mind kind of groks the category, then I think you can be really fast. And so I have a hypothesis that children can grok new categories, can create and refine new categories in general more quickly than adults. I sort of think that adults at some point, we certainly see this in politics, kind of get stuck with certain categories in their heads. And I think adults at some point, you know, obviously if you're a philosopher, you do this all the time, it's easier. But I think for a lot of adults, it's really hard for them to imagine a completely new category. And so they just interpret the world based on the categories that they develop when they're younger. And so that's why I have seen a lot of kids beat their parents at Set after a learning curve because they think they can, oh, this is the category, boom. And it's sort of analogous to learning languages as well. Oh, this is this word in this language, this word in this language, okay, boom. Once they get it, it's kind of part of their software, so to speak, and it makes, allows them to move really quickly in ways that may not be the case for adults.

Right. Something in that same vein about children learning quickly, Alana has taken pretty quickly to Rock, paper, scissors.

Yep, very cool.

And there's 3 sets there: rocks beat scissors, scissors beat paper, paper beat rocks, and it's circular. And at first she couldn't understand that, it's months ago.

Yeah.

And now that's something that we play all the time if we're bored or sitting at a coffee shop trying to figure out who's going to go first on checkers.

Yeah.

Because I used to let her always go first. I'd say, because you're the most beautiful. And then, you know, now she's old enough to understand differently, and I'm like, She's like, well, I should go first because I'm the most beautiful. I thought to myself, well, isn't that sexist? So I said, we got to think of a better way, Alana. No beauty privilege for you here.

There we go. There we go. Yeah, and at some point, you're going to want to go first. Or her brother has to go first or whatever.

We need—

No.

Yeah, but now she has to earn it. Every time we play a game, she has to do rock, paper, scissors. But she's really grasped it. And she has strategies in her mind where she's going rock, scissors. Paper. She's trying to mix it up to beat me.

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

She's better at that than almost any other game. Like, she has a real strategy in her head, and she's genuinely disappointed when it's a tie or she doesn't win because she was thinking about it. Whereas everything else—

I would assume you're counter-strategizing, and now that you know she's strategic, yeah.

I managed to win about 5 out of every 7. Oh wow.

There we go. But yeah, she's going for it. How about tic-tac-toe? Do you play tic-tac-toe at all? Yeah, we do.

That's, that's the other coffee shop thing is that if we're ever bored or I feel like she's been watching too much, uh, TV or something, I just turn it off, I grab a piece of paper wherever we're at, I go, let's play. And it's like Connect 3. I tell her it's like Connect 3 kind of because we play Connect 4 a lot. Yep. And, uh, I've— I only started doing tic-tac-toe with her a couple of months ago. Hindsight, I should have done it sooner, but for whatever reason I didn't. And so she's still kind of learning it, but she gets it.

Yeah, yeah.

But Connect Four, she's also getting better. Even since last week, we've been playing checkers, or on checkers and Connect Four at night, and a few other games like this game where you hang metal bars and stuff, kind of.

I bet she's getting better at checkers all the time.

She is. Like, now she's looking for the jumps. She's making moves so that I can't jump her. She's— I just can't believe how fast she picks it up.

Yep.

First time you play that, she never learned how to set up the board. You know what I mean?

Yep. Well, I think I told you, I thought a great, you know, super low-cost school for poor kids could be you just read and play chess or play chess and checkers for 6 years.

I think it would be better than what they got. Exactly.

Better than what they've got. You know, the stimulation she's getting. What's boring about tic-tac-toe is at some point you realize whoever goes first can either win or tie, and then it's no longer fun, whereas checkers, pretty much unlimited, unlimited sophistication, right?

So speaking of school, this morning she tells me that, she goes, Daddy, I want to go to kindergarten.

Yeah.

And I was like, how do you go to kindergarten? And she says, because Wyatt, one of the kids in her preschool, is turning 5, so he's going to kindergarten next year.

Yeah.

She says, I want to go. What's kindergarten? She goes, it's school for big kids. I'm like, why do you want to go? And she gives me this look, I just asked the world's dumbest question. To her, school is just nothing but hope and change.

Well, I think there is, yeah, it's funny, even at that age, you know, the word status sounds funny, but in a certain sense, yeah, it almost sounds like a status move up for her to get to go to school and be one of the big kids. And, you know, I think we're kind of programmed to do what our tribe does. And even at the age of 4, our tribe goes to school at 5, so it's an honor, so to speak.

No, absolutely, and she's into it. So we'll see, you know, at this point we're worried that not putting her in a school of some sort would just be crushing to her spirit.

Well, you're looking at not for this coming fall, but for fall of 2017?

Yeah, so we have a little bit of time. We'll probably keep her in that same Spanish immersion school, Yak Academy program. She's done very, very well there. I gotta tell you one quick anecdote. We're driving through town one day and I see a new bar restaurant on the corner that I hadn't seen before, named, uh, uh, Encontro, which poorly pronounced, right? But it's a Spanish word.

There you go.

Hey, Alana, how do you, um, or what does this word mean in Spanish? She doesn't even look at the sign. She's looking out the window and she says, I found something. She knew exactly what that influence role means.

And she translates it like that.

Yeah, like, "That's a silly question, Dad." There we go. Spanish is getting pretty good.

Excellent, excellent. It looks like you've got a fellow there who's a little bit energetic. One of the things we might talk in a future call about is maybe organizing a group of homeschoolers or unschoolers to do a kind of kindergarten preschool thing And you can even brand it for Alana and her peers as this is the big thing. So if you don't want to do a local existing one, you know, you could—

you guys— there's a girl here who would want to do it, although she is in a school program, which she probably will be, and her mom's a single mom, so that's kind of their best option at the moment. But if there's anyone else in your network that would want to do it, Alana would love to network with us and children and learn and share what she does. Learn from others. She does love that stuff.

Did you connect with Jordan? I connected you on Facebook.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

Okay, so that's one possibility. We'll keep cultivating.

Okay, what's that? Trying to keep up.

Looks like we both had our call and plenty busy, so have a great week and we'll talk hopefully next Sunday.

That's good. Thank you, Michael.

Thank you. Bye-bye.