While Conrad was growing, kicking CB and getting excited about food (bananas!) we discussed, read and thought substantially about the philosophies we should apply in raising him and other children. Our approach to raising children is an application of our broader philosophies. We will refine these applications as we learn and grow as parents. Currently they are:
- Bring children into our family. Give them a foundation. Avoid wrapping our family around our children.
- Teach our children to love and pursue goodness, truth, and beauty.
- Expose our children to many different people at home and abroad from an early age.
- Teach them to understand all sides of arguments.
- Engage our children like adults.
- Reading and intelligent conversation > screen time. Screen time cannot be a forbidden fruit.
- Learn to do a few things well and excel at those things. Early on, resist the urge to specialize, favoring range of experience over depth of pursuit. Use range of experiences to optimize match quality, and once found obsessively double-down on the best matches — identified by our children’s interests and aptitudes — and promote them. There is joy in mastery. Deep learning through depth is greater and more joyful than deep learning through breadth.
- In early education, focus on forming the right worldviews. In later education, focus on forming the right capabilities — especially learning to think, reason, and persuasively express thought (dialectic and rhetoric).
- Focus on effective education. This includes having a growth mindset and maximizing time spent at the cusp between capability and ignorance.
- Learn core basic skills e.g., swimming, skiing, etc. from an early age.
- Become multi-lingual at an early age. Languages include spoken (e.g., English/Spanish/French/Mandarin) and written (e.g., music, math, data, economic, and programming languages).
- Our general expectation is that what we do we do well. There are modest rewards for top performance as it is expected (and top performance is its own reward). There are consequences for poor performance.
- The children eat what the adults eat. They eat at the table from their first solid food, and they eat a variety of food. They learn where food comes from and how it is prepared.
Finally, week seek to remember that we are likely to have about 18 years where we are able to see each child on most days — about 6,500 days in total. If our kids then move away and we see them about three weeks each year for the subsequent 30 years, that’s about 650 additional days we get to spend with them, or a mere 10% of the total days we were able to spend with them as they grew up. We must make all the time count.
Last updated: 2021 (v2)
Prior versions: 2018 (v1)