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Ask HN: What knowledge or skills do you hope your kids to have?

21 points by sharps_xp ↗ HN
Just had my first kid, and I'm thinking about all the things I hope she'll learn.

Some things I hope she learns: - physical/emotional/spiritual/mental health all affect each other; live a balanced life - how to distinguish between things that compound over time and things that don't (not money, but relationships, hobbies, skills) - how to eat well - how to express oneself - how to listen

25 comments

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arthurjj
I don't know if it's a skill per se. But if agency or initiative is learnable it's something I'm hoping for for my son. The things I'm proud of I decided to do without direct prompting from others
austincheney
* planning - The informal calculus of anticipating changes and moving targets is a common sense few people possess.

* self-reflection - The confidence to objectively see yourself as a non-special data point comparable to other data points prevents many failures attributable to bias.

* honesty - Honesty is a skill many people are shockingly terrible at and horrified to encounter. Yet it determines who seeks to do you harm more so than anything else.

* immortality - If the children inherent the rare physical traits that I have grown into there is never reason to feel physical intimidation from other people. Let that define their character more than anything else.

banmeagaindan2
I've tried finding a good book on planning but failed - do you have any recommendations?
austincheney
Look at the resources at PMI: https://www.pmi.org/

The greatest challenge to planning is to train yourself to think in terms of moving targets and contingincies. It doesn't matter where a thing is right now or where it will be. What's important is where it can be and working backwards to the present.

meiraleal
I'm curious. How does this immortality thing work?
sgillen
All these life skills are great, I was also going to say mathematics though. It’s well known that languages are much easier to pick up for children, I think math is similar. Even if your daughter never uses it outside of school, fluency makes school much less stressful, and opens many doors.
pkrotich
How to learn - no one teaches how to learn effectively and yet we are expected to be lifelong learners.
unlog
A secondary language is a must-have if possible when you are young. It doesn't only allow you to speak with people, it introduces you to other cultures, opens your mind on how things could be so differently. I'm from a Spanish speaker country and learned English alone. Music also. What I consider the most important thing is that learning shouldn't feel like an obligation.
rdtwo
I hope my kid learns how to be handy and take care of stuff like cars and houses.

I hope she learns good money management skills

How to handle emotions and mange relationships and use others to get what she wants in life be that fiscal emotional or otherwise.

I hope she learns how to handle abusive and toxic people and cut them off.

Also how to manage risk and take advantage of situations where risk reward are in her favor.

the_resistence
Critical thinking skills and extreme appreciation for thinking for themselves.
dakiol
Fluency in 4 languages before 12. I speak X, my wife speaks Y, we both speak to each other in English and we live in a country that speaks Z. Could be a challenge, I know.
fakedang
Not really. I learnt my four fluent languages before 12. One was the mother tongue at home, the second was English, the third was the language of the region I was living in, the fourth was the majority language of my home country. I picked up French at 12 though it's not as fluent as the others (i.e. I don't dream in it yet).

Helped that three of the languages (and later French) were taught in school, I guess.

nforest
May be anecdotal but my family is friends with two parents, the father French and the mother American. They and their children lived a few years in France and Montréal, and they spoke the two languages at home. I remember two of their children (around 8-9 years old at the time), not being really fluent in any language, but actually quite mediocre at both. They would start a sentence in french, struggle on grammar or vocabulary, and end up giving up and finishing it in English. I can't imagine what it would be like with two more languages.
boltzmannbrain
Fix my VCR / DVD / DVR / Netflix / whatever when I'm old.
dprophecyguy
- Ability to determine whether a fact is fake or not.

- Computer Science (Think Like a Programmer)

- Empathy

- To go through a struggle and learn from it.

- Embrace Pain instead of running away from it.

- Handle Personal Finance (Tax, Saving, Investment)

- System Thinking (Understand Everyone is Playing a Game)

- Not get influenced by Advertising. (Dont be funnel)

- Dont be a skinner box.

- Ability to love one person for rest of their life.

virtualmic
This is a great list!

> - System Thinking (Understand Everyone is Playing a Game)

Any pointers on how to develop this in a kid?

dprophecyguy
I think games are the best way to depict this, on a higher level. Once your child can understand the concept of

Input -> System -> Output

Then you can show them example of modelling different activities happening around you.

What i have learned as my own is you need an underlying concept to model the systems.

For example : Elon musk use physics and break down everything based on first principle thinking, i resonate more with Input -> Compute -> Output.

So i try to break everything into such a model and then try to understand the processes..

Most of the things happening around us can be aligned to few principles...

Most of the social media is (Virtue Signaling, Rent Seekers, and Funnel)

You need to understand these things in order to identify them. So yeah you have to teach all the basic principles.

Economics (Just what is transaction and what encompasses an Economy) and little bit of Psychology and so and so.

Idea is that most of us are just machines with emotions (which are itself a product of hormones).

nforest
You should embrace suffering, not pain. If you're in pain it means something is wrong and you should stop, or you will hurt yourself and take longer to recover.
dprophecyguy
My perspective was Suffering causes pain, and there is a reason behind it, either you are weak to handle and take ownership so you want to run away from it.

Or either you are anxious and don't want something to let go of, embracing the pain is kind of accepting the situation and deciding to do something about it.

Progress = ( Pain / Suffering ) +_Reflection

Learnt from Ray Dalio, not my original thoughts.

k0t0n0
Abelity to build Clojure and detmoic.
Fr3dd1
In my opinion there is a lot to learn. And also a lot of usefull / important stuff. But if I had to decide for just one thing, I would say to stay positive and optimistic no matter what.
meiraleal
To not disregard physical education in favour of mental formation. mens sana in corpore sano.