Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity
It's the start of the holidays. My daughter is 11 y/o and I'm currently unemployed. I would like to do some projects with her that may interest her/us while enjoying the time together. Any suggestions/ ideas would be great!
226 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadTell her that for this project she will be your project manager that would lead to the fruition of the end product; that would be enough to keep her engaged with the whole process.
Good luck!
> end product
That does not sound fun. I don't think I was envisioning things as management and products when I was a child.
The first line of your comment does sound fun, however.
His idea of playing with a (age appropriate) train set was to get his mother to set everything up under his direction, similarly going to the beach he'd direct me to build a dam... (which I was happy to do).
But still ask because she might know have an idea. Still ask, and encourage her to speak up and that you'll give it a try if it is affordable (or whatever qualifiers you have). Still ask, and provide some varied suggestions or categories of things to do. Still ask and try to get preferences of what the kid is currently interested in. At minimum, you can probably be left with some dislikes and a few things that might be interesting.
All she might want to do is watch some cartoons, notice the content and after some time propose to record your own little video with a similar content, or to model and 3D print one of the characters, or to use scratch to program one of the characters to do something.
Alternatively, give her options, not only verbal but take her places (the mall, local market, county fair) and observe what calls her attention and dig deeper into that!
Browsing books at a local library about whatever topic she might like could also be interesting!
Good luck and hope you have tons of fun!
Road trips were great bonding experiences for me as a parent.
Sure their headphones were on a lot when they weren’t sleeping.
But it was all happening someplace they hadn’t been.
And they saw me out of my comfort zone dealing with the unknown laughing at fart jokes on the XM comedy station.
Good faith means living with answers you don’t want to hear.
I mean if you ask and then say “I don’t want to do that” to her answer, what do you expect when you ask how about a hike instead?
You can choose which routes are available for a child to express their personhood, but you can’t prevent its expression.
Holding their expression of autonomy in contempt has consequences that you probably don’t want.
Learning from your child, on the other hand, will probably pay off for the rest of your lives.
TikTok is more interesting than most people.
- Some crafting
- Some electronics
- If you wish some programming
- A lot of fun afterwards...
http://phoniebox.de/index-en.html
https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID
She is SO happy with this thing, it is a pleasure to look at her still using her wooden RFID tags to play "The Bare Necessities" from The Jungle Book and dancing in her room nearly every day - she is 3 now.
[1] https://us.yotoplay.com/
https://studio.com/mark-rober-engineering
Not sure if you have any instruments around the house, but make a song with her
Like another poster said, make magazine. They have tooons of good projects.
https://gadgetlite.in/2022/01/math-playground-games/
Target practice, berry picking, helping my father do woodworking projects, learning to shoot a bow, playing assistant in the kitchen to my sister's baking, collecting vegetables from the garden for dinner, trips to the library with my mother and sister where I would lay on the floor and read Dr. Seuss while my sister worked on stuff for her high school newspaper, putting together imaginary travel wardrobes for my dolls, trying every 'girly' craft I was aware of -- sewing, crochet, etc -- though none of that ever resulted in a finished project otlr really stuck.
As an adult, my sons have helped widen my horizons by telling me stuff like "This 4x game (Master of Magic) is just like your favorite, SimCity" and walking me through how to play it primarily as a city/civilization building game.
If you can find some sweet spot of that sort, I think it would be wonderful. I have read that one of the strongest predictors of career success in women is a good relationship to her father.
Enjoy.
Once you have a long enough list, pull up a calendar and pick dates for doing these things. Keep options open (e.g. don’t buy tickets to that concert too early) because you will have to adjust the plan.
Then hang the list and the calendar and review/revisit maybe once per week. Add/remove activities from the list, plan them on the calendar. Encourage her to decorate or personalise the plan.
This serves multiple purposes. It involves her in the decision making. Teaches how to organise time and how to plan. Anticipation should build up naturally. She will like a plan that she has done personally (IKEA effect)
Have fun together! This opportunity to spend time with her will be increasingly rare, treasure it
When I ask him what he wants to do he says "I don't know", so I say "We're going swimming in the sea", "Lets plant some seeds", "Today we're cooking / sewing", "Lets pick a spot on the map and go visit it by bus/tram", or "Lets draw pokemon evolving".
(maps are kinda fascinating to him. I often ask him what he thinks he can see if he were stood on top of a particular local landmark - he has a good sense of direction, but no idea of scale/distance.)
Over time I've learned a bit about what he likes, but he's young and fickle enough that some ideas are good one day and terrible the next. (For example he loves swimming and playing football, but when I put him in age-appropriate classes he refused to take part - "I don't like doing what the teacher says, why can't I just have fun and play about?")
Electronics is interesting to him, as is listening to "Daddy music". (Goth/Rock/Metal.) "Mommy music" doesn't appeal as much which I find a little fascinating. Does he genuinely prefer my music, or is it something about me? I know that he behaves and plays differently depending on who he's spending time with ..
What genres does "Mommy music" consist of?
So a reasonably high amount of overlap, which is why it's a bit fascinating.
(I guess I learned early on that he liked loud drums, loud rhythms, and repetition. Things like Rammstein - Fier Fier, Prodigy - Firestarter, so I tend to bias myself in that direction if he's nearby or listening with me. Maybe that's all it is, but it's fun to observe.)
A blogger I read a while ago (I completely forget who) wrote something about this that stuck with me: if you ask a kid if they want pancakes or cereal for breakfast, they'll pick one and be delighted. If you ask them what they'd like to have without presenting options, this can lead to a complete meltdown. Picking from infinite options, forcing them to think all of them up and then turn down n-1 of them... It can be too much for a kid.
Give kids a small number of diverse options where you also approve of all of them. Everyone is pretty happy with the decision. (This system maybe also works really well with adults.)
I force a choice on mine, and she immediately 'strongly' choose the other one, which I reject, which makes her want it even more.
Me: <Kid's name>, do you want apple juice? No. Do you want orange juice? No. Do you want grape juice? No. Well that's all we've got, which one do you prefer? None, I want something else. ... and obviously whatever we had would not do. My mom who saw I was not efficient enough: Okay <kid's name> do you want apple or orange juice? Orange.
My first reaction was "but I already suggested it", but I got better after a while.
[It works to get class buy-in, even if you are offering meh choice A and awful choice B. A class that has chosen "A" will be more engaged doing it than if you just told them to do A...
but you'd better be ready to do 'B' if the class decides to be contrarian. Once, they really wanted to do the quiz to show that they really -do- know what we've been doing, and if I hadn't had the quiz prepped and ready I'd have been in trouble...]
Has literally never worked with my kids (now aged 17 and 13) fwiw.
Oh, totally. It does work with my kids somewhat, but there has to be at least a minimal reason for constraint and at least some desirability of the options. At school, constraint is expected and things that are not entirely fun are tolerated.
Asking A or B for breakfast as someone else pointed out, when they're not interested in eating, isn't going to do anything.
Also--my wife and I do the "A or B --- or -you- propose something" with each other. Prevents just absently saying "nah" to a long list of options.
I had to reach the age of 22 and get the chance to use computers for the first time in my life to figure that out ... he will be ok :)
This is a very insightful question. Although I can’t answer for your child, I know mine takes an interest in almost anything that i show love or curiosity for. If I express love for a song (not with words but by singing it, dancing to it, etc), he will ask to hear it again and again.
Does his mother show a love for music and specific songs?
He got his first watch, way before he could tell the time, because he was so interested in my watch collection and kept pleading to wear one "just like daddy does".
But yes I think we both enjoy music, and I think we both sing (badly) to our favourite tracks now and again - usually he tells us to stop!
That said, the pregnancy music selection was mostly daddy's music because daddy has a music education, mommy's pretty much deaf to intervals between notes and stuck on music from her youth. But the things that were there, baby still loves.
Since then I've made an effort to expand on his repertory from daddy's music. Mom's attempts to do so are met with less enthusiasm.
----
Thaaat said: parenting so far has confirmed the story about the Oedipus complex. In plain words, it's like this: mom can't give him her full attention; the world and society and large steal her from him. Luckily, the baby learns to personify all this stuff into dad -- it's dad who steals mommy. This is lucky because he can aspire to be me, while "society at large" is enough to drive anyone insane. This is very very clear in this family: kid wants to be with his mom, often alone with her; but also: kid wants to be like me. He attentively watches me as I dress, and enjoys enormously the homologies (hey, let's all put on socks!). Even when it comes to daddy's "no" -- this is understandable, the overarching ways of the world are not. (Jacques Lacan has this pun where "le non du pere" becomes "le nom du pere" -- baby will have my name, this is the heart of fathering.)
I can also see that when she works overnight he tries to outright punish her, by ignoring her, when she returns.
But those kinda things aside I don't see anything like your story there. I guess it goes to show that kids, and personalities, are so varied.
There's not an A or B answer to this kind of question. Parents are influential, and the response to parents' recommendations and preferences are inseparable from the actual relationship.
My oldest son is now 13. Most of what I played for him isn't so interesting anymore. But we spent a couple years earlier in his life where we went to my workshop and I'd play Kraftwerk and he'd get one on one time and we'd do "serious" things. Kraftwerk is still treasured to him, and I doubt that it's because Kraftwerk was more intrinsically appealing to him than those other things...
Or, conversely, my dad always listened to music from rat pack performers. It was a subject of curiosity when i was 6-11... awful when I was 12-17 and had a terrible relationship with my dad, and now it's evolved to a mild appreciation tinged with nostalgia. If I was still mad at my dad I think it would be hard to like it.
I would do the programming, and the girls would help assemble the parts. But they would be with me and see the programming process. Soldering lead free is difficult, in the end some things I soldered myself with lead. And one of the girls is interested in the programming in the end.
It need not be educational in the traditional sense at all either. You could go on hikes, teach about camping/wilderness survival, knot tying/scouts activity stuff. It could even be handyman things if those are of interest to her (I know they would have been of interest to 11yo me) - basics of tools and tool safety (assuming you know it yourself, or perhaps a local course for kids if available). There are more "practical"/lifesaving options too like knowing how to change a tire, or how do perform CPR/Heimlich maneuver.
Additional on a tangential note there are lots of excellent books, but in particular I highly recommend the x Book series by DK (not just for kids but also for adults) (https://www.dk.com/ca/promotion/big-ideas-series/). Encyclopedias are also great, the more pictures the funner they are for some.
Do your own thing and she will see how it looks to be engaged in something you like.
All the other props and gimmicks will only implant your interests on her, which might be the the same and that is ok, but most likely they will not be.
However, she should be with friends around her age as well. Parents are important, but negotiating friendships is invaluable.