Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to keep my daughter busy while tickling her curiosity

407 pointsmquarks215 comments

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!

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I became a single parent when my daughter turned 1 year old. When she got old enough we'd go fishing, bicycling, swimming, and hiking a lot. We'd also go to a used book store twice a month (on pay day) so she could pick out a few books to read. She loved doing that.

She had no interest at all in learning how to code or gaming but she loved helping in the garden and in the kitchen prepping and cooking meals.

When she got to Jr. High she wanted to join the "Cheerleader" squad so there were a lot early morning rides to school I had to make, and lot's of Basketball games I attended until she graduated, but I had a lot fun cheering along with them.

During those years I setup a campsite on our property so her and her friends could go hang out there. I'm sure they had more fun than most parents would approve of but they never got into any real trouble, the police were never called, and no one got hurt bad enough for the parents to call me. For the most part all those parents knew exactly where their kids were and what they were doing. And that I was close enough to deal with anything that came up. But there were never any serious issues.

She's 37 years old now, still loves to hike, backpack, swim, fish, garden, and cook, and most important, she still likes to hang out with me!

We have such a weird culture around how we treat teenagers in this country. We all remember drinking and smoking as teens, but parents tends to rule with an iron fist and convince themselves that they have more control than their parents did, which means we force healthy normal curious kids to go out to a secluded area (probably by car) to get high or drunk or explore in other ways, away from an adult that could help if something goes wrong, and at a much greater chance of involving the police and putting their future in jeopardy. I respect you for giving your daughter and her friends a safe place to just be normal teenagers. I’m not saying parents should buy their teens a bottle of vodka but everyone should start from a place of being realistic and reducing harm.

Speak to your kids like adults, explaining why some choices lead to worse outcomes, and they will make choices like adults. Speak to kids like they're slaves, and they will make rebellious choices like slaves. Don't speak to your kids at all about decisions, and they will make poor decisions and wonder why their lives are so difficult.

One thing I’m very grateful for is that I never had to worry about going home as a kid. Never. Later I realized how much of a privilege that was.

Like you imply I think being punitive may be viewed as healthy because the opposite stance (of encouraging or enabling, or even participating) is boundary-blurring. In this case the temporally removed hypocrisy is better than joining in, which is the other extreme.

Culturally we don’t have a lot of nuance in America yet.

>We all remember drinking and smoking as teens

Speak for yourself, worst thing I did in high school was play too many video games.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

>By late adolescence, 78.2% of US adolescents had consumed alcohol

I guess I fall into that group, since I had a few sips, given to my by my parents.

> 47.1% had reached regular drinking levels defined by at least 12 drinks within a given year

So less than half.

> drug use by 42.5%

Also less than half. I wonder how many tried it just once.

> drug abuse by 16.4%

Hell yeah. My parents would have been very stern with me if they knew just how many hours I spent gaming.

I also taught myself programming into the wee hours of the night.

It was a wild time alright

I have friends who spent a huge amount of money and time in "Arcades" playing pinball and then video games in the `70s-`80s. And others who spent even more on blow.

I never got into gaming or blow myself. I was much more intrigued with the tech of games than playing them, and it's been amazing to see it progress from Pong to what's out there now.

After all these years I wouldn't say hanging out with friends and drinking a few beers and puffing a few doobies is "worse" than gaming though. Not even a tiny bit worse.

I really can't even imagine a reason why anyone would think that unless we're talking about getting shitfaced drunk and/or stoned, but that's really not much different than someone who's been chugging Mountain Dew and gaming for 24 hours+, and I have seen gamers do that, a lot too, not just a few times.

At that point it's fair to say it's an addictive behavior that's unhealthy.

I wonder how teenage alcohol abuse compares across countries, France in particular comes to mind since it's common to introduce wine relatively early (in moderation, and perhaps diluted, of course). I thought there was quite a young supervised with-meal drinking age too, but having searched for it perhaps that's changed (or I was wrong). If it's not some forbidden fruit maybe the run off with a bottle of vodka thing doesn't happen so much.

In France, diluting your wine will get you the guillotine ;-)

The legal drinking age is 16 for low alcohol content beverages (wine, beer, etc) ; 18 for all alcohols and tobacco.

At a family gathering or on a special occasion you may get a glass of wine starting around 14 or later I'd say, for most middle class families.

Binge drinking is not as much of a problem as in more northern countries, but binge alcohol consumption is a problem that is being felt at the University level.

Ha, I only meant your children's. Did it not used to be 12y as long as with a meal (and adults) or something?

Otherwise that's pretty much the same as the UK, except the 16/18 distinction is drink/buy rather than low/high ABV. (That's my recollection anyway - I'm almost as far past needing to care for myself as I am away from caring for anyone else!)

At the time the legal drinking age in the Netherlands was 16, and I can remember sneaking in drinks a few years early (just not buying any myself). I honestly think it’s for the best to get aquainted with alcohol earlier in your life, so that you don’t go wild later in life when there is much less supervision.

Nice. The library, used book stores and Blockbuster video were some of our favorites, especially when the weather was bad.

Thanks for sharing, hoping I can follow suit and raise an independent free-range daughter who likes me!

This should go on twitter as "Dudes posting their massive W's" :D

Mine is 22, about to start grad school for a Ph.D. in applied math (I'm Ph.D. in theoretical physics, but am a secret math nerd ... wife is also a math nerd and an M.S. Physics).

Early on we discovered how much she loved reading. So, we read to her, every night. For a while, I could quote whole sections of "The Sleep Book" (Dr. Seuss) from memory. As she grew older, she read. Voraciously. Throughout high school, she insisted she wanted to be an artist, which we completely supported. Said she hated math.

She liked some physical activity, though I could never convince her to work out with me or my wife at the gym.

Went through an IB program in high school. Told us at the end, after getting into a competitive art school, that she was happy she never had to take math, ever again. Fast forward a year, and she was aching to change majors.

She graduated with a double major (one being math), and a minor. Got into a bunch of grad schools for Ph.D.

Now, the girl who hated math at the end of high school, is about to move on to be a woman in a math Ph.D. program.

There's a point to this.

Your kid will find some things interesting, and others less so. Don't worry about that, and enjoy discovering what she likes with her. If you do the dad thing right, you will wind up with a kid who can adapt to new situations, and find joy in what they do.

My daughter still does (absolutely amazing) art on her own. Not just a dad saying this, she really is tremendously talented. And we encourage her to continue to pursue what she likes/loves.

Good for you, and good for her. What you guys have done is the most inspiring thing I've read today!

"I'm Ph.D. in theoretical physics, but am a secret math nerd"

Uh...you know that secret got out some time before your doctorate, right? =^>.

Physics grad here. We used to say theoretical physicists were people just not good enough for actual math. "Regular" phycisists like myself simply admitted they are too lazy.

As a 27 year old physics grad turned maths PhD with a physics MSc wife... I'm taking notes :)

as a young father. your piece elegantly summarizes what im hoping to be to my child. i wish you two many years of curiosity!

Thank you for posting this.

First off, great on you.

Second, I love the idea of giving your child access to as many used books as they can handle and the library. Used books are often very cheap in my experience, and the value a child will get out of that book we bought for $3 is extremely worth it. The library is also a great (and better) option, especially if there's one in walking distance.

As someone who is comfortable middle class, I'll do my best to always get my child a used book if they're going to read it. With a quick search on Ebay, you can get each of the Lord of the Rings books for ~$4 each, and that's including shipping. You seriously can't beat books as entertainment for cost and childhood development wins. That said, if the library is across town - we'll take that route.

My son is 12 y/o, and he's into Minecraft.

Yesterday he discovered the server mc.openredstone.org. He spent all day yesterday and about one hour today, and he ended up building a 4-bit adder.

On this server players learn how to build logic gates, and mix them so they eventually build CPUs. It's fully gamified, so beginners are called "students" and more advanced players are called "builders". To become a "builder" you need to pass some trials. The "builders" probably have their own challenges (not sure, my son is still a student), in any case, they behave like teachers. So a student will find a builder who will give them instructions, and guide them through more and more complex designs.

So, yesterday my son had no idea what XOR or NAND is, and today he already built a 4-bit adder, and has dreams of building an ALU.

I'm quite excited to be honest. By the way, I'm not in any way connected with whomever put together this Minecraft server. I don't even think it's a for-profit thing, as far as I can tell, it's fully non-profit.

My kid has been into Minecraft for years, even before he had permission to play videogames. This year (he's 9) he started making 3d models and textures with Blockbench, and added them into his MCreator mod. It's a great gateway to learn stuff.

I've been programming for 15 years and had to google what NAND was. Had a sense of XOR

That's not something you should be so quick to tell people.

Oh come on! There are a lot of types of programming and most of them exist pretty far from logic gates. The previous poster probably understands the concepts from their work but doesn’t relate them to logic gates.

Ya that's basically what I meant. The concepts are arguably unavoidable if you've done enough.

Heh, roasted. I know you're being a bit facetious, but it's not like I haven't used them, but in terms of the acronyms and maybe actually using them as bitwise operations, it's something I've rarely needed in JS programming. If you aren't being facetious, then you might need to work on humility

You would be surprised how much more relevant info programmers miss...

Example, most programmers I know have no idea when a variable gets allocated on the stack and when it's on the heap.

Let's not talk about how many dont even know what a (stack overflow)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_buffer_overflow] is...

I remember being shocked to discover that a recent CS grad could not implement a factorial function using recursion. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to do that, but to not be able to do it?

a lot of CS undergrads compress out recursion knowledge. They learn that most recursion is best skipped in favor of iteration/dp, and they learn that they should implement things efficiently.

It’s possible the undergrad assumed you were referring to an efficient recursive algorithm or simply forgot most recursion.

No, I was quite explicit, and seriously, is it really that hard to write something along the lines of

    if (i<=1) 
       return i;
    else
       return factorial(i-1)*i;

It wasn't meant to be a trick or trap, it was the simplest recursive function I could think of and it’s not like I was asking him to implement a stack.

Heh, I just did the DS+A section of a Faang interview, and got the time and space complexity of an optimal solution more or less correct, as well as most of a recursive binary search implementation, but not quite there. I stumble with recursion because syntactically it's something you either have to use a lot or deliberately practice to have a keen sense of return values imo.

Probably won't get an offer because of that. Do I feel like as a frontend engineer I really need that knowledge? Not really. I could work it out for work purposes if I needed to tho. I'd be practicing it just to pass interviews.

I'd venture 95% of JS and Python devs don't even know what the stack is. They might have some vague understanding of a reference type vs. a value type, but that's probably it. Even in something like C# or Java I'd guess it's less than half that know what they are.

Diving into reverse engineering taught me just how little I know about assembly/call conventions and such. But it is highly educational.

To be fair, AND, OR and NOT are enough to compute any function, and you can make all the other operators out of a combination of those three. For example A XOR B is just (A OR B) AND (NOT (A AND B)). Knowing things beyond AND, OR or NOT is useful, but not strictly necessary. XOR has useful properties though: with random inputs you get TRUE 50% of the time, allowing you to chain it without trending to 0 or 1; also it's the opposite of bitwise equality.

The others aren't that interesting if you aren't dealing with hardware, and their function is obvious if you know the naming convention.

Nah, all you need are nand gates. Everything else can be implemented from those.

Yeah, similarly in mathematics they often like to build everything up from ‘implies’ where the rule is implies(a,b) = or(not(a), b) = nand(a,nand(b, b)).

You only need one of {AND, OR} too.

((a or b) is (not ((not a) and (not b))), and vice versa.)

All the Ns are just the opposites.

If you want to learn more about logic gates, you might like the book "Bebop to the Boolean Boogie". It's aimed at kids but someone with a CS background could fly through it pretty quickly.

Redstone is fun, and some people do amazing builds with it, but it gets tedious fast; like building your own computer from transistors - fun … once! :-) But Minecraft has an incredible amount of richness once you get into modding and command blocks (although it’s a shame that they don’t have a proper lua built in.) Speaking of which, there’s powder toy, which DOES have built in Lua.

Well, there's Minetest[1] if you want a voxel block game with Lua built in.

[1]: https://www.minetest.net

mazbe this could be to your sons liking?

https://nandgame.com/

also https://echa.itch.io/pocket-robots-test-chamber

Might be off topic but a nugget from having two girls (5 and 11). Kids don’t care about budget or how much things cost. We have toys we’ve spent hundreds of dollars on only to have the near free to free one be a hit. I say this to make sure you know your employment status likely only effects your kids if it effects you. Or said differently, to the extent it effects you it will effect them.

Kids will generally have fun with anything you show a degree of interest in. The copper pipe plumbing example in this thread is a perfect example. A simple Task became a life long activity for the kid. They will remember it forever and tell someone in the future “this time I welded with my dad”… they won’t remember that time my dad didn’t hire a plumber.

Things off the top of my head that have been a hit - Planting plants Fashion design Basic coding activities or contests Shooting Anything that requires safety procedures Lawn work (but make it fun or set a timer) Writing a story where they write some of it, you add in silly bits, they write more , repeat till laughing out loud. Both my girls super in to etiquette

Best of luck buddy and squeeze these years for as much as you can.

Yes, time with dad. Get outside and walk or hike. Play in dirt. Explore plants and flowers. Splash in a creek. My daughter really enjoyed the affordable bow&arrow with foam target.

All this is making me want to have kids sooner.

You need to get off of Hackernews first sir

Says you. Enough karma and I’ll unlock the HN Dating page.

Whaaat … there is an HN dating page :)

Yes but the market is kind of poor right now. You'll need to have good numbers to attract any kind of attention.

I'm already married so no worries.

Get off Hackernews and do what? Next steps please T_T

Or just be a kid.

There is nothing my oldest (4.5 years old) enjoys more than going down to the creek by our house and exploring.

We’ve learned pretty quick with both kids that spending a lot of money on toys etc resulted in a lot of one-and-done play sessions before they’d quickly lose interest.

As with all things and especially kids… YMMV!

My wife frequently says to me “this is why I don’t buy my kid toys” as we watch our Son playing with some random bucket or cardboard box around the house.

I laugh my ass off so many times I see this. The toy is on the side and the box that the toy came in is apparently more fun. That or Costco boxes. They’re sturdy and can fit kids inside them. Lol

100%

My kids (boys) have probably a couple thousand dollars worth of toys in the house. You know what they enjoy playing with? “Toys” that we’ve made together. Planes, boats etc. the one exception probably is Legos. Legos are cool!

Get legos from garage sales or something and open the doors to endless fun!

Very true. And very counter-intuitive. A cardboard box I turned into a playhouse in like three minutes is still one of my daughter’s favorite play things. The LEGO I bought her, on the other hand, is pretty much collecting dust.

> Best of luck buddy and squeeze these years for as much as you can.

This ... so much ... Just be there. Discover together.

My spouse and I know this with our 5- and 1-year-old.

We have a song that we play to remind ourselves of this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_HsMQ_AQw

> I say this to make sure you know your employment status likely only effects your kids if it effects you

That's partially true but there are also things for some hobbies/activities which are really expensive. I'm thinking musical instruments (+lessons), or robotics (okay, those were very expensive when I was a kid but maybe they're cheaper now :p).

When I was a kid I tried to do some robotics thing with my dad which was not terribly expensive (it failed due to the servos not being sufficiently powerful despite matching the spec from the book). But probably had the advantage that he knew about electronics a bit and could deal with the chemicals for etching a circuit board (and could borrow a uv lamp thing or oscilloscope or eprom writer from his employer). But these days you can have circuit boards printed for cheap and often there are ‘maker spaces’ which may have better equipment available (or just skip the PIC and use a raspberry pi).

For an expensive hobby I’d guess anything equestrian rather than music lessons though I don’t really know.

Also the OP doesn’t say they’re actively looking for work so they may be using ‘unemployed’ in the tongue-in-cheek sense of ‘I don’t have a job but I have enough money to live without one for a while and want to spend time with my kid’ rather than one of the more technical senses of ‘not employed and currently actively seeking/wanting/open to employment’, which even still may or may not imply tight financial constraints.

> robotics

that takes me back. Using NxC on a Lego NXT. One of the bigger reasons I moved towards programming.

Some things I enjoyed as a girl:

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.

Wow, that sounds like quite the variety of fun when you were younger; kudos! My dad was very much into sports, so my siblings and i - as you can imagine - played lots of sports in our youth; somewhat on teams but more so just with each other. And honestly, as fun as team sports were, i enjoyed my time tons more with just our little family unit when i was a kid. Kudos again to you for your fun youth! :-)

I did the Mark Rober Creative Engineering class with my daughters and we all had a blast. We made a apple slicing guillotine, a s’more assembly machine, and a robotic arduino-controlled bird. We finished the class 18 months ago and they still talk about it. They were 7 and 9 yrs old at the time. The key is to not do it all at once but to pace out the videos and exercises and truly do when he teaches, from brainstorming, to prototyping, etc.

https://studio.com/mark-rober-engineering

Just that day I was showing Arduino to my daughter - I know very little about hardware so we would be both learning if we went with the starter kit (that fact made her happy). Thanks for sharing this.

Sure! I ended up getting the official arduino starter kit and the Elagoo (?) kit Rober mentions in the class list. The Elagoo one is more versatile, but they complemented each other. A lot of learning, for us, came from finding the Elagoo and official projects and tutorials and completing them. There are many good guides and examples, but you may have to dig a bit on the Elagoo and official sites to find them. We had a lot of fun! It’s similar to legos, in a sense, with a little more thinking required and some cool interactive results.

Try lots of things and see what she gets into. Do some gardening. Make stuff with your hands. Cook. Play lots of different musical instruments. If you don’t have any, play rhythms with your hands. Listen to some music. Ask her what she likes or doesn’t like about it. Sing along to it. Read lots of books to her. Take her to visit woods, hills (with good views), rock formations, streams, lakes, old buildings open the public. Go to museums. Borrow a dog. Bring a friend and their parent along so she can play with the other child while you chat to the parent about grown up stuff, but you can still get involved in what the kids are doing.

My youngest and I love gardening together. She’s got so much gusto! Sunflowers grow really fast. Get loads of random seeds and a plastic tray to grow the seedlings in. Then once they’ve sprouted you can plant them in the beds or in bigger pots of you don’t have a garden. More steps more fun

Being unemployed probably means you don't have a huge budget, but some for our child I've tried to do a little bit of "everything" to see what he enjoys.

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 ..

> "Mommy music" doesn't appeal as much which I find a little fascinating.

What genres does "Mommy music" consist of?

dad was a metalhead and mom was a punk

I'd choose goth/rock/techno/industrial-metal and stuff from the 80s. She'd choose goth/rock/techno/90s music.

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.)

> When I ask him what he wants to do he says "I don't know"

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.)

Sounds plausible, but IME doesn't actually work with real kids

Works well with mine. He’s got 3 choices most mornings.

It doesn't with mine, I'm afraid. I frequently give them 1-3 options and they shoot them all down (even pancakes?!). Eventually I give up and ask them what they want, and they still don't know, or just want to eat nothing.

OK, sure, offering a choice of what to eat when they're not excited about the idea of eating isn't going to generate a response. I almost never ate breakfast as a kid... unless there was leftover cake or something I could sneak...

> Eventually I give up and ask them what they want, and they still don't know, or just want to eat nothing.

I force a choice on mine, and she immediately 'strongly' choose the other one, which I reject, which makes her want it even more.

It’s because they’ve learned that they can say no and you’ll keep coming up with more options. They’ve exited the game because you created the exit by failing to enforce the boundary.

Yeah I've experienced this when I was young. My mom was running a daycare at home, and I would sometimes try to help at lunchtime.

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.

Eh. I'm a teacher these days, and it works with real kids. With my own kids, who know the range of possibility and aren't quite so believing in my authority as that of a real teacher, it's still effective but less so.

[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...]

Might it simply be the social setting that makes it work in a class and not with your own kids? At a work offsite I'm happy enough to choose between a walking tour or a brewery visit as mandatory fun, but if I'm the same city with my wife we're probably gonna do something different

Has literally never worked with my kids (now aged 17 and 13) fwiw.

> Might it simply be the social setting that makes it work in a class and not with your own kids?

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.

> When I ask him what he wants to do he says "I don't know"

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 :)

> Does he genuinely prefer my music, or is it something about me?

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?

I see the same thing in other areas, definitely.

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!

"being unemployed" could also be a euphemism for "i sold my startup for $100s of millions"

Then the answer is easy. Go to the nearest Lego store and buy everything!

Baby had a starting preference for things we put with headphones over the mom's belly. This might sound insane, but I was in the OR for the C-section and once the baby was put on the mother's arm I started to play one of these music tracks and the baby stopped crying, appearing to recognize stuff from the older situation.

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 think our child seems to like us both "equally" these days, though it is clear some days that nothing Daddy does is correct, and mommy would do it better/properly.

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.

> 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 ..

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.

Hey I will use these tactics in my wife, thanks :)

Lots of good suggestions in this thread here, I'd just like to add - see what she's interested in, from a topic point of view. A lot of the suggested things here are science based. Is that what she likes? Maybe history? Museums and exhibits may be much more appreciated and exiting than science kits. Or perhaps biology? Bug collecting? A basic microscope kit might be better.

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.

Modern USB microscopes are extremely good. Not in the sense that the quality is somehow superb but in the sense that they can be had reasonably cheaply and give you a sufficiently magnified view to see lots of details that would not be visible to the naked eye. Importantly, they don’t require lots of the faff that a ‘proper’ microscope does, e.g. no messing around with dirty objectives or eyepieces or light sources or slides or covering slips or stains or preparing samples or two different focusing wheels or oils or whatever. And it can be a further pain if you want to get an image onto a computer whereas with a USB scope it’s already there. The point is that the lower barrier of entry can build interest and the low cost means you don’t feel so bad if you only use it once or twice.

I don't know where you lives, but do hicking with her if you have time.

Try to do some theater of mind games (d&d or whatever she or both likes). Maybe you can't afford going somewhere but nothings tie you there.

Talking about that if you lives in a city big enough, there must to be hidden places with a story to tell, grab a map a visit that with her. Think about a story you can tell with that. I learnt more about buenos aires (the city where I live) and Chicago (the city where I'm moving soon) because Dresden Files books and roleplaying, than from school. And I learned how to love every city secret because of that.

Why I'm talking about roleplaying and walking time together? Because both will be spending time together and will be knowing (a looot) each other, and over that, you will be feeding her imagination and curiosity.

And it is free.

Great suggestions and you inspired me. What is Dresden Files?

Books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dresden_Files

> What is Dresden Files?

It is a fantasy/mystery novel series written by Jim Butcher.

The sorries follow the titular Harry Dresden, who is a wizard-for-hire investigating supernatural disturbances in modern day Chicago. It can be described as a hard-boiled detective novel with fantasy elements.

A book series about a wizard/private investigator working in Chicago. It is funny, short (each book, they are like 20..) and they feed on arthurian lore plus urban legends (that is pushed even more by the roleplay books).

Jim Butcher is the author and the audiobooks are narrated by James Masters (spike in buffy tv show)

Maybe look at building up manual skills if possible. When my daughter was 11 y/o I as doing a lot of DIY plumbing in the house and I taught her to cut and bend (copper) pipes, and solder pipe joints. We used a gas torch, much to the horror of my S.O, but it was a useful skill learned and she got really good at it.

I think learning to "think with your hands" is not a recognized academic skill, but yet there's something real about it.

If at all possible, teach her to ride a bike and to actually be able to get around on one if your locale is suitable for it.

My kids (11, 8, 5) all ride bikes, and are competent enough to ride on the road on quieter streets. I've found it to be a wonderful bonding experience, and also a growth opportunity since they're learning to get around, read signs, navigate, plus it's laying the groundwork for later independence.

One of my professors (a Distinguished University Professor and fellow of the American Physical Society) selects for "ability to think with your hands". Successful experimentalists know that building things that work is hard, and having experience with plumbing, soldering, etc. really helps.

I've heard this from a couple of people - get her to dictate a story to you while you type it up (assuming you can type faster than she can). If it is long enough then you can send it off to a book printing service and get 5 copies or something. It costs a bit but the kids really get a kick out of it. You can design the cover art with her as well if she is into that.

If you have any pets, make them the main characters in the story. Anthropomorphize then.

Play.

I remember playing with my father who passed away a few years ago simple word games. We called that Word-building, a game where one player says a word and the next one has to say to word starting with the last letter of the previous word eg: Apple, Egg, Goose, Elephant and so on. Occasionally my father would say an uncommon word and when I asked him what it was, he casually pointed me to the dictionary, asked me to bring it and taught me how to use it.

Another game we played then is what we called Name-Place-Animal-Thing where we pick a letter and then have to say a proper name, a place name, an animal and a thing that starts with that letter. For eg: V -> Victor, Virginia, Viper and Vase.

Kids that age love to learn new words and concepts.

Paper-folding and origami are also great to spend time together.

Let her guide you? I somehow managed to raise three daughters to adulthood with their curiosity and love of learning intact, there is a luck component of course.

An easy, not much equipment needed, activity is drawing. What I like about it is that it incentivizes visualizing things (not everyone can, and that is okay, drawing what you are looking at can be fun too!) and since I generally was not great at drawing nobody felt they were too "bad" at it to participate.

A program the girls took advantage of was Reikes Nature studies. One of the things they do is catalog as many things they can see at a nearby wooded park. When I read Feynman's discussion of how the ants became a source of fascination for him I realized that there are zillions of questions right in front in our eyes if we think about it. Or perhaps more accurately wonder why things are the way they are.

David Macaulay has a great book called "The Way Things Work." (and it has funny illustrations of mammoths figuring things out) Reading it together and talking about how things work led to interesting questions which led to interesting projects to see if we could answer those questions.

And generally "active reading" where you read together and talk about the characters in the story, what they might be feeling, why they might be acting the way they are, and how things might be different if something happened in a different way than it does in the book.

Perhaps the best idea to be genuinely interested in what they are interested in, rather than trying to get them interested in something you are interested in. That may seem obvious but it wasn't to me at first.

My eldest and I started doing piano lessons at that age, in part because the music was interesting and in part because I always wanted something "safe" we could talk about (and music was always a good topic of conversation).

Oh, do not keep her busy. Let her wallow in the discomfort of having nothing to do, but do not give her the modern things which are an easy escape from that discomfort (TV, Computers, etc). You will see her natural interests reveal themselves and when they do, give them all the interest like they weer your own as well.

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.

If she likes electronics at all, I thought these were super cool... wish they made those when I was a kid!

Snap-in educational and fully functional circuits: https://www.elenco.com/snap-circuits-2/

Science & crafts toys: https://www.johncoproductions.com/collections/4m

Green & renewable energy toys: https://www.johncoproductions.com/collections/green-science

(Edit: For the second two links, apparently that is a non-US vendor. Sorry about that. But those toys are also commonly available in the US, at toy stores and often, museum gift stores)

Make a stop motion video - there are cheap/free apps that make it really easy to do

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.

Stop Motion Studio by Cateater is a good app iirc. It's available for at least iOs, Android and Windows.

I don't know if you're looking for something less technology focused, but—have you ever seen Scratch? I teach classes in Scratch to kids professionally, and I happen to think it's a really excellent tool. Kids enjoy it a lot, and it teaches a mode of thinking that I consider essential for the modern world.

https://scratch.mit.edu/

My company's curriculum is all public. I frankly don't love all of the projects, but some are pretty darn good. A few of my favorites:

Ghostbusters (Level 1): https://coding.space/launchpad/GqrsER3FnGgSZwyTYgkkDdyyty92-...

Apple Catcher (Level 2): https://coding.space/launchpad/703c1a8d-0c55-4bcb-b3ef-832ee...

Flappy Bird (Level 3): https://coding.space/launchpad/703c1a8d-0c55-4bcb-b3ef-832ee...

This isn't necessarily the be-all end-all way to teach Scratch (there are also official tutorials you can check out), but especially if you as the parent have some coding knowledge, they might be a fun way to learn together. Our philosophy is to provide a goal and some direction (for students who need it) without ever saying exactly what to do. This forces students to learn how to figure things out on their own.

Tiny note, notwithstanding my earlier praise of Scratch, it has one very frustrating design quirk that you might want to be aware of: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31932147

In training academic Pedagogist here: It may be worthwhile to take a two or day three reading of Rousseau's classic, "Emile; or On Education." It gives tremendous insight into how it is that adults can have positive relationships with the children that they might be governing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emile%2C_or_On_Education

Rousseau recommends: Night games, obstacle courses, Natural Method (Parkour), but in short the idea is to let the child be self-directing in their activities. In Rousseau's words, "to gain time by losing it." ie. don't try to direct their activities. Do what is necessary and dutiful in your own regard and teach through example and necessity; never through imposition unless absolutely necessary.

If you’re going this route there is a whole field of early childhood development; don’t read one archaic text and declare “this is the way” or you risk coming off like the new grad student in Good Will Hunting. [0]

Montessori (the person) and Steiner are other interesting originating sources in Western culture but reading about how the e.g. Aka parent might be a shorter path. [1]

[ 0 https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/specialengage... ]

[ 1 Review Barry and Bonnie Hewlett’s research particularly]

Fuck off dude. I'll come off however I like.

Is that the same Rosseau that abandoned his own children to suffer miserable, short lives in an orphanage?

Maybe the rest of HN has a similar, better option, but I could recommend LEGO Mindstorms. Eleven would be a good age to start getting curious about robots and automation. You should of course, help her with it, as it may be too complex for her to handle alone at the start.

It is pricey new, but you could get an older version used for cheaper.

There's also Nintendo Labo, for a similar, less expensive version.

LEGO Mindstorms is great, but it's amazingly expensive.

They recently released LEGO Boost, which has some limitations wrt Mindstorms, but you won't notice it unless you're doing advanced stuff. Moreover, it has a great app. And it's one third of the price of Mindstorms.

Due to price, when you buy motors/sensors/hubs, you'd want them to be compatible with future buys. LEGO used to have several systems but now pretty much converged to one "Powered Up" interface: https://brickarchitect.com/powered-up/.

The app is indeed neat & powerful. Performance is limited by official firmware being "dumb", it reports sensor values and takes commands, all computations actually run in the app. However, what's cool is an essentially unbrickable bluetooth bootloader letting you try alternative FOSS firmware — see https://pybricks.com/.

Not quite the same thing, but, speaking of expensive parts. This post seems like the place to share the findings.

As a kid, I would absolutely love to have some of the Lego(-compatible) motors [0] that are now available on the Chinese market for a few bucks a piece.

Some of the 'regular' sets [1] look quite tempting, too. In the bang for the buck department, at least.

[0] https://aliexpress.com/item/1005004221490793.html

[1] https://aliexpress.com/item/1005003548518388.html

Ask her what she wants to do.

"I don't know"

Honestly, that is understandable. Part of being 11 is getting to do more and more things that you just couldn't do before. But part of being 11 is having an insulated view of the world and the things available in it. Not knowing is perfectly natural.

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.

This, but I think it could be more nuanced. Notice her interest and explore further what she wants to do.

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!

take her places

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.

If its like my daughter its watch tiktok 16 hours a day.

So install TikTok and sit together on your phones doom scrolling and see what happens.

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.

You are unemployed, so I cannot judge your financial means, but I keep seeing this pop up in my feeds and it might be cool for you and your daughter to build together: https://www.kiwico.com/

Use sticks to make fire, then other Primitive Technology activities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9n9rqb-lvY

Carve a spoon: https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/tools/sets/111261-spoon...

Build a phoniebox with her (see https://pilabor.com/projects/labelmaker/)

- Some crafting

- Some electronics

- If you wish some programming

- A lot of fun afterwards...

Saving the next person some immediate confusion an extra cliks :) :)

http://phoniebox.de/index-en.html

https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID

Thanks... I did not think about the confusion, but you are right. My article contains the hint, that I build an RFID based music box for / with my daughter... and of course my programming effort to print labels for the RFID stickers ;)

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.

Very cool idea, indeed!

Oh that looks amazing! I just ordered a yoto [1] but that looks a lot more fun!

[1] https://us.yotoplay.com/

You both might enjoy an Australian TV series called "Curiosity Show".

It is science / technology focused and aimed at kids around your daughters age.

They explain a lot of fun sciencey things, puzzles and magic tricks that can be made at home from very easy to find parts.

The YT channel has over 1000 short videos : https://youtube.com/c/CuriosityShow

It was made in the 70s and 80s yet much is still totally relevant today. Even the occasional thing that is out of date might be a fun history discussion.

Just watched two of them, very cool. I had no idea that animas and birds that eat fish whole always always always eat the fish head-first.

I had great luck with Sparkfun Inventor's Kit. It came with an Arduino, a bunch of sensors and effectors and a manual of projects today went step by step to learn electronics and the Arduino system.

Haven't tried this with kids yet, but "coloring computers" might be a cool thing.

You can find it here: Coloring computers: non-electronic computers that work when you color them https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYz7DPRWypGQcbAHr7Mi8EKB6ntSPsEnUsCXbA...

And the recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31393501

You can spend time with her and help her discover her interests by asking her what she enjoys doing. Additionally, you can engage in outdoor activities with her, and most significantly, you can accompany her to museums, parks, or zoos. If she enjoys playing games or watching cartoons, she can play educational interactive games where she will learn also.

https://gadgetlite.in/2022/01/math-playground-games/

My daughter was a little younger than that when we bought a pile of dead DVD drives and disassembled them. Then we build a little driver circuit and hooked a laser diode to it. She was so excited to come home and take those drives apart after school. She learned about how things come apart, the importance of eye protection, how to use basic hand tools, and a little bit about electronics (I am self-taught and my knowledge is super uneven so I'm not the best teacher for that).

When my daughter was a little younger than yours we took turns writing and playing interactive fiction adventures. My first story began with a neighborhood walk. You find what appears to be a lost dog. You want to return it to its owner. Something is written on its collar but it's frightened of you and retreats when you try to get close to read it. How will you earn its trust?

http://inform7.com

What was the child like when younger? I have no idea what his interests are.

I have a one-and-a-halfer and I keep him busy when I want to kick back at the end of the day by putting some really challenging music on the TV (initially jazz and prog rock, but by now we're watching flamenco and some lieder by Webern and Schoenberg). Kid is really into music; Camel's "Rhayader/Rhayader goes into town" (rock music but instrumental and an almost-suite kind of structure) is his jam, no Backyardigans or Peppa Pig in this home.

He's also very curious about books, physically. I can't tell if he's going to be a reader (of course he likes baby books with the tactile colorful elements) but he likes to touch them on the shelves and had to be taught not to remove them. He might just like rectangular (parallelepipedal?) things.

Anyway, when I imagine keeping my son busy at age 3 I imagine sending him to piano lessons, going to concerts, maybe trying to do two-part harmonies. Also maybe reading him books or just making piles of rectangular bricks -- give him initial ideas and leaving him to it. What will he be like at age 11, I don't know. But I will by then.

Go Kayaking with her. A camera and lenses and you could do wildlife or macro photography or fishing on your trips. Great Exercise and connection with nature. If you get something like a DJI Mini drone you can capture something people rarely see. Maybe you could even start a youtube channel with all the unique footage. Which would require video editing and photoshop skills. Not even that expensive:

Mirrorless camera $500

Drone $400

Two kayaks ~$1000

I started building one of these small wooden boats with my son (9) in our garden: https://duckworks.com/mouse-plans/. He's very engaged in the project, and receives lots of cheers from friends and family. The book "Ultra simple boat building" explains all the steps in detail.

You didn't mention anything she's interested in currently.

Whatever it is follow it, no matter how frivolous or irrelevant to future success these may seem. Participate. Really jump into it in an unreasonable way.

Things your children get really interested in have a way of becoming interesting to an open-minded parent. Note that these interest can come and go at the drop of a hat. That's part of the fun!

I was unemployed for 10 months in 1998, so my kids were both under 10. My now nearly 30 year old asked me yesterday to go to the zoo like we did back then. Washington DC area had (has?) lots of free things to do. They both remember fishing, hiking, biking, exploring public transportation and just spending time together.

That's amazing! I have two under the age of five and I hope they will still want to hang out with me when they're adults. Sounds like you're a great parent .

Try taking her to a local library and asking the librarian in the children's section. Libraries often have fun and educational activities for children and families to enjoy. If they don't, at the very least the librarian should be able to help you find books of projects for kids to do.

It sounds like an amazing opportunity that you should grab. You both have the freedom to do something that normally would be closed to you due to constraints on both of your time (school and work).

Assuming you can afford it, how about hiring a camper van and taking off for a month, and see where you end up? There's bound to be places you both would love to see which otherwise would be difficult, and by being away from the trappings of home and email etc, you'll get some amazing quality time together which may not happen again.

11 is a great age, but you are at the start of some difficult years where there's lots of pressure on kids, both from society and from family (go well at school, know what you want to do etc etc). So take advantage of some care free time together!

Start making a list of things. It doesn’t have to be definitive, just a way to start the conversation.

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

If you have access to a computer, make a super-simple game with her - just an arcanoid. I had a very bright experience with this, and it can be done in browser DevTools.

At first, it’s just a big circle floating in the middle of the screen.

Then you make it move diagonally (x+1,y+1 on each iteration of an infinite cycle).

Then you figure out where the extents of the screen are, together, and make it bounce off, and this is where fun starts!

You add new objects for the circle/ball to bounce from, player-controlled pad at the bottom of the screen, devise new levels where ball moves in amusing patterns, breakable blocks and things like power-ups etc. You can add sound at some point.

All in all, this can be an extremely fun journey for weeks!

Since some people are talking about games, I thought I'd share my short list. My kids are a bit younger, and it's important to me that we don't introduce fast-moving games. We don't have a TV for this reason, stuff is just too intense now. I'm trying to recreate the modern experience that I went through, learning the joy of adventure from games like Sierra Online's series (Police Quest, Kings Quest, etc.)

All I've found so far are Lumino City, Old Man's Journey, and Machinarium. So far all 3 have been huge hits and exactly the pace I've been going for. We've played each one probably 10 times.

There has never been a better time to be a self-guided music learner. When I was 11 I would have flipped right out over the possibilities available in tools like Max, an interactive visual programming environment for making audio, visual, and music programs and installations. And combining it with Arduinos is also amazing for kids (ok, for anyone!). You can try max out for a very low monthly subscription now ($10 or something similar) and there are tons and tons of wonderful online resources for learning it.

I don't think what to do is as important as to how to do it. As you are unemployed, you probably have a lot of free time, while at the same time having to do house chores.

What I would do, is establish a more or less organized schedule, but letting her know that you will set apart a certain amount of time daily to play with her. What to do with then, is up to her.

Also, try to get her involved with the house chores. As long as it doesn't feel like work - obviously don't make her work - she'll also enjoy those tasks, while at the same time learning, getting used to it, and enjoying her time with you.

Write / draw a book, show her how to sell it on Etsy / Gumroad.

I have had much fun with my daughters at that age (and younger, and older) with Arduino kits from Ali Express. Just a few dollars' worth of parts were some of the best spent money I've ever spent.

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.

> ...My daughter is 11

At this age, I rather try to get in tune with the initiative that comes from the kid. She may already have some projects that may benefit from your [measured] participation.

Alternatively, I'd try to find something fun for myself, and then would try to see if there's a room in it for the kid's effort.

All in all, the pre-teen/teens want to know that their choices are respected (no matter how self-contradicting these may be).

I can think of three great options for age 11.

First option get a makeymakey and work through the free project videos on their site.

Second option get a microbit and work through the free tutorials on makecode. If you have two microbits, they can talk via onboard radio. They also have Bluetooth so you can connect to a phone.

Third get a copy of the Getting Started in Electronics RadioShak book and build some of the science and circuit projects.

11 years is a good age for projects, like building a toy city from cardboard boxes, writing a long story, building a puppet theatre etc. When I was 11, I half-started a lot of projects like that, but usually lost attention pretty quick. I think things would be different if my dad was working on it with me.

Or to take something I did actually do with my father and enjoyed, going for long walks together.

Lots of good suggestions in here. In the end, none of us know your daughter. If you are out of ideas on things to do with her, take her with you to something you enjoy doing. If you’re enthusiastic about it, she might be too. Also, there’s nothing wrong with uneducational fun either. Watch a movie or find shapes in the clouds. Be silly and teach her how to laugh on a budget.

Ask her what she finds interesting and based on her answer(s), find the most appealing to you and start designing a logic based on it, a prototype if you will.

Tell 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!

> Tell her that for this project she will be your project manager

> 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.

Our son was very fond of acting as a "project manager" when he was young - like 3 or 4 years old.

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).

Good to know. I'll remember this as a tool for potential future use then.

Mine just installed planet zoo (20$ on steam) and she is having a blast.

I am not for video games in general, but I am surprise at the amount of planning, learning involved in this.

We also bought a used cricut and she made some cute stuff with it, but there is a computer drawing side to those projects.

You can build stuff together, learn to draw, etc.

Recently, me and my daughter got some scrap wood from a shop that specializes in laser cutting. We used paper and wood glue to make beds for her dolls. She really liked it. It requires creativity because the scrap wood has all sorts of weird shapes. And patience, because the glue requires drying.

Spider eggs, spider eggs,

Can do all that an egg can.

Does nothing?, what surpraise!

Here comes the mayonaise...

https://aleteia.org/blogs/simchafisher/whats-for-supper-vol-...

Include some of her friends when possible. Make up for lost social time over the past couple years.

I've just found this https://twitter.com/TansuYegen/status/1543534003520770052 in my Twitter feed. I hope it can be useful.

Build things with wood! I’ve been making board games pieces with my 9 yo. A sheet of plywood’s, a saw and paints/stain can get you a long way. Today we just made a storage box for all the pieces and plan on decorating it tomorrow.

https://makezine.com/ https://www.adafruit.com If looking for mini tech projects :)

If you are in the US - public libraries are a wonderful resource for kids to visit.

Go fishing. There’s something about hanging out by the water and having a good time that is just special. Catching fish doesn’t really matter.

Also, play cards. My kid and cousins are running a rummy “tournament” as I type.

Make a pinhole camera, or a small functioning water lock system for boats.

11 is around the age I got into coding petpages on Neopets. They don't support JavaScriptor CSS3, and certain classes have to be inclined, but the contraints are what make it fun.

Do outdoorsy stuff. Hiking is costs just food and water and it doesn't need to be extreme to be fun. There's a whole interesting world of stuff just outside that's free.

Hiking, fishing, gardening, woodworking, visit the library, learn some songs or an instrument together ... the possibilities are endless :)

Walks in nature + iNaturalist. Gardening. Pottery. Vermiculture. Microscopy. Creative writing. Watercolour. Robotics.

If she’s into science and physics, I think that’s a great age to get her interested in radio.

I recommend starting with an RTLSDR ($30 on Amazon) and a homemade dipole. You can use an open source program called GQRX to listen to it. This will be fun to just listen to local FM radio, air traffic controllers, EMS/Police in your area if it’s not encrypted.

If she seems interested and you want to go a bit further, buy a block frequency upconverter (there’s one on Amazon called “ham it up” for ~$30) and make a large antenna for the 20M ham band. You’ll be able to pick up people from all over the country, and if you do a good job on the antenna, all over the world.

Most importantly, it’s fun and you get to work with your hands. You get to have fun trying to get ropes over trees in your yard to hang the antenna high enough. You get to deal with the problem of measuring out 60 feet of wire and cutting it. You have to figure out what trees to hang the antenna on so that it’s pointing where you want to listen (not directly East, but northeast due to the curvature of the earth, Google maps “measure distance” can help give a vector). This is all done with a cheap run of coax and speaker wire, no more than $40 in materials.

If she’s into it, you can get your ham radio technician license for a $15 fee, and you can get two way radios on Amazon for the VHF/UHF bands for $20 (baofeng UV5R). Fun to study for.

Make a board game or pen and paper RPG. There's lot of stuff to do, art, rules, making up lore.

I just built a rudimentary table with my young kid to keep him off the computer for a while.

i wish DIY.org (specifically Zack Klein -and team's earlier versions) was available as free/open source software libraries (and not just available for kids). a decommoditized, advertising-free and networked maker space everywhere

Check out Roblox.com/create

Here are a few ideas...

- Build a free little library

- Learn to skateboard

- Collaborate on a short-story

- Build a treehouse

- Learn to bake bread

- Plant a garden

- Go on hikes together

- Learn to safely fire a .22 or BB gun

(Edited for layout)

I would probably get them into cooking and helping me cook.

If she has any interest in music then show her MuseScore

a video game like Cities Skylines might not be the worst idea ever. I remember being a 10/11 year old and playing the original Simcity for PC...

If it’s helpful, we built a site during the pandemic where we sourced ideas from parents on how to keep kids engaged while working from home. It was #2 on Product Hunt.

Enrichmentactivities.org

My favorite activity is quality time outdoors . If there is any hike you could do, a beach or a park, that’s always a winner. Spending time in nature being physically active is a great way to keep both of you engaged and spending time together. You could also plan a picnic and make recipes together.

Is there something she’d like to make ? Go on YouTube and figure out how to make a boomerang, tie dye shirts, learn to knit, do origami or sew.

Maybe your daughter could even help you with your job search. Kids, especially 11 year olds are whip smart and love to engage in grownup stuff

Swift Playgrounds

Have you asked your daughter?

Give her a can of beans!

having a blast doing carting with mine, 11 as well

Fiction books

Kerbal Space Program!

https://xkcd.com/1356/

Guide her to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HowStuffWorks

ask her

TikTok and Netflix are great places to start.

Why are you asking Hacker News about this and not your daughter? Hacker News doesn't know your daughter.

Thats how you grow a kid whos addicted to netflix and frozen chicken nuggets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com