Don't force your kids to do math

I do, it requires being still in miserable conditions for a long time, being cold, wet, mosquitos, and then usually still no success, but frustration.

But to my knowledge, no savage kid is in need of being forced to learn it.

"children sense your true passions and naturally want to join in"

And that is my experience as well. But if you stop childrens curiosity out of limited time and patience "Be quite now!" - stop them from helping, because they are not a help in the beginning and you are faster on your own - then of course they won't just start enthusiastically some years later doing with motivation whatever it is, you define as their arbitary target now.

Without that exploration the kids won't make the world their world, at best they'd only make it a bad approximation of what we, our (older) generation, best think that that world should be.

Such a bold claim coming from some who does not share their credentials on the matter.

My kid will do everything as long as it is interesting. My sample of 1 contradicts your claim, but neither of us are experts on the matter.

If you have to restart later, no matter at which point, even up into 'the kids' 20s ( ultra late bloomers, slackers, kids disgusted by most people for reason Z, drug- or "condition X"-induced deadbeats, repressed kids with and without ADHD, failed or successful attempts by psycho-social environments ) understand three things:

1) you are not pushing, even if you are, you are demanding sth for the sake of your child AND yourself. YOU WANT THIS first and foremost. It's not a bad thing, fuck what the little fucker wants.

It's imperative for the kid to know that YOU WANT THIS no matter the obstacles. You want to see the process and result. It's a form of accountability, I guess. Kids pushing back is some dumb implicit way to check how important THEY and THE THING really are to you _or someone else_ (that counts for the ugly stuff, too). It's part of our evolutionary, hard-coded OODA loop.

2) just start at the very beginning, so that it's easy, almost effortless. The kid will be annoyed on most of the difficulty increases, it always depends on the sub-topic so don't back down. Even 20 year olds will catch up with their successful piers within some time. Neuro-genesis is awesome. Most 'grown up' stuff is child's play and a matter of baseline-human character anyway.

3) your stress level is what matters. Stay cool, be equanimous, serene, check your posture, voice, tone, the discussion won't last 5 min and will be worth it.

Absolutely force your kids to do math.

My parents pushed me hard to do piano when I was around 10-12. After a year that went pretty well I was starting to get lazy and put very little work and investment into preparing for the next lesson. They still had me play piano a full year until they eventually gave up and bitterly told me what a waste my resignation felt to them.

20 years later, I got back to playing piano, and I can't thank my parent enough for having me to continue playing in my teenage years. Because it only took me a few month to be able to play pretty advanced piano sheets compared to some of my relatives who are struggling with the basics starting it in their adulthood.

Same for maths. I feel that a lot of people like the author of this blog post are being extremely misdirected thinking math can and should be taught in a fun or amusing manner every time.

Sure, a lot of topics in Maths can be made more digestible by "gameification" to help younglings develop an intuition. But a very big part of Maths actually requires you to sit down and painstakingly crunch down the numbers/equations, memorize and learn when to apply the correct methods to solve some problems. And even though this part can feel fun and engaging after a while, you can't expect children to exhibit such interest right of the bat without having them first struggle with the classics.

Kids don't know better. Your role as a parent is to navigate along the fine line of forcing your kid to get good exposure to the (boring) activities we adults value and letting him enjoy what he enjoys. Only in doing that will your kid open up to the world and grow up into a functional human being.

The really important part of this is that kids mimic what they see adults they like and respect doing. If their role models spend 6+ hours in front of the television every night, that’s what they’ll do. If their role models are playing music or sport, that’s what they’ll want to do.

At the end of my second year of piano lessons, my teacher took me into her living room, and we listened to Glen Miller records for most of the hour. And then we had a cup of tea, and she told me, "this is the music that I love. I play piano because I love that music, and I want to be able to play it myself. What kind of music do you like?" I didn't really have an answer. So she told me that we should stop doing lessons, but once I found music that I loved, she'd be happy to teach me how to play it.

In my early teens, I discovered Miles Davis. Once I had found my passion, all the hard work became play. I actually ended up learning to play jazz guitar, not piano. Even the heavy lifting was pure joy, because it had purpose and meaning.

I didn't become great at mathematics until I discovered the joy in mathematics (another brilliant teacher handed me a stack of old math contests, and said here, you might find these fun. I placed 4th among 20,000 students).

I didn't learn to write well until I discovered the joy in writings. (An absolutely brilliant English teacher who made us assign ourselves our own grades, but broke his promise in the end by upgrading all my papers to A+'s).

And I gave my kids the room to find their joy as well.

I guess it's true for adult humans, and other creatures as well. Instead of pushing, however, you should consider using other motivational methods (a simple prize for accomplishing something that you want from your kids works very well). Pushing can cause alienation and hate, which could affect their entire adult life.

In my view, if we let our children do what interests them, to some degree (of course anything taken to the extreme will likely fail, and it depends on the child), they are likely to cover way more territory, and probably more useful territory, than a child that is being forced and coerced. One of the many things my 7 year old has learned from Minecraft is an entire language (English), to a level which in the past (my generation) we didn't reach before perhaps 18 (and that was due to watching TV, not school). The other day I caught him taking notes on a piece of paper that said single = 1, double = 2, triple = 3, quadruple = 4, quintuple = 5, sextuple = 6. This is a child who should not be speaking English, but now he can write and spell it better than his native language, because we let him follow his passion. He's also learned a ton of engineering concepts and vocabulary, and has the ability to install mods, debug when they don't work, has a basic understanding of networking, IP addresses and on and on.

He has no interest in playing an instrument right now, why should we force him? If the time comes and he wants to, he will learn it so much faster because he wants to get better.

These kids barely have any free time. School during weekdays, activities during the weekend… worse than a full time job.

I think there’s a balance to be struck. Your kids don’t need to be good at everything.

Take music, for example. Many high schoolers play an instrument as part of the college admissions game. Almost none of those kids can play music with their friends and just enjoy it. To them music is this structured activity where they get paper with dots on it, and they have to play the right notes at the right time to pass the class. These kids never develop a true understanding or appreciation for music. They don't keep their instruments or practice as adults.

There's so many things to learn to be good at, why not find something that you actually like?

This may be true, but explain to me what are the returns you get on forcing math (or anything) on kids? They won't like it, they won't learn it intimately, the won't internalize it, it'll be unusable knowledge and mostly a waste of time with lots of bad vibes and probably even a little trauma...

I spent a lot of time with math in high school and college but that was because I had a couple teachers who really elucidated why *I* might find math to be interesting (in my case, it was physics and computing). Forcing people to do anything generally leads to nothing worthwhile.

they used to beat the living shit out of us india when were growing up. is that what you mean?

The nature of pushing needs to be considered in the sense of the overall parent-child relationship, and not just being handed a Mikrokosmos and an egg timer. If my parents were more proud of my ability to push forward and took interest in the piano and my playing beyond just performing good at recitals, I probably would have grown up to truly enjoy performing music. Today I'm left with a bit of a bad taste in my mouth that would require conceited effort to overcome. So I guess my parents weren't "lazy" in your terms but a bit too strict for me to conclude I would be "good at music" that early.

I reluctantly admit that you are right, and I am the better for it because I overcame my lazyness and found joy, in math, English, reading, and music. I sing, play piano, guitar, and listen with appreciation.

I roughly classify parents in two groups: (1) like the author of the article, (2) like you. Based on my limited observation, neither can be claimed to give optimal results, and it more boils down to "see what actually works for your kid in the long term" which unfortunately far too often can only be definitely said in hindsight.

The school system today uses elements, structures, and clusters, the same techniques used in real torture. Its embedded into the structure of by-rote pedagogy starting in the late 1970s, and it also goes by another name starting in the 90s, where Administrators, NEA representatives, and Teachers, call this "Lying to Children".

Most parents today seem to be simply too busy, treating school like daycare, or maybe they just don't love their children enough to put the time in to protect them and figure out what is actually happening to their kids.

Classic curricula followed the western philosophy of the greeks, you develop tools that let you reduce a working system to first principles (in guided manner), which are proven true, and then you use those principles to model the system accurate, and then predict the future parts of that system.

"Lying to Children" does the exact opposite in time. It starts with a flawed model that is useless teaching abstract concepts and includes other unrelated concepts that arise naturally from that flawed model. The student is then as mastery progresses forced to struggle to unlearn material that isn't correct, and then relearn the finer details with each new flawed model given in a progressive fashion, over, and over, and over, becoming more useful yes, but torturing themselves, and in a way destroying themselves in the process.

When questions or true insights occur, the flawed model breaks those insights requiring you to do things differently in earlier classes before you can use those, but not even this information is given so you can't leap frog the torture.

There are additional strategic structures that orchestrate failures to gatekeep technical fields like math. There is an Algebra->Geometry->Trigonometry sequence which uses a gimmick in undisclosed pass criteria between class 1 and class 3, so the student passes initially but then fails and has to go back to Algebra, but can't because its sequential. Its called burning the bridge.

Regardless, the student is blamed, no help is given (because there is no cure for torture). They are told, "maybe you're just not a math person, you should choose a career that doesn't use this if your having trouble.

This gatekeeper is orchestrated to induce PTSD towards math in general, and as all technical fields require math this prevents them from entering those fields. Some are able to pass and enter these professions, but never the best and brightest, only the most compliant with blinders.

The exception to this is if you bypassed the entire process through private boarding school, and Ivy league college straightaway. If your an elite, you get a decent education.

These structures follow a false ideology based in gnosis/gnosticism which is long refuted, but that hasn't stopped these things from being used for purpose, or allowed others to remove these.

There is an all out war that has been happening for years, a war on our children. Compare low attention spans and other things with the documented characteristics of torture from PoWs and you'll see there are parallels everywhere.

The thousand yard stare. Hollowed out feelings. Lashing out. These are often referenced in the material on torture.

The problem is unlike adults, once broken and distorted by torture children carry that forward their entire lives, unable to change because its not learning, its torture, and there are very few who ever recover.

Failing to see the reality of what is happening and calling it lazy and complacent without understanding is problematic and most definitely not the sign of a good parent if that means you let your children's minds be destroyed under a false belief that its just laziness.

For those parents that are unaware of what I mean by torture. You can read books on the subject matter by Joost Meerloo, or Robert Lifton. From the case studies you can derive the requirements and you would be shocked to find and recognize these things being used everywhere today without you knowing. Robert Cialdini touches on the psychological blindspots used which bypass your and your children's perception to the issue.

The elements are isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with real or perceived loss, and lack of agency to remove oneself from the situation. Some would argue this also includes time and exposure.

Structuring and Clustering, forces active engagement through specially designed circular trauma loops, forcing the psyche back on itself to destroy itself, and narco-synthesis and narco-analysis which in the 50s used barbituates to trigger dopamine are used today through associative priming through many ways including your phone (gamification uses many of these things learned from research on torture).

It is established that those who are drugged have less resistance to torture, and those with faith-based beliefs tend to resist torture better. One of the first things to go under torture is rational thought.

For example, in many Middle Eastern and Asian cultures (pardon my generalization here), there's an ingrained expectation that children should be pushed, often quite hard, especially in areas like mathematics, science, engineering, and law. Hence the old cliche: "You have three career options: doctor, lawyer, or engineer.".

I've seen this firsthand as a Middle Easterner (I was born in IRAN). My father is an engineer, and both my parents were relentless when it came to academic discipline. I ended up in computer science, and my brother became a pharmaceutical researcher after obtaining his PHD.. There's no question that this kind of structure and pressure produced tangible results. But I'd be lying if I said it was an easy or joyful process. It ended up costing me plenty of social anxieties and now I struggle with social dynamics.

That said, I have mixed feelings about it. While the rigor pays off in terms of career and technical competence, it often comes at the cost of creativity, intrinsic motivation, and the space to explore things like literature, music, and the arts. I sometimes wonder what paths we might have followed if exploration had been valued as highly as performance.

So I _partially_ agree with you that some degree of external motivation is necessary, especially with children who haven't yet developed discipline. But I also think we should be careful not to frame this solely as a matter of "lazy" vs. "good" parenting. Upon reflection, I think that there's a balance between encouragement, discipline, and allowing for the development of intrinsic interest. Different families, cultures, and even individual children may need to strike this in different ways.

I look back at the memories very fondly now. As a pre-teen I got invited to play at my cousin's wedding and everyone still talks about it. It gave me a good foundation and I performed well in highschool band and small ensembles. I now play my instruments for my kids and it brings us all a lot of joy.

Both of my parents weren't especially musical. I'm not amazing or anything, but I've got enough skill to hear a tune from a show or someplace and play it at home for my kids reasonably enough. But I wouldn't be able to if my mom didn't make me practice.

Also in your opinion at what age should pushing start, and how much pushing per age group?

I was the kid who wanted a keyboard and guitar but didn't get one until I could afford one in my twenties, then I learned just enough to be able to be creative. People say I'm good at piano but technically I suck, I'm just creative and expressive with limited tools.

It's an interesting phenomenon, the adults who are technically great at piano, but can't play anything without it being written in sheet music.

When teaching addition, workbooks commonly use a box, eg, “[ ] + 2 = 5” — and first graders have no conceptual problem with this. Somehow, we lose people by the time we’re trying to formalize the same concept in algebra. There’s been many times I’ve written a box around letters in a problem and asked students “what’s in the box labeled x?”

Pedagogy is hard.

People just want to know why it's x and not something else or how a letter can have value. They might even think how can 24 + 2 = 5? They just want something to grab onto and nobody is really teaching the concept of a symbol in a math class.

Even if the system was better the person still has to be able to motivate themselves and put in the time.

One of my school math teacher had the same approach in another way: We were expected to use greek letters, not latin ones.

Same reasoning: It showed us kiddos that the letter was insignificant compared to the concept expressed by the letter.

So my take would be: Your friend taught the students for the first time what they were actually doing while handling equations with "a letter in it". That is no problem of algebra in itself. It just means their previous teachers sucked.

She loves it. It uses a ‘?’ for basic algebra style problems and after a few days of playing (if/when she wants to, we don’t make her play it), she was already much better and faster at those problems. It made me think that schools should be giving kids games like these.

Quite a story condensed into those five phrases.

Like learning dozens of trig identities without any explanation about why one would need them. As I've mentioned elsewhere learning math for the sake of it isn't enough. For most of us math has to have relevance, and for that we have to link it to things in the real world.

I think there are some differences

If you are a physicist or an economist, you may be using mathematics as a language in the sense that you are using a mathematical description to convey an understanding of the natural world or the economy to your colleagues. But if you are a mathematician, you are interested in the mathematical objects for their own sake.

There is also a difference between the purpose of learning language and learning math. The goal of learning language is (often) to be fluent in it. In other words, the goal is to reach a level of proficiency which would allow you to not have to think about language and focus on the content of the conversation instead. On the other hand, the goal of learning mathematics is usually to be able to solve mathematical problems. Being able to do math without "thinking about it" is not usually a requirement.

I agree with most of what you wrote, but this part is tricky. Yes, it would be nice to have math and physics textbooks synced. Maybe other subjects, too.

But writing a textbook is a lot of work; it can take years. How do we get two textbooks synced, if they are written by different people? One writes their book first, then the other has to match it? What if the other disagrees with how the first book was organized? They both write together? Now there is a risk that one does a good job, another does a bad job, and the good textbook is connected to the bad one.

Or maybe write the common outline first, and then each author is trying to follow it independently? Plus, there could be multiple versions of each book, following the same outline, so each math textbook can be connected with each physics textbook based on the same outline. Here the problem is that people often disagree on the outline.

Also, not sure how important is this part, having things in sync could slow down the improvement in the future. For example, imagine that we figure out a better way to teach something in physics. But now everyone is used to having math and physics textbooks synced, so the new physics books would be rejected, until someone rewrites the math books too.

The "undeveloped PFC" argument is shallow, unspecific and usually just used to infantilize younger people. It may be useful if the child is under 6 years old, but at the time someone is 17 or older, it becomes essentially useless.

My learning process was always, and still is fueled by curiosity.

My mom would bring us into the clubhouse in the backyard and read to us, which I found really boring. Ended up not liking books because of it, and I'm pretty sure the same happened to both of my brothers. For years I'd only read the bare minimum required for school.

Years later I happened to see an neat book cover in the impulse-buy section of a store and begged for the book. That one book was what actually got me set on reading, and from then on I'd always have something with me.

She never realized this and still thinks I like reading because she read to us. I can't help but wonder how many of the anecdotes here are also parents not realizing what's actually going through their kids' minds.

1. A true hatred of work, make work, and a strong desire to defend laziness as a concept (note that Bertrand Russel agrees hard with me here!) -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Ot...

2. A love of subversives and cheating the system. Basically, the guys writing leetcode cheating software are saints in my book. All subversions of the attempt to turn society into a meritocracy (a term which was originally supposed to be a slur/negative connotation - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy) is extremely good.

3. An advanced knowledge of TI basic, so I could cheat hard on every single school assignment I could get away with. AP Chemistry? I’ve got a symbolic stoichometry solver app! Calculus? CAS system in the palm of my hand!

Play stupid games with children, win stupid prizes. Maybe don’t force them to work like little slaves in their early life, and they won’t strike back at your society systems.

Well it depends. I had no pressure from my parents to learn about programming but still got really good at it. Could I have gotten even better had I been pressured to "practice"? Perhaps. But then I also wouldn't like it for the reasons I do (I like making stuff, but not solving riddles) and it would feel like the dad sport situation.

I also played the piano for 6 years, starting out because I liked it. My parents didn't suggest it, but a few years in they were pushing me to continue even when I didn't like it anymore. Finished the first level of music school (6 years where I live) and haven't touched it since. Just to clarify, they weren't using any directly abusive tactics to keep me going, but they did put a lot of pressure onto it.

There's a lot of nuance to all of this and I don't completely disagree that we should occasionally pressure our kids to push their limits. What we often fail to acknowledge is that kids easily change their minds after a while. Just because they liked something at a certain point doesn't mean they still do. The easiest way to get a kid to dislike something is to make it a chore. Additionally, I think we need to ask ourselves whether it's more important to us to have a kid that's average scoring but has a (mostly) stress free upbringing, or one that excels but is stressed out by the time they hit high school. Kids absorb stress differently than we (adults) do.

I'm a MechE by classical training (professionally I actually work doing software/network stuff, don't ask, DNS (screams internally)), so here's where it stood out for me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_analogy

Internalize what this simple example represents, think about why that's mathematically interesting, and start looking for where it applies elsewhere. You too could be roped into doing systems engineering at scales you didn't think people haven't already figured out.

Math gives you the ability to leverage the very structure and relationships of pure abstraction. It's quite the super power.

None of the specific things you learn studying math will be nearly as useful as the ability to think mathematically.

If there was any advice I would give, then it's probably similar advice on how to stop procrastinating on anything that is difficult. Establish a routine first - find a spot that you will only use for studying this (like a spot in a library), start small, divide and conquer, accept that you will not understand most things easily, reward yourself for the small wins along the way, find an accountability partner or someone to study with if that's your thing, make a regular schedule with regular times where this is what you do - consistency is key, even if its just for 5 minutes, stack it onto other habits, see yourself as a scholar of math - it is what you do, lean into the discomfort, as enduring that is a valuable skill in itself.

For me, it began many years ago when reading about Hilbert's hotel paradox. Turns out our laymen's understanding about infinity isn't as really refined.

I write mobile apps for living and indeed these stuffs are irrelevant for my work.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

The feeling of "oh yeah, that was nice watching that mess turn into something clean and squared away" is where I get a lot of my joy from math.

But also, there are uses to math that you might be able to play with through every day, but you've never thought of those scenarios in a mathematical way.

I was walking today, and on the street there is a right angle turn. The inner portion of the turn is just a square right angle, but the outside of the turn is a radius. I started wondering to myself, if I want to be on the outside of the turn going into and exiting the turn, what would be different ways I could walk this, and what would the distance differences be.

Crossing directly across, to the inner corner and crossing directly across to the outer side again, would be 2w (for the width of the road w). Following the edge of the radius would (assuming perfectly circular), be 1/4 of a circle, so 1/42piw = 1/2 pi * w. The shortest route is a straight line, which would make a right triangle, so w^2 + w^2 = c^2, 2w^2 = c^2, sqrt(2) w = c

So crossing twice is 2w, following the edge is 1/2piw, and shortest path is sqrt(2)*w. Not super applicable, and I didn't need to do math to figure it out, but I was walking and bored, so I found joy in it. The fact that they all boil down to having w as a factor means I could figure out a nice ratio between all of them. And then I needed to mentally figure out what 1/2 pi was. 3.14/2 = 1.57... And I know that sqrt(2) is roughly 1.41 ish.

So now I know that crossing twice has a cost of 2, following the edge is 1.57, and direct line is 1.41. Following the edge is vaguely close enough to the ideal path to warrant not walking into the street to optimize the route, 1.57 / 1.41 is about ~110%. Whereas by defintion, a cost of 2 is going to be sqrt(2) times sqrt(2), so ~141% more than shortest path.

A few things to note here. First off, I'm aware that not everyone finds the same joy in doing simple mental math and thinking about problems mathematically even when there is no need to do it, but trying to think of things more minor trivial things mathematically may cause you to at least appreciate it more, which can grow into joy. And second, I wasn't doing any complicated math in my head. I just thought to myself "is it faster to cut to the inside corner and then cut back out... of course not, right?" and I was able to answer that definitively to myself. Did it matter? Was the answer probably obvious anyway? Probably, but I was able to _prove_ that. And I value facts. Finding joy in the simple things lets you build up more of a familiarity and view it more as a problem solving tool than a tedious thing to rote memorize.

A great way to build up math familiarity and see how other people find joy in mathematics would be to watch Numberphile videos on YouTube[0]. It's a bunch of mathematicians sharing things they find interesting about math. Some times are REAL hard to grasp, but some are just very interesting puzzles[1]. The puzzles don't always have clear immediate usefulness, but can often be described as "a mathematician wanted to know an answer, so they did some math to find out and prove something to themself."

Sorry, end of spiel.

tl;dr - find the joy in the simple things and use math as a tool to answer (even simple) questions to help highlight the usefulness.

0: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoxcjq-8xIDTYp3uz647V5A 1: https://youtu.be/ONdgXYEBihA

I didn't particularly find (at the time) calculus, multivariable calculus, physics, etc. interesting as I didn't find the applications interesting at the time. I find these subjects representative of what you traditionally learn at school.

When I entered uni I discovered my passion for discrete math, algebra (groups, rings, fields, etc.), number theory, cryptography, theory of computation, etc. as they have a lot of application in CS.

That's really what did it for me - and also I had great uni lecturers. I wish they would have taught the subjects I like in highschool - the difficulty level is about the same.

[0] https://plus.maths.org/content/john-haigh

Consider doing something that actually needs it. You like computer programming - consider making a game engine. It might be easier to learn when you can actually see that it is useful.

Keep in mind though that math is a lot of things. People obsess over calculus but that is just one type. Math is just as much the different types of symmetry in wall paper patterns as it is finding the derrivative. Don't be afraid to try different areas. If you dont know where to start, consider picking up "A Concise Introduction to Pure Mathematics" by liebeck which introduces a bunch of different math concepts and see if any feel more interesting to you.

The tricky bit is often that you need to learn some of the math before you can see how it's useful, but if you need stronger motivation, you might try diving into a slightly math heavy programming problem and learn the math as you go

Yes, you need some practical math as well. I did engineering, there's a lot of inelegant stuff there.

But that stuff actually tends to be right next to some very interesting things.

Here are three things you can find out.

First, there's more than one kind of infinity. You can't make a map from natural numbers like 1, 2, 3 etc to real numbers like e, 0.632268, sqrt(2) etc. Look for Cantor diagonalization.

Second, a random walk like a heads vs tails comes back to zero almost certainly. It also does so in two dimensions, like walking randomly in Manhattan. In three dimensions, it does not, and so for higher dimensions. Look for Polya.

Third. There is a way for you and me to communicate secretly, despite everyone in HN being able to see our entire exchange. Look for Diffie Helmann.

These days, there's a whole industry of people doing math videos with interesting stuff.

So I think a good motive for math study is really in games and puzzles, where the questions posed aren't about win/lose or right/wrong, but about exploring the scenario further and clarifying the constraints or finding an interesting new framing. Martin Gardner wrote a long-running column and a few books in this vein which are still highly regarded decades later.

If anyone had a guaranteed way to make people enjoy math, we'd already be applying that method.

Just read ahead to figure out what you'll need to learn, and do some advance reading. Anything thag make the courses easier will tend to make them more fun.

I would go so far as to say modern society actually enables us to be more involved in our children’s lives, especially those for whom remote work and home schooling are options.

I could understand if someone was forced to work two full-time jobs (as my grandfather was), but I find it much harder to blame ‘society’ when so many of these situations are self-imposed.

It’s possible that I’m jaded from hearing a subset of parents complain about not having enough time with their kids but then get stuck scrolling their phone while kids want to play. I also know some parents who insist on having a spotlessly clean house every day and then complain that there is enough time to spend with their kids.

I’ve gravitated toward peer parents who have similar priorities in life which has indirectly made me happier. Seeing all of the parents in my friend circles prioritize spending time with their kids and being honest with themselves about their priorities has been unexpectedly helpful for my own sanity.

Again, nothing against parents who are really forced to allocate time elsewhere, but I’m tired of seeing self-inflicted problems of prioritization and time management be externalized as blaming society.

They're 3, so I don't expect that to scale, but I'm hoping it's normal reward-for-knowledge by the time we get report cards.

And then there's intangibles - something being slightly cheaper doesn't necessarily mean I'm making a good trade off by buying it for my overall quality of life.

In Australia at least this whole problem was perfectly adequately solved by mandating bulk price labeling on all items in the supermarket. Products in comparable categories have per volume/weight prices listed alongside item prices.

Some things aren't optional, and if they are seen as such, it's going to force the child to learn later in life what they couldn't earlier on.

Probably a better example is figuring out the cost of a loan. Just multiply the amortized monthly payment by the term and compare that to the loan amount. If the difference makes you balk, then go ahead and walk.

How many people even realize that loan interest is a significant cost and would bother to do that? Or know how to do that? Most people just try to minimize monthly payments to something they can bear and sign the paperwork.

Imagine having to move a round thing around some other people to get that thing into a square frame. Then, imagine that you can only use your feet!

I imagine the part of a test people dislike is failing, and the consequences from failing. Framing it as a game without those emotional stakes fixes that.

If the teaching environment was set up to encourage learning rather than punish not having learnt yet we might not need these tricks, but that culture is slow to change

Even with a "normal" mind. Train consistently to gain excellence!

As kids get older, they need to learn how to struggle and overcome struggles. (I would still caution against "forcing" math.) But yes, you need to start engaging hard work and determination.

Btw, the two are not mutually exclusive. Young children should be praised for struggling at things so they begin learning that skill, too.

The original concept in the article of exploration is great. Some kids want to explore math, some science, some music, and some Starcraft.

I read it (as a non-child), and a lot of my certainties about what young brains are and are not capable of got joyfully exploded. I'm not linking it to you proscriptively, or with a specific suggestion or riposte in mind whatsoever - you just might be interested in it.

School is very successful at convincing kids (and former kids) of two things: firstly, that the academic subjects they purport to teach are actually delineated by the school textbooks and curricula. And secondly, that the reaction people have to specific subjects within these school structures are the actual unchangeable nature of the person's relationship with the subject.

I hope one day our societies move past these two egregious and immeasurably damaging beliefs.

Math in school was purposeless and rigid, a rote procedure to be followed by command because that's what kids have to do.

Now, I have grown older, and my curiosity drove me to learn because I wanted to make things, machines and software and probabilistic strategies. Things that necessitate math. If you can't rotate a vector, your guy walks faster diagonally. If you can't think mathematically and you want to lift a 2 jointed robot arm that weighs several tons, you're going to tip it over, and possibly die in the process. You can do it without trig but you can't do it without thinking about math.

Once I found purpose, I began to appreciate the beauty of the more elegant solutions. I kind of fell in love with math as an adult. Now I watch numberphile with my kids and make complicated machinery and software at work.

I think a lot more people love math than realize it, because they're conflating math itself and what school calls math, which is worksheets and demands, not beauty and creation.

This is really stupid.