What Should a 4 Year Old Know? (2010)

Enjoy your kids. This means if you enjoy reading books, you should read books with your kids.

Now she and her sister, who loved being read to, are both doing just fine and they both read piles and piles of books.

I'm not claiming you are wrong, only that I am unconvinced by a couple of examples.

The Tiger Woods of world are brilliant in their fields, but often leave behind a train-wreck of personal life issues in their wake.

Will you look back to her childhood without regrets? Will she?

If they are great at something, and develop talents that make them world famous, that would be cool. But so few people do that, I cannot realistically even consider that result in my parenting choices.

Many of the careers that get a lot of prestige - law, medicine, business management, etc - all require that you understand a variety of fields, or are at least greatly aided by understanding a second field in depth in addition to the one primarily related to your career.

Similarly, if you're not competent in a few fields (math, reading, writing, basic computer operation), you're simply going to lose out to more competent peers in the workplace.

Finally, your annotation makes an extremely important point: people we see making breakthroughs in fields - the truly top tier academics for instance - are well known for working in multiple fields and having wide interests. You cite an example yourself when you mention Neumann, who made contributions to a wide variety of math, led the team that invented the first computer, worked on several military projects, and contributed to a few tangential fields occasionally, for example applying game theory (which he invented) to economics.

In reality, the truly dominant people tend to be polymaths, and the middle to middle-top tier tend to be highly specialized.

I believe your child should be as well rounded or as focused as they feel the need to be. The world needs generalists and it needs specialists. The Yo-Yo Mas, Tiger Woods' and Michael Phelps' of this world may be superstars, but they needed a team of generalists coordinating their rise to stardom; Your child may be a generalist, the glue that holds everything together and the oil that makes the machine work. The one who can make sense of the chaos of the world around them and bring order and harmony. There is great value in that too.

You can't say the well rounded are any more or less worthy or worthless than the superstars. All are needed and all are as valuable as one another.

The smallest pin in a watch as as important as the largest cog, but without a drive mechanism or hands, the piece is worthless. It is only when all the parts come together in concert that it is worth something. Each of the parts is a specialist at what they do, doing one thing extremely well; each a vital piece of the puzzle. But it takes the watchmaker, the generalist who understands the value of all the pieces together, who has the skill (and a lot of patience) to bring them together as a whole that makes the result something useful.

And while I didn't count them, I'd say that about two thirds of them stopped progressing (and then playing) somewhere between age 16 and 18. Mostly they developed other interests, or lost motivation for reasons unknown to me.

So I'd be very careful with putting high stakes on very narrow interests; it can easily become a dead end.

(FWIW I don't consider that time "lost" or anything; they surely learned a lot about self confidence, team play, reliability and other traits; it's just that it sounds that you as a parent might be rather disappointed when your hypothetical child loses interest in his narrow focus).

It seems to me that the biggest advantage to being a generalist is that as parents, we can identify what a kid is good at, and can start him down that road. Things go wrong when a parent is not himself enough of a generalist to figure out what the kid likes, and just pushes him toward something random or prestigious.

As for those that object to what you say, I wonder why they insist on putting words in your mouth. Perhaps they don't believe that a young kid could be interested in any deep topic without coercion; which relieves them of the responsibility to try to find what this topic could be. But my attitude is that as a parent, I may not find it, or maybe it's not there, but the potential upsides are large enough that I will keep thinking about it.

I came to love music again later in life, and I do play now, fiddle as well as a few other instruments.

Here are some of my absolute favorite "violinists" (probably should call them fiddle players). By and large, they came to violin later in life, though with great interest in music. They are very different musicians from classical players, no doubt, but they're the type of musicians I probably should have been. I honestly think I was harmed as a musician by classical teachers who were constantly in my business, messing around with how I held the bow.

There are so many kids nowadays who can play a nearly flawless etude. Some show the the grimaces and gestures of someone who plays with passion, but I still wonder if it is an affectation, a teacher, noticing it has gotten a little mechanical, says "but with more passion… good, good" (as student playing etude flawlessly after a gazillion practices now affects the swaying and grimaces that seem to properly convey requested passion)

Personally, I'd much rather be Boyd Tinsley or Ketch Secor than a top classical musician, but that's probably because I'd much rather listen to their music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyd_Tinsley

"He was not an avid music lover or player. He learned violin by accidentally signing up for a middle school orchestra class, under the impression that guitar would be taught. The idea of learning the violin, however, was interesting enough for him that he stuck with it."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posey_Rorer

"He suffered from severely clubbed feet for the first 30 years of his life. At the age of 10 he learned to play the banjo but soon switched to the fiddle. In 1917, he moved to West Virginia but due to the flu epidemic of 1919, he had to return to Virginia."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassar_Clements

He taught himself to play the fiddle at age 7 and the first song he learned was "There's an Old Spinning Wheel in the Parlor". Soon, Clements formed a local string band with two first cousins, Red and Gerald. Gerald was the fiddle player and when he got married and left, Clements had to pick up the fiddle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luderin_Darbone He was born in Evangeline and raised in Orangefield, Texas. His parents gave him his first fiddle at the age of 12 and he learned to play through a correspondence course.

I'm also a big fan of Ketch decor from Old Crow Medicine Show (who also learned late in life).

http://www.charlottemagazine.com/Blogs/Revue/November-2010/Q...

"The act of fiddle playing is a lifetime relationship. You have good spells and bad turns, and while you celebrate all your time together, it doesn’t mean it’s all rosy. I’ve been playing since I was 18, and learning to play in Rockingham County, NC, but it’s taken me this long—14 years—to figure out not to fall over on the dance floor and step all over her feet."

The development of a standout isn't generally talked about unless there's a story to be told, so while you will hear the story about the kid who started young, cute pictures as evidence, you won't hear about the ones who didn't (unless it's so late that it, again, becomes worthy of a story).

Further, isn't that logic vulnerable to a dangerous survivorship bias? For every Woods or Perlman, how many kids grew to absolutely hate an activity because instead of it being fun or developing, it became the hangup of a parent expecting their child to be an extreme exception? How many simply weren't standouts, so they spent much of their youth forced to do an activity that they ended up being merely average at?

"Most kids, by the age of 4 know X, know or are in the process of learning Y and probably don't yet grasp Z. if they already know Z, but don't know X, it's not a big deal, they'll get it shortly."

Clearly "My kid knows X, Y and Z" isn't what the parent is looking for. I don't care what your kid can do, quite probably my kid can do a bunch of stuff yours can't and vice versa, I don't really care that your kid can do X and mine can do Z, I don't think less of your parenting, nor your child that they can't do Z and it's not a big deal to me that yours can do X.

When I ask the question, what I'm really asking is so much more complicated: "Is my kid equipped with enough of the understanding and skills they require to feel at home and confident in the grade they're in, while still learning at an optimal pace for them? Are they keeping up with what's being taught or are they struggling? Are they engaged or disruptive? If they're disruptive, is it because they're struggling to keep up and have disengaged because they've lost hope, or is it because they already understand everything they're being taught and are bored? Are they more/less advanced than the majority of the class, do I need to consider keeping them back a year because they're struggling with a lot of material, do I need to fast-track them ahead a year so they're a better social/educational fit with their peers? Do I need to consider some private tutoring for X, Y or Z because they're struggling or because they've hit the ceiling for their peer group for that subject?"

So when I ask "What should my 4 year old know", what I'm really looking for is some assurance: "Relax, your kid is a perfect fit for the grade she's in, she's an amazing child, she's made friends, she's happy, she's engaged, she participates, she's got the confidence to speak, she listens well to instruction and to her peers, she understands and retains information well - she's on par with the rest of her class, a bit ahead in X, a bit behind in Y, but nothing that you need to spend any time worrying about. Just concentrate on having fun with her and enjoying her childhood, she's doing fine."

Please start with the "Gang of Four"; perhaps the title will trick them into thinking it's about a gang of four year olds?

So far nobody has opted for C.

See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1411647... for just one reference.

Nevertheless, it's crucial that we support the development of cognitive skills related to self-reflection, inhibitory control, and so on even in children whose prefrontal cortexes may not be physically developed enough to consistently make appropriate judgements.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_function#Adulthood

You can never see what's always there, such as the air we breathe. You can only understand it by logic and that's not until your teenage years, at the earliest. How could a toddler possibly understand love?

Edit: To clarity, of course you should love your children, unconditionally. But to teach them what unconditional love is, at an early age? Really?

It wasn't important in this case, but my brain kept flipping back to the previous item to make sure I hadn't made a mistake in reading. Ordinarily it is pretty important to the narrative.