Treat Your Kids Like Intelligent Humans 🤓

Table of Contents

The Intelligence of Children
Mindset Shift
Respect Your Kids
Examples

The Intelligence of Children

When my first kids were young (around 3 years old), I realized they were insanely more capable than I had thought kids at 3 years old were. I had worked with many 5-year-olds through various educational, childcare, and entertainment roles I had in the past and loved that age because 5-year-olds seemed pretty fun and capable. I hadn't had as much interaction with 3-year-olds at that point so I assumed they were quite a bit less intelligent or capable than 5-year-olds.

My current theory is that the primary difference between 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds is that they just haven't had enough time to learn all the stuff a person needs to learn to build up a more complex understanding of the world, but they are still quite smart. In fact, this appears to be the primary difference between 3-year-olds and any age.

Beyond 3 years old, I would argue that you should try to give your kids more credit than you otherwise might. They're smarter than you think, they just haven't absorbed much info about the world yet so they are still working on developing their basic principles. In some ways, I would argue this actually makes them smarter than those of us who are bogged down subconsciously with societal knowledge. For example, words like "amn't" and "goed" (as the past participle of "to go"), which are commonly heard around our house these days, seem more intelligent to me than the actual English language.

Mindset Shift

I would argue that we, as parents, should do our best to ...