From Freddie de Boer’s blog:
if you’re looking for something to meaningfully move your child around in the academic performance spectrum, to take an X percentile kid and make him an X+Y percentile kid, the answer is no, what you’re asking me about doesn’t work, won’t matter, isn’t worth it. Because outside of some very specific and rare scenarios like schooling a child who has received literally no formal education or removing a kid from extreme neglect or abuse, nothing substantially changes the average kid’s place in the performance spectrum. Academic outputs are dominantly student-side and uncontrollable, based largely on genetics, conditions in the womb, and the “unshared environment,” which is our awkward term for that big chunk of variation we can neither explain nor control.
That is absolutely 100% true. The reason to take a kid to robotics (if the kid really wants to go) or any other extracurricular is so that the kid has fun.
You can’t change a kid’s IQ. At all. But you can do something much more important. Imagine looking into a mirror your whole life and seeing a strikingly beautiful woman or a sensationally good-looking man every single time. Imagine living with a feeling that the world is conspiring in your favor, that everything will turn out just right for you because you are that kind of person. Who needs academic outputs if you can have that?
This is what we can give our children.
People get stuck on these stupid academic outputs like they can make anybody happy.
Clarissa's Blog 
Yes that. And also: virtue is learned not inborn.
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Exactly. Love of books, self-discipline, the capacity for happiness, loyalty, knowing how to be in a stable relationship. Even healthy eating practices. So much crucial stuff. But people get stuck on extracurriculars like they really matter. Dragging 3-year-olds to Kumon instead of letting them play outside.
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And don’t forget taste. Not talking about high culture, just– a sense of what is good and beautiful. It’s so lacking across so much of our culture just now.
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And, stuff nearly everyone devalues: the basic organizational practices of keeping house. How to cook. How to do basic household tasks in a regular, disciplined, and organized manner. I didn’t learn any of that growing up, and acquiring it in adulthood has been a fairly painful and time-consuming process. Making the transition into adulthood is so much easier with those things already nailed down.
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God, we have a lot in common. I so get what you are saying.
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“basic organizational practices of keeping house”
Or even basic self-care…. I remember a conversation with my brother.
While we both valued what our parents gave us in terms of seeing through and seeing the value of convention and being your own person etc he asked more or less “would it have killed them to make sure we brushed our teeth?” (adult dental problems…. not fun……. brrrrrrrr)
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Well, going through this right now with my own kids, and I’m sympathetic… to your parents. Have a kid who hates dental hygeine so much he’ll wet the toothbrush and then lie about it. Old enough to theoretically understand about not getting any new teeth now, and wanting to keep them… but no, I have to play jailer/torturer to get him to brush consistently. I know it’s not my job to be my kid’s friend, but do I *have* to have a fight with a 9yo every damn evening, stand there and watch him brush, make him go back and do it again when he does a crap job, and go to bed feeling like I have failed at life, parenting, and hated by my child? There’s got to be a better solution than that, or letting him rot his teeth. But I haven’t found it yet. Like, how much parental torture are clean teeth really worth anyway?
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“Have a kid who hates dental hygeine”
I sympathize (maybe he wants to be a carny or a biker?)
In our case, ee didn’t even hate it, we were just…. kids, easily distracted and lazy and forgetful (about stuff like that). Occasional (okay daily) reminders would have been enough…
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My Dad was a carny for a while. Has the teeth to match (though there’s no causal connection between those things). Perhaps I should just start pointing this out whenever he visits… it’s a shame they’re not old enough yet to care what girls think of them.
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I will never forget my father’s lessons: “When you are leaving a person’s house, turn to them with your whole body, look them in the face, and say, thank you, I had a wonderful time.” It really helped.
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My parents were working class Cuban immigrants but I inherited stuff from both. My father was a long-time Anglophile who became fascinated by British culture after getting into the Beatles in the mid 60, he loved British music, film and literature and his favorite author was Dickens. My mother has had a fascination with India since she was a child and loves Indian film and culture, she’s read extensively on Hindu mythology even though she’s a nominal Catholic. From my mother, I inherited a love of music and reading and film. From my mother, an open mind about other cultures, spirituality and mythology
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This is so true. And I’m blessed that I was raised by wonderful parents who always made me feel bulletproof. I always give this example of the ‘where are you from?’ “microagression” that seems to torment every POC on the planet. The moment this phrase is uttered, the first thing that comes to their mind is that the person saying it wants them to leave the country. I always found that to be so bizarre! To me that is always a sign that this person likes me and is interested in knowing more about my life. The thought that this is a xenophobic question never crossed my mind until I came across the microagressions discourse on blogs, movies, youtube videos, everywhere.
It’s like they desperately want to believe this narrative because it validates their internal feelings of self-hate. Nothing’s sweeter than validation.
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It’s word salad for this premise: average people are by definition average.
But that won’t stop parents from insisting their average kids can rise with all of the others when a high tide rolls in.
And it also won’t stop parents from moving to deny resources to kids who are far from average in either direction.
Average is overserved and overprovisioned, and so to the extremes being average, and by extension mediocrity, is the enemy.
Retards (‘sup peeps?) should hate average as much as geniuses (muh esteemed colleagues).
Taylor Swift as “one-ply toilet paper” is a thing, an important cultural thing, where you notice what average culture wants and does.
Doubt this at your peril and that of your kids, because politics is downwind of culture in the same way that a shit-smelling town is downwind of a chicken farm.
As for the music angle, consider better music even if it’s mostly pop: I was listening to Wes Montgomery, Alan Parsons, The Spinners, and The Brothers Johnson when I was but a little kid.
My sister took me to The Brothers Johnson in concert before I was a teenager.
Concerts used to be OK for kids with good values … and safe.
Fuck me, I’ll get off my own lawn now. :-)
Oh, yeah, One Ply’s mentor Toby Keith died, not a word in memoriam, not even a word to acknowledge.
She’s too busy bitching about how her plane with PIA government glamour bullshit on it can still be tracked via ADSB, and OMG she’s going to have to sell that one Dassault … the one with the tail number ending in TS. :-)
OK, so what you can give a child … yeah, got it.
Extreme intolerance of averageness as a virtue, plus attention deficits when it comes to word salad, those are my gifts.
If that doesn’t work, there’s aikido, literally letting average people beat themselves up. :-)
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