Preschoolers can reason better than we think, study suggests

Completely agree. In various volunteering capacities (think STEM fairs, youth baseball umpiring, etc) I end up working with 8-12 year olds a lot and I seem to be better at this than a lot of my counterparts. You nailed it.

The secret is to treat the kid like an adult until they demonstrate a reason(s) not to. A GF one time asked me why I talked to her nephew “like that?” and I was so confused. She said “you talk to him the same way you talk to me” (ie. the way I talk to anyone). Nephew and I were shooting free throws in the driveway. We get along great. This was very rambly but I think about it all the time.

I’ve gotten the brattiest kids to calm down and accept the situation in meltdowns in youth baseball with the same approach.

I’m not claiming this always works. Many times the situation or kid themselves demonstrates they must be treated like a kid. That’s fine too.

It makes my blood boil that my kid comes from the nursery saying things like "I did an ouchie". Kids don't naturally speak like this, they are taught like this. He's 3. At home he speaks his parents languages and he sounds like a 5 year old because we don't dumb it down for him. In English he sounds like every other English 3 year old in the nursery.

> Children are most hurt by low expectations. Especially young children.

I feel children's programming is reflecting those low expectations.

Daniel Tiger's fine, but an episode tends to be so focused on some narrow little thing. The older Mr. Rogers show it's based on tended to be much more wide-ranging, and often had segments introducing parts of the real adult world to a kid.

And there's stuff like Blippi, where you have a man engaging in extremely literal and unimaginative play, being "educational" by teaching colors over and over.

"High demands are not high expectations." Holy crap that is a great phrase!

I think treating partial goals as bonuses is a good thing. Any goal that can be seen as a fun bonus challenge becomes more psychologically rewarding than if it's treated as a requirement?

At least I find that works when motivating myself. I didn't expect that I would finish this big skirace this year. But having it as a bonus goal made it very rewarding when I actually did finish it.

I wish we kind of celebrated failures and treated them as learning opportunities.

One of my main complains about my upbringing is that it didn't demand much of us, and it didn't provide opportunities to extend our wings and do and learn about cool stuff, while failures were treated as the end of the world.

I used to think I hated children. No, I hate bad parenting. Friends had kids and talked to them like adults (not when they were toddlers, obviously) and the kids turned out awesome. I think it’s easy to handicap children by limiting your expectations of them.

My cousin needed speech therapy because my aunt accidentally formed her own language with him in over-doing the baby talk.

Ironically, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone I've ever met.

I have a similar story about our child, at a similar age! He waited until I'd left the room before dragging a chair away from the dining table and then climbing it, in order to reach a toy I'd accidentally placed on a high shelf on the book-case.

When I came back he immediately knew he'd been caught. Though I wasn't at all mad, it was a wakeup-call that from then on placing things too high was probably a challenge for him, rather than an absolute protection.

100%, my son will be 2 next month and he's even started saying his own name in the tone we do when we're telling him it's not safe and then giggling to himself!

He can recognise a lot of birds, trees, flowers (daffodils, primroses, hyacinths, tulips) coming out in the garden at the moment, only needs to be told what it is once or twice for it to stick.

Mine is two years, three months and has recently started trying to loid the magnetic child safety cabinet locks in the kitchen with any piece of strong cardboard she finds. I do not know how she came to the realization that that should work, but it definitely feels like we underestimated her.

Luckily she's only succeeded once so far, but nevertheless we're trying to figure out how to make sure the knives are safely out of reach (because she's also figured out how to climb the counter with a chair, obviously) without it becoming too inconvenient for us as well.

My kid is about the same age. We recently bought a safety lock to prevent him from getting into cupboard under our sink. It had great reviews on Amazon.

The first time he went into the kitchen after I had installed it, he notices it immediately, walks straight up to it, grasps it with both hands like an adult would, and has it unlatched within 5 seconds. He then proceeds to look at me like "Is this some sort of test?"

This is tangent, but your comment reminds me of this essay that floats around HN every so often about how limiting school is. Young children are absolutely capable of greatness beyond what we ever ask of them, and most of us are okay with them growing up in the rigid, ordained box of modern public schooling: https://map.simonsarris.com/p/school-is-not-enough

They are basically lacking the experience and have limited knowledge of the world around them. And us adults often fail to understand their mental model, since we usually won't connect the same dots, but there is definitely logic to their reasoning. It's best to try and ask more questions to know how they've come to some ridiculous idea, and they usually reveal one or two steps that I wouldn't think about.

Can you elaborate on ways people are intelligent that we don't value?

There was a 3-part BBC documentary called "My Brilliant Brain" with one that featured Susan, who was the oldest and is today one of the best live chess commentators in the world. The doc talks about her father's theory and practice. His most important understanding was that the child must choose the endeavor of their own free will, and then he merely helped them optimize their learning curve.

Susan has a great quote about showing up to a men's chess club, when she was still young. She said, "I don't think I ever beat a healthy man." Because they were always not feeling well, or whatever lame excuse they conjured up.

The other two parts of the series are on different topics, but are also interesting, but Susan's is our favorite, and I got them long before our son started chess.

And Laszlo's book on chess problems is on my son's bookshelf. It has more than 5000 "problems, combinations, and games". It's been replaced by chess.com's and lichess's puzzle games, but it is still the reference book on chess puzzles, to my understanding.

The problem there is that just because you can do it doesn't mean it's good for them. I have two cousins who were trained at playing classical instruments from extremely young age(like 2 years old), one of them went on to become a very successful and well known violinist, but......she hates it. She will be the first one to say that the constant almost daily lessons were an absolute nightmare and that she's had no childhood because of it, and it also locked her into being a violinist despite whatever else she might have wanted to do.

Great "achievement" for the parents, but I wouldn't personally do that to my child.

The part of the Polgár story that amazes me the most is that all three daughters showed enough interest and engagement in chess for the experiment to work so successfully. Because with my own children, I’ve seen again and again that you can encourage and expose them to certain interests, but they’re their own people - many of the things I exposed them to and tried to get them excited about just weren’t interesting to them.

And that’s completely fine. I was never forceful about it and they have their own deep interests in things that I just never got into or understood. I just find it surprising that in some families, these exceptional skills and interests are so readily passed from one generation to the next.

The logic is sound, but all logic depends on the initial premises put forth.

I can concoct some flawless chain of logic leading to some conclusion but it’s all for naught if the premises it is based on are invalid.

An intelligent listener can listen and find where the base misunderstanding is and teach from there. Teaching from the false conclusion is a mistake.

I’ve seen this often. My son is 3 and often tells us his reasoning: “we need to run for the bus because it doesn’t wait for us!”

He always says it like he isn't sure we know about buses yet making me think it’s hard to model others as separate minds with differing information until much older. But his modeling of the world logic is very solid. He can easily use multiple tools to reach high up snacks, or build complex block forts, or reason about what will happen “we will grow up and then go to kindergarten!”

Can you give some examples? Super interesting to me as someone with no children

I blame the laws applying children for why this misconception is so widely spread. If companies hired children more people would realize how capable they are. Instead now they have to segregate and start their own companies or work for free where they won't coexist with adults. Adults have a superiority complex over children and don't want them to compete with them as it would shatter their ego.

And birds. And fish. And…

We seem to have a very very strong bias towards assuming less/no intelligence in anything that isn’t an adult human.

It is possible to talk to young children in a grown up way faster than people think, at least for those that do not have recent experience with toddlers.

My son is 2 1/2 and making sure we know he wants to do things his own way.

But if you take time to explain a situation like an adult he backs down eventually. Or, it could be I am just boring him to death and he gives in to shut me up.

I would like to be sympathetic to this, because it is true that as a child I was free to do what I pleased at "bedtime" the rule being that I may not leave my room or disturb my parents, so e.g. reading until daylight is fine, playing music is not, but whether I'm "in bed" let alone "asleep" is on me. In fact of course almost always I would end up asleep, maybe not exactly when I "should" be asleep, but likely as soon as you'd end up getting a reluctant child to actually sleep if you're trying to enforce that.

However, we know lots of children left to their own devices get over-tired, they should sleep but they don't and then they're much worse for it the next day. So in practice most parents are doing the right thing by insisting that children should sleep when they were "supposed" to rather than leaving them to their own devices as mine did.

I have a friend who is an angry drunk. The sort of person who door staff may need to kick out of a bar before they start a fight. In his 20s and 30s, loud arguments about nothing of consequence and even occasional violence were a likely end to a previously enjoyable evening. But although he's still an angry drunk he eventually got good enough at understanding his own emotional state that by his 40s he would just leave. Instead of "We need to all go home or J might kick off" it's "Bye J, see you next week" because he's just realised he feels angry about nothing and he has ordered himself a ride home and is leaving, no fuss.

This ability to self-regulate is often not something children are good at, but it's important. There's a difference between reasoning that if you eat the whole cake you'll feel bad and not eating the whole cake because you'll feel bad

The reasoning is perfectly solid and how this conversation should go between two adults. When children talk about wanting to be adults, this is a large part of what they mean: adults are allowed to apply rules and logic consistently and fairly. If children do it they are called insolent and disrepectful

I guess that laughter provides a lot of context that helps learning.

Whenever I laugh in such situations I make sure to point out that my child was right.

It's also a common communications failure, in that you'll do far better not just with children, but with adults to, if you provide a reason instead of assuming that the other party know why you're making the request you're making.

Instead you're inviting pattern matching - the child will have been told to go to bed because it is late, so it's a natural statement to make if you don't understand why the parent is stating it.

Explain the steps, and the consequence of failure in a way that the child can relate to, and you're likely to get a very different reaction("come home, because it's late and you need to go to bed so you're not too tired to play tomorrow").

But really, adding a "because ..." tends to improve compliance even when the reasoning isn't very sound, and even with adults. It's scarily effective as long as the ask isn't too great.