My wife (staying at home) and I have a 2yo girl and a 7mo girl and raise them trilingually (English, Spanish, German).
To our surprise, the 2yo has a better pronunciation than monolingual peers.
She also has a remarkable memory and can remember names of places and people.
Moreover, she discovers letters on signs and posters. Her favorite book is a visual dictionary. [3]
In general, our daughters can have access to all tools after a short introduction and under supervision.
Scissors? Hold em like this. Kitchen knife? Handle with care. China plates? Careful.<p>Most people in our neighborhood do not have a strategy on how to raise the children.
They rather trust in day care to take care of that or follow their intuition.<p>I feel a strong need to strategically work out an education.
So far, I have been studying the Montessori work, namely 'Montessori, the Science Behind the Genius' [2].<p>I am interested in the following questions:<p>1. What educational strategy / syllabus do you have for your children?<p>2. At what age do you introduce smartphones / tablets for their independent usage? (<i>)<p><pre><code> 1. What do you think of the WHO guidance [4]?
2. How much screen time do you think is beneficial / detrimental?
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3. How do you provide an optimal environment for your children to learn at any time?<p>4. How do you teach technological foundations (STEM) without technology?<p>5. What activities do you perform outside / in nature? (e.g., Usage of animal guides / plant guides)<p>6. My daughter sees me working a lot with tablet / laptop and wants to do the same. (She's even 'scheduling meetings'). How would you deal with this?<p>(</i>) I am familiar with a related question from 2014 (Ask HN: How much screen time do you let your kids have?[1]).<p>---<p>[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746045<p>[2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/019536936X<p>[3]: https://www.dk.com/us/book/9781465447562-5-language-visual-dictionary/<p>[4]: https://www.who.int/news/item/24-04-2019-to-grow-up-healthy-children-need-to-sit-less-and-play-more
I can comment on "3. How do you provide an optimal environment for your children to learn at any time?"<p>What we have done correctly is to have loads of books in the house, often maxing out our library card to get the appropriate reading/interest level for our children. My oldest is an avid reader (now 12 yrs old) and a benefit of reading so much is that she is an excellent writer as well. We also have throughout the house art/project materials, electronic components, legos, etc. They will often say "I'm bored", then (getting no response from their parents) engage in some art/project/making activity. When they do get screen time, we try to keep it educational (though video games have started to really draw them in).<p>Anyway, I'll post back in 20 yrs and let you know what else we got right!