Ask HN: How do I give my son a head start?

My eldest is 8 years old. He knows the basics of computer programming already, but he taught it to himself. Where we are native English speakers, he reads and speaks German without an accent. He also understands some French and a smattering of other languages. He reads at a 10 year old reading level, and has mathematics skills at the same level. His writing level is a bit lower. He is also one of the most affable children in his class, known and loved by all, and is generally thought of as conducting himself well, better than many of his peers. He has a solid grasp of the solar system and the fundamentals of astronomy; last year he found the four Galilean moons of Jupiter himself. On his own, he built his own electronics switch when he was barely six and still plays with electronics. He also has recently finished reading about WW1 and WW2, touching upon the Russian Revolution and the Great Depression along the way. And these were not little kid readings. He read "Im Westen nichts neues" - the German original of "All Quiet on the Western Front" - as well as "The Diary of Anne Frank" and several other works from various angles. I am already getting books for him out of the local university library. I say all this to illustrate that he is pretty far ahead of the game in many ways, and he has enjoyed all of it.

Now this is the tack that we have taken. First, we are big fans of the Mozart Effect on children. So we played Mozart a LOT when he was in utero and when he was a baby. We tended to play one of the major composers (Mozart, Beethoven, Bach) more often than other types of music until he was seven. We took to heart Hitler's observation about the importance the influences up to seven play. Therefore, we specifically kept from him any music that came out prior to about 1965. After that point, the lyrics and music start to become more complicated as protests and the civil strife of the time enter the music and then become "free love" and all that. We will now let him hear some of that, but not until he had a foundation from which to understand it.

One of our major guiding principles is to avoid something that might be abusive. "Abusive" is here defined as allowing something to enter your child's world for which s/he has no or very little framework for understanding it. So we were at pains to give him a framework and help him understand things in life as he encountered them early on.

Finally, we try our best not to say "no" when he wants to explore something. Rather, we do our best to find a way that he can safely delve in. For example, he found out the sixth graders at school were studying WW2. He wanted to learn, too, but the school wouldn't let him because he was in third grade. He approached me, and I cobbled together a reading list and a list of films that he could use to work through WW2. As WW2 makes no sense without WW1, he started there. So the point here is to never, ever, EVER limit your child but to take their curiosity as an invitation to find a way to help them interact with the world in a safe way.

We started playing and speaking French with him when he was two. When he was three, he caught a whiff of German and decided that he would rather learn German than French, so we switched (I speak both). We used Early Advantage's Muzzy program and cannot recommend it enough. It is an award-winning program that was developed by the BBC for teaching foreign languages to children. Combined with doing it at home, we also sought out speakers of the target language to help him learn. Today, my son reads full length novels in German and is yet to watch Apollo 13 in English. When I ask him what they said on Apollo 13, his first reply is "Houston, wir haben ein Problem!"

Finally, we encourage his learning to fight and staying physically fit through judo. This has helped a lot, and my son has consequently taken to reading Sun Tzu and thinking about strategy.

So, to sum it up, don't worry about tech. If you take care of the building blocks of logic and language and foster your child's natural desire to explore, there is no end to what they will do and where they will go.

Richard Feynman's father spent a lot of time teaching his son how to think and what thinking is. That was more important to Feynman than any mathematical lessons his father could teach him. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=695Flhmjmg4#t=2m56s

Parents need to keep an eye out for what kind of person their kids are. They might not be a carbon-copy of yourself, they might have completely different interests and abilities and learning styles.    I did, very much so.    Many parents erroneously assumes that their kids are like themselves because "it is their kids", their genes, their upbringing. But neither genes or kids work like copy machines when it comes to personality.

Sometimes you get a gem too.

After explaining something at work I asked him what he thought of my job and he said, "It sounds like your job is hard dad."

Actually evidence suggests that this is not true. Energy spent reading to kids helps a bit, but what makes a long-term difference is to be seen frequently reading for yourself. Otherwise you wind up in the trap that the kid learns that reading is for babies.