Not unless it’s qualified with ”… in relative terms, in absolute terms a small fraction of ‘brain power’ that parents do invest can easily outweigh a child’s much larger fraction”. Different underlying hardware.
Sure. In situations where parents have more experience link e.g. traffic or super markets. But not where children have comparable experience like creating or getting away with some mischief. Some parents remember their own childhood. But for most of us this lies in the dark before memory or before the significant restructurings during puberty.
Possibly you are more experienced than the average parent at creating and getting away with mischief. This is probably a good thing, actually, since most people are far less mischievous than they should be.
It’s also very hard to avoid—hard to avoid doing both simultaneously, even.
Watching my own nieces, it’s struck me that different parts of their minds are maturing at different rates. It’s not just that children are any fixed amount less intelligent than adults, and there isn’t even a similar vector of factors for different children—children actually acquire capabilities at different points in time, even when they’re genetically similar.
So niece A was better at math at twelve than B was at fifteen, vice versa for boating skills, vice versa for impulse control...
It comes down to personality differences, but they’re affecting what we’d consider basic cognitive skills in ways you just don’t see in adults.
Brilliant insight!
Not unless it’s qualified with ”… in relative terms, in absolute terms a small fraction of ‘brain power’ that parents do invest can easily outweigh a child’s much larger fraction”. Different underlying hardware.
Sure. In situations where parents have more experience link e.g. traffic or super markets. But not where children have comparable experience like creating or getting away with some mischief. Some parents remember their own childhood. But for most of us this lies in the dark before memory or before the significant restructurings during puberty.
I model my daughter’s creativity in this manner upon my own. It’s been a pretty reliable model so far.
Possibly you are more experienced than the average parent at creating and getting away with mischief. This is probably a good thing, actually, since most people are far less mischievous than they should be.
My mother is most heartily enjoying grandmother’s revenge.
Well, some of us remain more mischievous than others, and social competence / ability to pick up on cues increases from childhood to adulthood.
I find overestimating children to be wrought with dangers of its own, similar in magnitude to underestimating children.
It’s also very hard to avoid—hard to avoid doing both simultaneously, even.
Watching my own nieces, it’s struck me that different parts of their minds are maturing at different rates. It’s not just that children are any fixed amount less intelligent than adults, and there isn’t even a similar vector of factors for different children—children actually acquire capabilities at different points in time, even when they’re genetically similar.
So niece A was better at math at twelve than B was at fifteen, vice versa for boating skills, vice versa for impulse control...
It comes down to personality differences, but they’re affecting what we’d consider basic cognitive skills in ways you just don’t see in adults.
Observing a child develop is a marvellous lesson in the incredibly fragmented nature of what we so blithely simplify into the label “intelligence”