Ask HN: How did you raise your child to be high achieving academically?

The single most powerful thing we’ve done is encourage our kids’ interest and allow the other things to slide. One of my kids gets near perfect grades in everything in a competitive honors college. One is years beyond their grade. Another is taking extraordinary risks to pursue their career.

If you are working with children who have strong intellectual capacity, you diminish it by treating learning as a grind.

If they don’t have it, they need a very clear motivator to grind through what they will never excel at.

Either way, Maria Montessori’s advice to “follow the child” is the most powerful and unique choice you can make.

If you ever find yourself asking (or discussing with teachers/staff) “How do I motivate my child?” then you’ve already steered off the path.

The only sustainable motivation is intrinsic. Children’s motivations radically change over their development.

Reading up on normative childhood development can be very helpful as a parent. You’ll learn that at every age there are skills your child just isn’t ready to develop, even though they will need to later, and there are ones that are worth supporting them in developing. Regression is normal. Rebuilding previously developed skills is normal.

It’s disorienting, scary, and occasionally marvelous.

My family were not academic at all but we always had lots of high quality books around the house.

probably the biggest boost to my early learning was having no age restriction on books at all so encyclopaedias and college textbooks were fair game whether I was 5 or 15.

First person in my family to get a degree and also first to get a masters.

For my own kids one day the biggest risk seems to be iPads and tiktok melting their brains instead of getting lost in physical books. Child attention spans surely were longer when you could have half of chance of getting bored without a screen under your nose 24/7.

It’s a combination of passing on your talented genes, and spending a lot of time with your child, while patiently exposing him or her to various activities and gently encouraging progress and curiosity.

If you do all that, the chances of your child becoming “high achieving” are still about 50/50.

Let them be curious, encourage them to play and discover for themselves, and, most importantly, stop trying to live vicariously through whatever they achieve (which they’ll achieve independent of your input, not because of it).

Also, if you’re nice, maybe let them not achieve at all? At the end of their life it won’t be about what they pursued, it will be about who they met along the way and how much they loved and were loved. The rest is moot.

High achieving academically or happy, pick one :)

I dont have kids, so take it with the grain of salt, but understanding "why", the purpose helped me a lot with edu

Step 1: Read to them when they are young.