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Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 26, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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She currently has a tablet, and likes to play games where she's supposed to trace letters, but then gets frustrated because it's actually kind of hard and not very useful to trace letters with fingers (it doesn't let me pass about half the time).

Yeah, that sounds minimally helpful to me--especially in an era when handwriting seems to be on its way out entirely. Making letters is totally unnecessary to the task of reading, except insofar as your daughter may want to do things like write her own name and then read it back to you.

I have a mild lingering feeling that TV watching and video game playing are vices compared to reading books, but am not sure exactly where that comes from, or to what extent it's true. Other moms I know also seem to feel that way, but it seems implicit, perhaps aesthetic and related to class in some way.

There are definitely times when the heuristic "if it's fun it's bad (or at least not good) for you" applies! And I would certainly say that poorly-curated media is like that. Educational shows like Sesame Street were specifically created in response to large numbers of young, lower-class children being left in front of television sets all day. The internet poses a similar problem, but in a way that is harder to fix. Plenty of games and television shows are rubbish--but the same was always true of books. That's why curating opportunities is so important. Fortunately, curating opportunities is a lot easier with the internet at hand. It doesn't take a lot of work, but it does take some. Just as parents should sit and read books to their children, they should also, I think, sit and play educational games with their children. Children learn best through imitation, so doing activities with them is very important, at least initially.

Also, there will almost certainly come a time when your daughter will have to work at something dull for her own good--it's just not at all clear to me that this is an important lesson for four-year-olds. Many countries don't worry about formal education at all before a child is 7 or 8 years old. I have known children as young as two years old who could read pretty fluently, but their understanding of what they are reading is limited by their experiences. It's actually surprisingly difficult to find good reading material for a six-year-old child who reads at a high school level, because the books written for that level of reading are also written with plots and problems aimed at appealing to teenagers. Precociousness is often a good problem to have, but it does come with some unique challenges!