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As a new parent with a 3-month old baby, I'd be interested in this too.
My totally unscientific intuition, sort of based on how heritable everything is, is that as long as you don't totally fuck up (feed him, don't keep him locked up in a dark room, have him socialize with other children and adults) it doesn't really matter/whatever an upper-middle class person would naturally do is fine. My wife initially fell victim to tons of the baby gear marketing, but once you realize that your baby is equally happy in the $50 generic amazon swing as he is in the $300 fancy swing, you kind of apply that lesson to child rearing writ large.
It's probably more important for his happiness to make sure he breathes through his nose than it is to play Bach by his crib while he sleeps or put him in one of those Russian math programs. We'll try, as much as possible, to avoid a burnout-inducing, intense middle school/high school, although that's hard where we live because a lot of our neighbors are that type. In my job I see plenty of kids coming out of grueling East Asian-style schooling and it absolutely puts them at a long-term disadvantage.
Hopefully the kid will be interested in something and we can nurture him to go deep in that direction, and hopefully it's as straightforward as just exposing him to a lot of things and seeing what he likes. The main thing I'd be at a loss over what to do is if he was just passionless and wanted to watch esports all day or something because I'm not like that and it'd be hard for me to understand and intervene.
Probably if you are hell-bent on raising a chess prodigy you should teach him chess early but that and related things seem like totally pathological goals to shoot for with your kid.
Are we the same person?
But after the neighbor boy showed up wearing a LGBTQ pin my wife has gone from a a huge fan of how diverse our local public elementary school (look at all those refugee kids in the playground) to saying we need to gear up to get the kid in the hyper conservative evangelical private school twenty miles away.
Hm? That sounds like the opposite - OP is going to choose cheaper swings; your wife is going to choose fancier school.
Probably should have made it clearer. It's a different train of thought. Wife has gotten over the baby expensive things, but unfortunately is shifting to future expensive things.
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That's interesting. The article about S Korea posted here a couple weeks ago seemed to also about this -- a pathological fear of not being the most excellent with the most excellent child leading to millions of people failing to form intimate relationships or have kids at all.
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As the parent of a 25 month old it makes them very angry to not breathe through their nose for about the first year! Just a heads up!
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