Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Yoga postures are hard enough; try doing them with your eyes closed and it becomes almost impossible. Kids on the other hand seem do those same poses fairly easily with their eyes closed.   I understood why it’s easier for kids to balance with their eyes closed as I was reading this excerpt from Eureka!: Mindblowing Science Every Day of the Year . The answer starts with an interesting observation: “Children obviously enjoy the feeling of dizziness -- just look at how roundabouts in parks and playgrounds are packed with young­sters.” Why is that? Because, it turns out, our balance system is controlled by 3 senses: Inner ear (vestibular system) Receptors in joints and muscles (proprioceptor system) Eyes (visual system)   These 3 systems mature at different rates from the time we are born: “The vestibular system is fully operational by the time a child has reached 6 months of age; proprioceptors need three or four years more. The development of the visual elem...

We got our 13 yo daughter her SIM card finally. Too early? Maybe (time will tell), but so many other kids seem to have gotten one at a much younger age. The other reason was the expectation that she’ll over-do/over-use whenever she gets her own phone number, and we will all take time to settle down on her usage (Time she spends? Which apps? Sharing her number with who? Learning to deal with unknown callers? Recognizing scamsters? etc). Better that the (team building) phases of ‘forming’, ‘storming’ and ‘norming’ get done long before she gets to 9 th standard, or so we hope. (I didn’t mention the ‘performing’ phase of team building because, well, she’s a teenager).   That’s the plan. But as Clausewitz said, “No plan survives contact with the enemy”, so let’s see… ~~   It reminded me of this recent Australian bill to set the minimum age for social media accounts at 16. Social media companies will be expected to enforce this law. My initial reaction was that this is a...

During our Ladakh vacation, it was annoying to find our 11 yo daughter hooked onto the phone every time we reached the hotel. When we asked our guide cum driver in Ladakh, he confirmed that his kids too loved their apps.   We were put up at Nubra Valley for a couple of days. We noticed very few people lived there, and so there were practically no vehicles on the road most of the time. When we were walking around the place in the evening, we saw a 2 or so year-old toddler on the street, his back towards us. He seemed oblivious to the fact that his parents weren’t anywhere around. Strange. Just then, a vehicle came, saw the toddler on the street, stopped, and honked. The startled kid looked back, and we saw what had been holding his attention all this while, and the reason why he didn’t notice his parents weren’t hold – yes, a smartphone. He then quickly spotted his mother and went running to her, the precious phone clutched tightly. प्राण जाये   पर   वचन smartphone ...

Beggars can’t be choosers. During COVID times, most kids couldn’t go down to play. They played in smaller groups indoors, but even that was constrained by the choice of the parents – whose house the kid allowed to go (or come from) was determined by the parents’ perception of how “cautious” that household was.   Under these constraints, a 5 yo girl upstairs ended up as one of the occasional playmates of my then 9/10 yo daughter. The age difference though proved insurmountable – but my wife grew a liking for that kid, so she’d often come to be with my wife! (Anyone is better than one’s own parent. Even an adult in COVID times apparently).   The 5 yo’s parents were very grateful - if we thought having a 9/10 yo indoors all the time was torture (for all of us), it must have been worse for the parents of that 5 yo girl. The father was a chef at a hotel, so they’d send the occasional homemade pizza. As the instances of such yummy food increased, my wife began to feel awkwar...

In his book on the road to quantum computing , John Gribbin made this remark about the multiverse: “In (David) Deutsch’s words, ‘all fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.’ So all of Jane Austen’s stories recount real events in parallel realities to our own; but The Lord of the Rings does not.” By that token, many things Calvin did in Bill Watterson’s books must happen some parallel universe. Or worse…   Calvin, like all boys his age, found girls repulsive. This 8 yo friend of my 10 yo daughter announced that she and a similar aged boy were now a couple. The older girls made fun of her singing the same K-I-S-S-I-N-G song Hobbes is singing above. The 8 yo brazenly said she didn’t care, and romped around holding hands with her “boyfriend”.   Kids are notorious for drawing totally wrong + self-serving conclusions: We have 2 car park slots, and had rented one of them to a neighbor. During play, their kid announced that since his car was in the sl...

The other day, while we were watching this Indian spy series, The Family Man , there was this scene where the main character was called to the principal’s office at his daughter’s school. And like any parent in that situation, he was saying things like “My daughter is a very good girl” and “She’d never do something like that”. Hearing which, my 9 yo daughter snorted, “Hmmph… no parent would ever say such things about their child”.   Yes, kiddo, I can see why you would think that.   I told her that I’d say the same if her principal called me in. You’d think she’d be glad to hear that I would have her back, should the need arise. But no. “No need. I am a very well-behaved kid at school” . At least she had the honesty to say “at school”…   Another time, she wasn’t happy with the song being played in the car. So I changed it and asked if the newer one was acceptable to her Royal Highness. A simple Yes/No would have sufficed. Instead, she gave an exaggerated sigh ...

This summer vacation, we subscribed to this online course called Logiqids for our 8 yo daughter. It’s about developing logical thinking, and they provide online worksheets, each with 10 multiple-choice questions. The format and the skills it helps develop all reminded me of those IIM entrance papers back when I was at college… The site offers the option to download the worksheet, solve it offline, and then submit the answers online. That’s the option she uses. Of late, I let her solve it herself, then we go over her answers (or questions she couldn’t solve), before submitting them. There was this one question she did that both impressed me and annoyed me. I was impressed because it was complex ( X is 10 years older than Y; Y is 6 years younger than Z; Z is 18, so how old is X? ), and yet she had identified the way to solve it (the right additions and subtractions) correctly. But I was annoyed she’d done the calculations wrong. She got the hard part right, but had messed u...

I love to read. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve diversified the stuff I read (the Internet helped immensely). And I try and do what Charlie Munger says: “(Just reading is) not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things.  Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.” But how does one enthuse a kid to read? After all, most of their reading is the kind “forced” by the education system, on subjects they don’t always care about, in a style that, well, let’s just say it isn’t riveting. Kevin Kelly wrote this passage trying to encourage kids to read. You decide whether he achieves its aim: “Imagine you can choose your own superpower. You get to pick one of these three: flying, invisibility, or being able to read. Which one do you choose?” Most kids would obviously pick the first two. Which is why Kelly writes next: “Flying is not so useful without other superpowers; invisibility is okay for being naughty or...

When I started reading Calvin and Hobbes , I was always struck by the range of topics Bill Watterson could cover. On the topic of how kids view their parents, this line by Calvin says it all, across space and time:   “I am related to people I cannot relate to.” As I’ve grown older, I can still appreciate and enjoy how Calvin views the world, but I increasingly find that my 8 yo daughter too can relate to Calvin. Like the time she read this strip: So how do I know she could relate to the strip? Like all kids, she has the subtlety of a sledgehammer. She turned to me and said, “I feel the same way about you”. And then added the final nail to the coffin: “It’s almost as if Calvin is my brother.” Ouch! The shoe is now on the other foot, and I don’t like it one bit.

One time, my 8 yo daughter said she wanted to be a lemonade vendor. Another time, as someone who loves dogs, she said she wanted to be a vet. My wife suggested that she should be the vet at a zoo so she could treat the widest (and wildest) variety of animals. The next time the topic came up, my daughter shamelessly claimed that the zoo idea was her’s all along: “You think I can’t come up with ideas? I have brains”, she declared, tapping her head. When it comes to studies, like most kids, she dislikes maths. I tried reasoning with her in terms of what she cares about. You want money, right? All the best paying jobs are based on doing well at maths. I made as much progress with that argument as Calvin’s dad had made. In recent times, my daughter has learnt the word, “hacking”. Hacking is a very positive term in her peer group, apparently. She announced that one of her friends has hacked her classmate’s account and thus gets to copy their (online) homework! Isn’t that cool,...

My 8 yo daughter can’t understand the difference between a couple of hundreds and say, a lakh, or a crore. The only context in which she cares about these numbers to even try and compare them is, of course, money. Then again, this inability to visualize the magnitude of difference between large numbers is a human-wide problem. Adults can’t do it either. Hence the endless analogies, like mapping the life of the planet (4.5 billion years) onto a 24 hour window, and then trying to impress you by pointing out that “modern humans have been around since 11:59:59pm—1 second”! So perhaps it’s too much to expect from kids. But we’re talking of kids here: Anything you think is easy, they absolutely won’t get. And they’ll have their enlightenment on whatever you have no hopes about. Recently, I told her that one of my friend’s kid was supposed to go on a school trip to the US. But given how much it cost, most parents dropped out. And so, I told her, the trip was cancelled. “How mu...

A while back, we gave my 8 yo daughter my old smartphone so she wouldn’t keep taking our phones to play games. It didn’t have a SIM card, so it was really a computer + camera she had, not a phone that could make calls. And now she finds some kids in the apartment having smartphones with SIM cards, ergo the demand that she be given one too. So far we’ve stood firm but the question is when she will have one, not if . Since I’d started thinking about this topic, I decided to listen to this Short and Curly podcast on the next question that comes with giving a smartphone to your kid. Should you put tracking apps on your kid’s phone? Is it right and necessary? Or are you becoming like the KGB, Stasi and every surveillance state in history? It’s a tough choice: trying to balance privacy v/s safety. Kids feel they can take care of themselves, that they are not animals to be tracked continuously. But how do you as a parent know if the kid is mature to be out there without supervi...

In the evenings, when I go to pick up my 8 yo daughter from play, she and her friends will insist that I chase them to the lift. Since they have converted the transition from play and fun to the home into a game, it’s easier for me to get her back without the endless negotiations of “5 more minutes, pleeee…ease” or “It’s not yet dark”. As I read Jennifer Senior’s awesome book, All Joy and No Fun , on what parenting does to parents, I realized why I enjoy the chasing part. It’s the thrill of the chase, of course! “(Young children) also create wormholes in time, transporting their fathers and mothers back to feelings and sensations they haven’t had since they were young themselves.” During the chase, anytime I am closing in on one of them, they’ll scream for a timeout (“Game pause” in their lingo) shamelessly. That’s another thing with kids: rules can be bent and broken. Unlike how adults how view the world: “I’m talking about the selves who live too much in their heads ra...

Remember this Calvin and Hobbes strip? Keep it in mind as you read this blog: The other day, the William story I was reading to my 7 yo daughter has our hero becoming friends with a bunch of new kids, the kind his mother wouldn’t have approved of. The why behind that becomes obvious when those kids scornfully tell William that, unlike him, they don’t go to school because they go to work at the factory instead. “So lucky, they don’t have to go to school”, I told my daughter. Like all kids who love live to contradict others on every topic under the sun, her response was: “That’s not true. At school, one gets to make new friends. At school, one gets to learn new things. And at school, one gets to have fun.” My jaw dropped. Which, of course, was her cue to land her punchline with a wide got-you grin on her face: “Except at my school. None of those things are true about my school.” Ok, kiddo, you got me there.

I was both amused and horrified at how my 7 yo’s computer science book explained Windows: “Windows is the most popular program that makes the computer work.” Man, we’re defining an Operating System (OS) based on popularity, I shuddered. Once upon a time, the OS was defined as a piece of software that managed the hardware of a computer. I know, I know, that’s way too complicated for a 7 yo... Tech blogger Ben Thompson suggested a different way of describing the OS , not the computer science way, but from a control and money perspective . Huh? He starts with the definition I gave (software that manages the hardware) and explains where that led to (control and money-wise): -           As the OS was the broker to the hardware, users and programmers stopped knowing or caring about the hardware; -           As programmers write applications for an OS, users flock to it because so man...

Due to a school function, my 7 yo daughter had very few classes all week. It was just “practice, practice, practice”. One evening, she told me that the teachers took the kids to the play area that day since the stage (or something, I wasn’t really paying attention) had to be decorated… by the teachers. “That meant the kids could run around the play area and have fun”, said my daughter. “And yet, a couple of them went to help the teachers”, she said, as if it was the most abnormal behavior in recorded history. “Nice kids”, I said just to irritate her. “No”, she snapped back, “The teachers don’t want them around. The kids just keep getting in the way, dropping things here, misplacing things there”. On a roll now, she continued, “Like the time when one kid said he couldn’t find whatever the teacher asked for. The teacher scolded him nicely, only to find that another kid was holding the thing in her hand with a proud it-was-with-me look”. Don’t ask me what the thing in quest...

This is how the so-called Feynman Technique to learning stuff is defined: 1)       Step 1 : Write down the concept you want to understand on a paper; 2)      Step 2 : Explain the topic on that paper. Not how you’d explain things to your smart friend, but to a toddler . This part is key as it ensures you avoid jargon. And it helps identify the gaps in your understanding (they’re the areas you can’t explain to a toddler); 3)      Step 3 : Go back and re-learn the gaps you identified. Then try explaining them again. Repeat until you can; 4)      Step 4 : Read your explanation. Does it sound easy to understand? Is it confusing? Based on the answers, you may need to revise the explanation. Anyone with a kid ends up having to follow the Feynman Technique to some extent or the other! I guess I’ve made some progress on this because the ultimate compliment my 7 year-old has paid me till date was whe...

When my 7 year-old daughter wanted to take money to buy stuff at the school canteen, I tried shooting it down pointing out that she didn’t know to subtract in her head. “How would you know how much they should return?”, I asked. “It’s OK if they don’t return the right amount,” she said. Seeing my jaw drop, she explained her stance, “It’s your money, I am fine if you spent a little extra”. Another time, she told me that giving extra money for something is better than giving the exact amount. “Why?”, I asked. “Simple,” she said, “That way they give you back some money. Imagine that: giving you money for buying something from them .” Patience, I reminded myself. She will learn when she is ready. Or even better, when she has an incentive to learn such things. I think that incentive driven moment to learn about subtraction and accounting has arrived. Of late, she has taken to growing plants. It soon became a group activity with her friends where they’d all plant seeds in cups,...

Kids in a car will drive you up a wall by asking the question, “Are we there yet?”. Every 2 minutes. And that’s if you are lucky; more often, they’ll ask the same question again within a minute. Is that because they’re so damned impatient and so easily bored? Or is it just not possible for kids to visualize distances or the passage of time? The point hit me when my daughter was watching this cartoon about 2 naughty school kids, Badrinath aur Buddhadev . The class was told that there’d be a 5 km marathon, upon which one kid promptly responded: “Just 5 km? What’s there in that? I can run that much in just 5 minutes.” Most adults immediately know that’s impossible. But if you step back to see how adults know that, it’s not because we can visualize the distance of 5 km or the amount of time 5 minutes implies. Rather, our brain uses the proxy called “speed” to assess the claim: 5 km in 5 min means a km per minute, which is 60 kmph. Cars go at that speed, not humans, therefore th...

If you thought that that finding one’s kid showing interest in science experiments would be satisfying, you’d be wrong. Parents would have identified the next peak to be scaled, in this case Mount Explanations. We bought my 6 year-old this kit called Snap Circuits . It had Lego-like blocks for capacitors, resistors, wires etc. The manual would tell you different ways to join the blocks to produce different effects e.g. a fuse, regulating fan speed, dimming a light etc. Awesome kit, thought my wife and I. To my daughter though, it began to feel repetitive after a point. The output of all these circuits seemed to usually be one of the following: a light turns on (or off), a fan spins, a speaker makes sounds. And so her damning verdict of the kit was that dreaded word, “Boring!”. And that meant all attempts to explain how a circuit (or its components) worked was doomed from the start… But she did seem to like some of the applications, like the fuses I showed in the house. Or ...