I think we expect too little of our children ... and give them even less

The are many other and stronger competitors for our children's attention than reading and a love of language. TV (which I'm guilty of over-exposing my own children to) is the chief culprit, but there are also plastic toys, whatever I happen to be looking at on my phone, etc.

So when I read the following from a letter J. R. R. Tolkien wrote to his elderly aunt in the early 1960s about how he thought about writing specifically for children (he didn't), it resonated powerfully:

Children are not a class or kind, they are a heterogeneous collection of immature persons, varying, as persons do, in their reach, and in their ability to extend it when stimulated. As soon as you limit your vocabulary to what you suppose to be within their reach, you in fact simply cut off the gifted ones from the chance of extending it. (Letters, 1961 to Jane Neave)

As it relates to this blog, the point to me is that if we want to maximize our children's ability to express themselves and express the mental models of their parents -- not to mention be able to construct new models from the building blocks of the old ones -- we must give them everything we can, and more than they can absorb. This investment in our future is clearly undervalued by our culture at large as we farm out the raising of our children to nannies and daycare and other caregivers, all of whom are applying uniform delivery of knowledge to the next generation.

So, what a tremendous cultural problem we face! How do we build a culture with two-income families, living separately and distant from their extended families, with adequate attention to the individualized needs of our children.

It's a tough problem ... and if it isn't solved, it's a recipe for cultural disaster as our capacity to solve the problems of the future become increasingly delicate and prone to catastrophe in the event of sudden changes.