Kid Stuff

Here’s a collection of general parenting, science & math, toys, and media that I like.

General Parenting

• Free Range Parenting is a great movement against helicopter parenting and helps parents raise more independent and resilient children.
  • Here’s a profile of Lenore Skenazy, the head of the movement, in the New Yorker and a clip of her on The Daily Show. She currently runs Letgrow.org.
  • 50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do seems like a great book with a similar sensibility. I really want to try some of this stuff out
• One of the most valuable things you can do as a parent is to think about how you can coach and support them. My sister Allison turned me on to How to Be the Parent You Always Wanted to Be by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlesh. They have a very short workshop with a book and audiobook (different content) that go over their method. There’s also a very funny video of them role-playing the issues that parents have with their kids. (Added 5/20)
• Natalie Jerimejenko, my Professor in college, named her kids with the longest and shortest names in New York. Her son is Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles and his sister is E. (Added 7/20)
• (Added 11/21) My favorite Disney vacation t-shirts. 
• (Added 10/23) My kids and I love to listen to Cabin Pressure in the car. During the episode “Ipswitch”, there’s a great piece of satirical advice on how to give suggestions to senior people. But it works really well for kids and parents. It goes like this:
  • Hey Mom. (Get the parent’s attention.)
  • I might be wrong. But I think we’re going in the wrong direction. (State your concern in a non-confrontational manner.)
  • This makes me nervous. (Express your feelings. To be honest, we normally skip this step.)
  • Maybe I should check my phone to see where we’re going. (Propose a solution.)
  • How does this should to you? (Gain buy in.)

Science & Math

• Ari really enjoys Ben Orlin’s math books. The most child-friendly one is Math Games with Bad Drawings. He also likes Math with Bad Drawings but that’s a bit more advanced. On the topic of bad drawings, he’s also enjoying What If? by Randall Munroe. (Added 9/2023) 
• StellarNova is a fun site for science parents. I enjoyed building a hexaflexagon and look forward to making juice spheres. (Added 5/20)
• My boys are watching a lot of Mark Rober. Rober is the science nerd at the frat house who did everyone’s math homework. He has great science videos on carnival scam science, fake meat (with Bill Gates), and mixed reality Halloween costumes. He even did a coronavirus physics class. Just for fun he also goes on the Jimmy Kimmel show to pull some epic pranks. (Added 5/20)
• Mark Rober update. My kids are still watching Mark Rober who is becoming more of a traditional media personality. This year he co-hosted the annual autism fundraiser with Jimmy Kimmel, taking over from John Stewart. My favorite Mark Rober item of the year was a build-it-yourself Kiwico domino placement machine that’s a much smaller version of the world record one he built for his YouTube site. (Updated 9/21)
• Valance Plus and Chemistry Fluxx are fun games for kids and adults that also teach basic chemistry concepts.
• Dragonbox makes the coolest Math games I’ve seen are from Dragonbox. Dragonbox teaches math concepts through intuitive games. They have algebra for 5 year olds (video), geometry for kids (video) and a very interesting game to learn adding and subtracting (video). The kids love them and they learn a lot.
• Steve Spangler is this generation’s Mr. Wizard. I especially like his work on Ellen and his series DIY SCI that’s available on Amazon Prime.
• This is a great video that shows what it means for gravity to bend space.
• Math Antics is a great YouTube channel on K-12 math topics
• A Math Love Poem
• Benny’s Rules is a famous math education paper, part of a set of “Disaster Papers,” on how individualized instruction measured in an automated way can go horribly wrong.
• It’s more math stuff for adults but I love watching the Festival of the Spoken Nerd with my kids when I can.
• Here are some nifty math books for kids. Hard Elementary School Math is a great book covering a wide variety of topics that are appropriate for elementary school. A Mathematician’s Lament (free abridged version here) is a great book on math education — focusing on how kids should be learning math. For those of you that want a more “adult” basic math book, check out , Steve Strotgatz’s Joy of X is quite good — you can also read a number of his articles in the New York Times. Bedtime Math is also fun — we like it but it’s especially for parents who aren’t so into math.

Toys

• Non Transitive Dice are 4 dice that given any one die, you can find another die that will on average beat the first die. However, there’s no “best” die. It’s like the game rock, paper, scissors. Warren Buffett and Ed Thorpe are both fans of non-transitive dice.
• Penny Magic is a set of strong magnets, British pennies, and an instruction guide that you can use to do some pretty awesome things.
• The Kid Should See This has a great holiday gift guide.
• Another favorite in our family is Snap Circuits which is a fun way to learn basic electronics. Snap Circuits Jr. Select looks even better but seems harder to find. It was the best selling toy on Amazon a few years ago.
• The kids have been having a lot of fun playing cards. We even learned to play Texas Holdem with these cheap poker chips. We also got some waterproof cards to play with by the pool. These cards are awesome but the case is made of paper (so bad stuff happens). These cards have a great case but the cards easily scuff and stick together. (Added 2020)

Videos, Books, and Other Media

• My boys love MrBeast, the top creator on YouTube. According to Bloomberg, MrBeast, also known as Jimmy Donaldson, is a 23-year-old from North Carolina who spent his life figuring out how to make the viral videos. It’s like watching a better version of 80s talk shows with highly addictive videos like Anything You Can Fit In The Circle I’ll Pay For, I Ate A $70,000 Golden Pizza, and I Gave My Credit Card To Random People.⁽¹⁾I showed Blake the Blink 182 video Rock Show because I thought it was really creative. Blake said that it was like MrBeast with less money. His most-watched video is $456,000 Squid Game In Real Life which cost $3.5 M to make, more than an episode of the real show. (Added 9/2021, Updated 12/2021)
• My friend Adam Chase is one of these Young Turks of new media. He writes the YouTube channel Half as Interesting (HAI) which has humorous takes on interesting and complicated topics. These videos average 500,000 views. By comparison, Jimmy Kimmel averages about 20% of that for a monologue. When I asked Adam how writing HAI changed him, he said, “I’ve become the most annoying person at any party. Like last week when I was introduced to someone at a party who used to be in the Navy, I could have said something normal like, ‘Thank you for your service.’ Instead, I decided to say, ‘Did you know that Pepsi once had the world’s sixth-largest navy.’” Abigail highlighted a very funny joke with the same idea. (Added 12/2021)
• The Chompers Podcast was created specifically for kids to listen during their morning and night tooth brushing. It’s engaging and exactly the right length to brush their teeth.
• If you want to mesmerize kids with innocuous videos, try dominoes falling down.
• The Kid Should See This is a weekly collection of videos that are inspiring for kids and parents.
• Comic books aren’t just about superheroes anymore. Jim Ottaviani has done a series of graphic novels as science biographies. His Feynman biography is superb. I’ve also enjoyed Primates (about the path-creating female primatologists) with my kids.
• We’ve using instructional placemats at home for years. My favorites are maps of the continents. The placemats all look similar but everyone gets a different continent. I also like the periodic table, the Presidents, and country flags.
• When it’s hard for the kids to get through a book, we bought an audiobook and a print copy of the book (or borrowed them from the library) so they can follow along. One great set is the Ramona Quimby Collection narrated by Stockard Channing.
• The audio versions of Dr. Seuss books narrated by celebrities They are amazing.
• I was watching Fiddler on the Roof recently. When it came out in the 1950s, it was a portrait of life in Russia that was completely destroyed by the Holocaust. I also started watching Brooklyn Bridge, Gary David Goldberg (Family Ties), show about growing up in 1950’s Brooklyn. I realized that since watching the show in my teens, it’s been my vision of the 1950s that my parents grew up in. There are great episodes about interfaith dating (Episode 7: “War of the Worlds”), working (Episode 12: “Get a Job), The Brooklyn Dodgers (episode 13: “Where Have You Gone, Jackie Robinson?”),  the Holocaust (episode 28: “The Last Immigrant). Unfortunately, you can’t stream it now, but episodes appear to be available on YouTube.
• What if Millie Dresselhaus, female scientist, were treated like a celebrity. Dresselhaus was the first woman to secure a full professorship at MIT and was awarded the National Medal of Science, the Presidential Medal of Freedom (bestowed by President Barack Obama), the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Enrico Fermi prize and dozens of honorary doctorates. She died earlier this year right after the commercial came out.
• People are Awesome is an amazing YouTube channel compiling amazing things that people do. Here’s the best of 2017.
• The kids and I listened to The Phantom Tollbooth, narrated by Rainn Wilson from The Office. The book is a beautiful fantasy of a young boy Milo who walks through the world of logic puzzles and paradoxes. It’s one book that speaks to the science nerd through literature.
• I was at the school book fair and saw, Emmy in the Key of Code. It’s one of the strangest books I’ve ever seen, trying to combine poetry, music, and coding into a novel. The author, a Silicon Valley coder, manages to pull it off and it comes off like a bit of kids version of Goedel, Escher, Bach.
• Brainpop is a wonderful site that provides 5 minute learning videos on Math, History and every other school subject followed by a series of multiple choice questions. My kids (6 and 3) have been using BrainPop Jr. which is targeted for K-3
• Powers of 10 is a fantastic video by Charles and Ray Eames on how big and small the universe is. It’s great for kids as well as adults.
• The first season of Sesame Street is (as of 2016) available on Netflix. It’s quite compelling and interesting to see. You can also see the original Sesame Street pitch reel which includes the Muppets acting as part of the pitch. I also found a compilation of my favorite bit, the man falling down stairs with baked goods. There’s also some very interesting and old videos of the Muppets before Sesame Street like TV Ads, Kermit meeting puppets of David Brinkly and Chet Hutley, and Cookie Monster’s predecessor staring in an IBM training video.
• Square One is a math based TV show for 8-12 year olds created by the Sesame Workshop. I remember it fondly as one of my favorite educational programs as a kid. I was able to find some episodes online recently.
• Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White has a couple of great audio versions. There’s an interesting parenting theme in the middle of the book that I, of course, missed as a kid. (Added 7/20)