Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸

Jens Peter de Pedro: Play Designer - VP Head of Games at Noggin. Toca Boca is my alma mater. Tweets on children's freedom and future of edu.

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

A radical idea: Children are people too. Childism, explained by me: http://t.co/zOIGx5rQZm

[Lenore Skenazy @FreeRangeKids]

Surprised? No.
Delighted? Yes.
Worried? Also yes.

Study of 4000 kids indicates that "increasing outdoor play may be a useful public health approach to reduce child mental health problems."

So why am I worried?

Kids aren't playing outdoors very much.

https://t.co/UtavZDFBJw

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@ihtesham2005 Somebody should sell the hardware with everything installed.

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@AndresPalacios The human connection boom.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Everyone is missing what this study actually says to parents.

The graph shows two paths to the same destination. The yellow line (early specialization) gets there faster in the early years. The blue line (multi-disciplinary) gets there slower but breaks through to world-class.

The key insight: individuals who perform best at a young age are usually not the same people who later reach the world-class level.

This came from 34,839 top performers across four domains: Nobel laureates, Olympic medalists, elite chess players, and renowned classical composers.

The researchers found three consistent patterns.

First, the best kids and the best adults are mostly different people.

Second, future world-class performers showed gradual development and weren’t among the best in their age group.

Third, they didn’t specialize early but engaged in multiple disciplines.

The research team proposes three mechanisms that explain why breadth beats depth.

The search-and-match hypothesis suggests that exposure to multiple disciplines increases the likelihood of eventually finding the best personal fit.

The enhanced-learning-capital hypothesis proposes that learning in diverse areas strengthens overall learning capacity, making it easier to continue improving later at the highest level within a chosen field.

The limited-risks hypothesis argues that engaging in multiple disciplines reduces the chance of setbacks such as burnout, unhealthy work-rest imbalances, loss of motivation, or physical injury.

That third one matters enormously. Specialized athletes are 2.25 times more likely to get overuse injuries than multi-sport athletes. The American Academy of Pediatrics, AOSSM, and American Medical Society for Sports Medicine all recommend against early specialization before age 15 for most sports.

The lead researcher, Arne Güllich from RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, puts it bluntly: “Don’t specialize in just one discipline too early. Encourage young people by providing opportunities to pursue different areas of interest, and support development in two or three disciplines.”

The two or three disciplines don’t need to be related. Language and mathematics. Philosophy and geography. The researchers cite Einstein pursuing physics and violin.

The connection between domains seems to build cognitive infrastructure that pure depth cannot replicate.

Here’s what makes this uncomfortable for parents. The early specialization path produces visible results faster. Your kid looks better at age 10. They make the travel team. They win the tournament. The graphs cross and diverge later, around peak performance age, when the multi-disciplinary kids start pulling ahead.

The entire youth talent ecosystem runs on selecting early performers and accelerating them. Travel leagues, elite academies, showcase tournaments. Every incentive pushes toward specialization.

But the research shows this system is optimizing for the wrong metric.

It produces great 14-year-olds, not great 24-year-olds.

The practical takeaway: let your kid play three sports until at least middle school.

Let them quit the piano and try drums. Let them be mediocre at several things instead of great at one thing. The data says this approach produces both more elite performers and fewer burnout casualties.

The hardest part is watching other kids pass yours on the yellow line while trusting the blue line catches up.

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

When I was thirteen, I started at a new school. The other kids disliked me and called me names. I found the work boring and pointless. I felt like an alien. I dreaded each interminable day. I stopped wanting to go to school. Every Sunday evening I was filled with misery.

If that happened today, they’d say I was anxious about school. I could have been said to have ‘Emotionally Based School Avoidance (EBSA)’ or ‘school anxiety’. Then, it was just called ‘school refusal’.

I was anxious about school, that’s true.

I was anxious about school when I was told that there was no choice but to go every day and that I ‘looked fine when you’re there’. I was anxious when I was told that if I didn’t attend school, I’d have no future. I was anxious when I was told that it was an ‘excellent school’ and that perhaps I just didn’t appreciate my luck.

I was anxious because I felt trapped in a place where I was miserable. There’s nothing wrong with someone who feels anxious in those circumstances. In fact, I’d worry more about someone who DOESN’T feel anxious. Certainly most adults would.

Once I had been defined as ‘anxious’ I could have been sent to see a specialist. I could have been told I had a mental health problem. My hatred of school would have been turned into a problem with me. ‘Successful treatment’ would have meant ‘Back to school’.

And what I would have learnt was that I was the problem. I’ve have learnt to keep quiet and stop telling others how I felt. I’ve have learnt (as I already suspected) that there was something wrong with me, not the school.

In fact I was lucky. That didn’t happen. I moved house and changed schools and the next school was different. I felt different almost immediately.

Anxiety is a understandable reaction to many circumstances. It’s an emotional response to uncertainty, novelty or lack of safety. It lets us know that extra caution is required. It keeps us alert through hard times. It is useful. We need our anxiety.

Yet with children, we’ve decided that their anxiety is the problem, that it means something is wrong with them. We’ve even told them this, with mental health awareness campaigns on toilet doors and in classrooms. We’ve encouraged them to see their emotional reactions as a sign of dysfunction, as something outside the ordinary. A problem in their heads, rather than a meaningful reaction to the world.

By turning children’s distress into a mental health problem, we depoliticise it. Instead of asking questions about the school system and whether it is fit for children, we suggest that the problem is our children’s reaction to school.

We’re using ‘anxiety’ to keep children quiet.

We don’t ask whether our schools might be designed in ways which provoke distress and anxiety. We don’t ask if they might be developmentally inappropriate and in need of change. Instead we say that they need counsellors, and mindfulness courses, and emotional regulation apps. Ways to ‘cope’, whilst the system carries on regardless.

If only our children could just stop having those inconvenient emotions, we think, then we could carry on as we were. There would be no need to change anything.

But they can't. No more than I could, all those years ago. Our children’s reactions are showing us that there’s a problem.
What will it take for us to listen?
(with @_MissingTheMark)

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@barryamanda99 TLDR but I skimmed the and I agree with everything I saw. 🤝

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

Education is not a science. However, just like the scientific study of music or theater can be worthwhile despite it never really leading to better music or theater, studying education has a place too, a small place.

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

Ökningen i mental ohälsa kom med nya läroplanen 2011, som för många andra länder när de införde läroplaner med fokus på prestation på nationella prov. Tyvärr skylls ungdomars problem på mobilanvändande, trots bristande bevisföring. #skoltwitter https://t.co/iufsRSceQM

[zeta @zeta_globin]

idk who needs to hear this but you can just treat your kid like an adult straight out of the womb, it's your parenthood- my dad turned every chicken dinner into a lecture on diapsid evolution & you can just start telling your kid about napoleon & atomic bombs when they're like 4

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@AnnaBjorklund Ja, i en skolskjutning är motivet att en elev (ibland fd) är traumatiserad av hur den blivit behandlad under sin tid i skolan. Örebrodådet handlar om rasistisk terrorism. Något helt annat.

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@shpetter @FMannerheim @Kettilikorthet Ja, om du har behov av vård under arbetstid. Jag förutsätter att specialpedagogerna Filippa syftar på ser att omsorg behövs där och då. Även om så inte är fallet vore det bra om skolan kunde garantera barns välmående under den tid de vistas där, när personalen ser behov.

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@FMannerheim @Kettilikorthet Både och. Eller så måste barnens behov av vård och omsorg tillgodoses på annat sätt. Eleverna vistas den mesta delen av dagen i skolan, rimligen borde deras behov av vård och omsorg tillgodoses där.

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@LubaSays Love her insights on this!

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

I love this. Love.

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Celebrating mindless striving culture reeks of Asian chauvinism and begs the question of why the most high impact individuals - from technologists to artists - do not have cookie cutter childhoods that were mainly spent being groomed for the Ivy League.

Contrary to what Vivek says, the jock or cheerleader being fêted in American high schools isn’t a sign of mediocrity; it’s actually the essence of what makes America so exceptional.

While the school valedictorian is an objective choice based on academic excellence, the high status archetypes that Vivek belittles, have actually achieved prominence and popularity in *ways that cannot be taught*

Their future success is based on something truly transformational that cannot be gleaned from textbooks: charisma, talent (non-academic), boldness, EQ, etc.

There’s a concept in vector mathematics called path dependency. In “striving cultures” that are synonymous with the “immigrant mentality,” success is not only very narrowly defined but also extremely path dependent.

Your outcomes depend heavily on the previous step, and the previous step depends heavily on the previous one, and so on so forth.

At any point in the path, degrees of freedom are very low.

In America, what you have is path independence, and in my opinion, it is one of the most underrated reasons that makes America so great.

It’s a society characterized by a normal distribution with very wide standard deviation - a lot of singular Great Men of History types at the high end of the tail, and lots of dumbfucks at the bottom tail.

Compare this to striving cultures that produce normal distractions with very low variance, tightly clustered around the mean.

That said, @VivekGRamaswamy is right that you can tell a lot about a society about who they idolize and who they shame. America - and the West - does get this wrong when moral degenerates whose only claim to fame is something like leaking a sex tape, are not only NOT marginalized and shamed, but actually adored by millions and rewarded financially and socially.

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@fredrikarboga @F3Kpilot @frksarapersson Ok, fattar. Allt det där tror jag på. Men det är nog inte till mycket nytta i dagens skola, som du säger. Lite som att tro på kulturodling när man är storbonde i Idaho med statlig beordran att leverera 10 ton majs 🌽 per hektar.

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@fredrikarboga @F3Kpilot @frksarapersson Hur yttrar sig idealismen, skulle du säga?

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@pmarca Why are all the law and order people the most keen on not being reminded of when they act illegally? And in this case it’s limitations that literally save people’s lives.

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@markrif1 @Hamza_a96 @mehdirhasan Starving the general population during a war is a war crime, for good reasons.

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@PerBylund school

[Jens Peter de Pedro | Jell.eth | 10k.eth 🇸🇪 🇪🇸 @jp_de_pedro]

@PatrikAskPM It’s not nostalgia for slavery, it’s nostalgia for having an authoritarian father in their lives like they had as children. The term is “paternal transference syndrome”.