[codemac]

It's not about forcing your kids to "do math", but to excel at important skills far before the benefits of being good at that skill matter.

The amount of homework/study per day that maximizes math scores on tests is significant, 1+ hours/school day by the time they're in middle school, with it helping even more for those who are starting out poor at math[0]. You'll note the referenced study doesn't even max out progress for any group - meaning most could have studied more and improved more.

I don't know any kids that voluntarily did an hour or more of solely math study per day. I know plenty that were forced, and ended up loving math or other technical fields as adults.

As a parent of young kids, obviously I haven't gone through high school yet - but I don't think many children who reach their potential in math, english, music etc will have no pressure from their parents.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8025066/

[trinix912]

> As a parent of young kids, obviously I haven't gone through high school yet - but I don't think many children who reach their potential in math, english, music etc will have no pressure from their parents.

Well it depends. I had no pressure from my parents to learn about programming but still got really good at it. Could I have gotten even better had I been pressured to "practice"? Perhaps. But then I also wouldn't like it for the reasons I do (I like making stuff, but not solving riddles) and it would feel like the dad sport situation.

I also played the piano for 6 years, starting out because I liked it. My parents didn't suggest it, but a few years in they were pushing me to continue even when I didn't like it anymore. Finished the first level of music school (6 years where I live) and haven't touched it since. Just to clarify, they weren't using any directly abusive tactics to keep me going, but they did put a lot of pressure onto it.

There's a lot of nuance to all of this and I don't completely disagree that we should occasionally pressure our kids to push their limits. What we often fail to acknowledge is that kids easily change their minds after a while. Just because they liked something at a certain point doesn't mean they still do. The easiest way to get a kid to dislike something is to make it a chore. Additionally, I think we need to ask ourselves whether it's more important to us to have a kid that's average scoring but has a (mostly) stress free upbringing, or one that excels but is stressed out by the time they hit high school. Kids absorb stress differently than we (adults) do.

[Der_Einzige]

Me being forced to do tons of horrible math by my abusive grandfather at a young age for literally 4+ hours at a time gave me a few things.

1. A true hatred of work, make work, and a strong desire to defend laziness as a concept (note that Bertrand Russel agrees hard with me here!) -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Ot...

2. A love of subversives and cheating the system. Basically, the guys writing leetcode cheating software are saints in my book. All subversions of the attempt to turn society into a meritocracy (a term which was originally supposed to be a slur/negative connotation - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy) is extremely good.

3. An advanced knowledge of TI basic, so I could cheat hard on every single school assignment I could get away with. AP Chemistry? I’ve got a symbolic stoichometry solver app! Calculus? CAS system in the palm of my hand!

Play stupid games with children, win stupid prizes. Maybe don’t force them to work like little slaves in their early life, and they won’t strike back at your society systems.

[ogogmad]

Raising kids is hard. Sad. And what do I know about it? Regardless, parents do need to get involved in their children's education. For instance, they should help their children prepare for entry exams into secondary school. This shouldn't take their child 4 hours a day. Maybe 10 minutes on some days, and 1 hour on others.

[CivBase]

Your experience sounds awful but surely there is a reasonable middle ground between forcing a kid to do any math and forcing them to do it in 4+ hour sessions.

[frogpelt]

Maybe it wasn't the math, but the abuse.

[matthewaveryusa]

I had similar conclusions, but the other way around: absolutely no guidance. Fortunately by the time I programmed and sold the basic ti math exam solvers to by classmates for 2 euros a pop I had everything memorized.

Nothing like cheating the system to know the system

[Hojojo]

You realize your experience can't be generalized to anybody else except for those who were abused in the same way you were? It also isn't what people in these comments are suggesting should be done.