I bought my son a Nintendo Switch when he was ~5 years old. That might be a little early but I was looking for new things we can do together that might potentially be more fun for me.

In retrospect, it was a great decision. We played a lot together since then, had a lot of fun, and I believe it has some positive effects as well (link1, link2, link3..)

Co-op games

I think the biggest reason the Nintendo Switch is a great console for kids is because of the variety of co-op games. If you’re not familiar with the term - it’s games you can play ‘together’ as opposed to ‘multiplayer’ games that you compete with each other.

Except for the normal fun you have playing a game, co-op games are less competitive and often require helping each other out.

I’ve tried quite a few different co-op games like: LEGO Horizon Adventures, Donkey Kong Country, Rayman Legends, Overcooked, Untitled Goose Game, Super Mario Bros. Wonder and more.. In my personal opinion, all these games don’t compare with Luigi’s Mansion 3 (considering my son’s age at the time).

Luigi’s Mansion 3

This game is a clear winner in my opinion for a few main reasons -

1. The game is relatively easy to master but still very fun. Once you learn how to successfully catch ghosts you’ve done 70% of the work, but there’s still some puzzle elements, things to search for, some bosses that require a little more.

2. Storyline is simple yet enjoyable. Graphics are really cute as well.

3. There’s a lot to do - even after beating all the bosses, my son enjoys going back and searching for more gems we didn’t find and ghosts we didn’t catch yet.

4. Guigi (the sidekick) can’t really die. He can, but he can always come back to life. This is perfect for playing with a kid that isn’t a gaming master yet! For the first few levels in the game, I always played Luigi and my son Guigi. Only after he mastered the controls he wanted to start switching around.

5. Some puzzles require cooperation - This is a great aspect of the game! Some puzzles you’ll run into throughout the game, mostly in the later stages, require special cooperation between the two characters, so you need to communicate and work together to solve them.

Other co-op games have some of these elements as well, but in my opinion (from the games I played), this game found the perfect mix of everything, creating a really enjoyable game that doesn’t get boring and is really fun to play with your kids.

I’m definitely not a hardcore gamer, barely a casual gamer myself, so feel free to take this with a grain of salt. What I can say though is that I recommended this game to a few different friends as games to play with their kids, and they couldn’t stop thanking me :).

I’m dead serious when I say that we flew a few times with a ridiculous amount of bags hanging on our stroller. Except for the bag we always hang on our stroller (with diapers, wipes, etc) we had at least 4-5 bags with clothes, food, electronics and more. Sometimes we’re carrying more bags with our hands as well.

During the check-in stage is the only time where someone might ask you what the bags are for or what’s in them. We just say “it’s baby stuff”, get the nod and go on.

There is an annoying downside to this - passing security and getting on the plane… :/
Getting all the bags off the stroller, folding it, passing the metal detectors, collecting all the bags again, making sure you have everything and reorganizing them on the stroller again is really annoying, but it’s worth it.

Taking it further

A friend of mine had a business trip while his wife was pregnant. He realized that purchasing a baby stroller abroad will be much cheaper, so he decided to buy it on the trip, open it up and walk through the airport and get on the flight with the stroller (exactly as if he was traveling with a baby). Airlines need to allow you to take a stroller with you if you have a baby. He obviously didn’t. When he told me this I asked him what would he do if they ask him about an empty stroller, he just said - ‘oh, i’ll tell them my wife went for a minute with the kid to change their diaper or something like that’. Makes sense.. :)

The super summarized TL;DR - Talking to your kids a lot when they are young (especially between the ages 0-3 years old) is crucial for their development and can cause a huge difference in their intelligence and other cognitive abilities in the future.

Why do I trust this book ?

The book is written by Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of Surgery and Pediatrics at University of Chicago Medical Center. She has published dozens of research papers on various subjects, many of them on how language effects brain development on newborns and infants.

The title of the book

‘Thirty Million Words’ is a reference to the "word gap" - a study (not published by the author) claiming that one of the main differences between children raised in poverty and children raised in good socio-economic environments is that those raised in better environments hear 30 million more words by the age of 3.

Although this study was done a long time ago and has since been questioned quite a bit (and rightfully so), the author, Dr. Dana Suskind has done many studies of her own on language and brain development, so she does seem legit on her own. She adds a lot of information from other studies she's done and researched over the years that give more evidence to this notion.

Going deeper

The book goes into more details about brain development explaining why it's so crucial learning language as early as possible. The brain develops the most during the first three years. After that you can still learn, but it becomes more difficult the older you get (hence the phrase: You can't teach an old dog new tricks).

Understanding language, as well as math and abstract thinking are a fundamental foundation for learning many other subjects further in life. It also helps develop executive function, social and emotional skills.

You also want to push your children to talk more when they're very young. Being supportive of this will help them develop their own way of communicating. The book sums this up nicely using the term The three T's - Talk more, Tune in & Take turns.

This won't be solved with technology

It's easy to assume that exposure to any kind of language is enough, so if my kid watches TV or interacts with a lot of language via apps on my phone then they will also achieve the same development. Studies would suggest otherwise though.

One study found that watching television decreased the amount of words spoken by infants. This is a correlation so we don't know exactly what caused it, but it definitely seems important to note.

Another study found that infants that were exposed to Mandarin (a language they weren't familiar with) for a certain amount of hours were able to pick up on certain differences of phonetic units of language, while infants exposed to the same amount of Mandarin but on a screen showed no effect what so ever later on.

What I do and my personal experience (so far)

I'm a very active parent. I try to spend as much time as I can at home with my kids. I know this can't work for everyone, but I'm fortunate to be able to work from home most days and my schedule is very flexible so I try to navigate my day around my children as much as possible - When they come home from school or day care, I usually take a break to be with them a little bit. Later on I will sit down and continue working, but early in the afternoon is where I get some good quality conversations with my son, before all the conversation becomes daily tasks before going to bed..

My wife and I also buy a lot of children books. We read to them a lot and try to read a big variety. We also go with them to the library often. I think this is a really great activity and I'm always surprised that many parents don't even know where their local library is! I think this is also important to get them used to the idea of taking books and returning them frequently.

I try to read to my son every night when he's in bed. This is my favorite part of the day. I read with him for about 15 minutes, and then sometimes stay to talk a little with him. The end of the day energy is perfect for hearing what's on his mind or answering some random questions he has. I usually try to share with him something from my day as well.

Since pre-k all the teachers always told us that our son has a very good vocabulary. I've seen first hand how this helped him learn new things quickly, and more importantly give him the ability to express himself better at a very young age.

My daughter doesn't talk yet, she's only 13 months old. Maybe i'll do a follow up on her as well. It might be interesting to compare.

I became a parent a little over 7 years ago and to say my life has changed is somewhat of an understatement. A huge part of my life became dedicated to raising my son, a few years later my daughter too, and as with many fields of my life, I looked to the internet for advice.

There's no shortage of information online about raising kids, yet I felt like a lot of it wasn't for me. I grew up interested in physics, math, science and computer programming. Basically a geek. I would love for my kids to be geeks as well, and even if not interested in these subjects as much as I am, I want to give them a strong foundation, spark interest in them, teach them how to learn and get them excited about learning.

A lot of the information online is junk articles, searching for cheap traffic (to get paid via ads and affiliate links). Some of the information online might be correct, but just isn't for me.

Being a geek - whether you're a computer programmer, gamer, hacker, love playing RPG's like D&D, Magic the Gathering, board games, cosplay, sci-fi movies, etc - makes you part of some subculture that has its conferences (maker faire, geekcon, comic-con), memes, lingo, rituals, and so on..

I keep looking for sources of information on parenting that some how relates to these areas of interest and hobbies and will resonate with me and possibly other geeks alike. I want to know about interesting board games that will be fun to play with a 5 year old, puzzle games that will help develop my kids thinking, fun ways to teach them math or experiments I can do at home with them to learn physics, recommended lego sets that will be

fun to build with them, TV shows that are a little more educational than the average, cool things I can do with them while traveling and more.

I haven't found exactly what I'm looking for, so I decided to try and create it myself, hoping that ‘if I build it they will come’, and it will help, or at least interest, many other geeky parents out there. If it doesn't, that's also ok. I like writing anyways. So this blog/website/newsletter is my attempt of collecting resources that are interesting, fun and educational for geeky parents trying to raise geeky kids. Posts here will be to-the-point, not paid for, (and hopefully) quality content. I won't try to use cheap click-bait tricks to lure you in, make you read a bunch of fluff before reaching the point or writing reviews for products that companies paid me to. I hope you'll enjoy the content here (and if not, feel free to let me know why).