I hope my kids want to learn and are curious about how things work like the OP's kid!
I dont want to be one of those parents that pushes their kid to the point that they dont enjoy learning or suffer socially.
Asking for a future me: how do you give your kid the best chance / environment to develop socially, but still enjoy learning & embracing the nerdier things?
I sent mine to a Steiner / Waldorf school on the hope that this is more of a social / confidence building environment. Then I surrepticiously feed her inner geek at every opportunity I can find. My personal current favourite is Wild Kratts [0] which teaches a amazing number of things.
Also we send my daughter to a violin school where they teach the suzuki method which has a fairly nerdy type of group of parents that go there.
So it means she's in a school that accepts most types of people whilst exposing her to nerdy things outside of school.
Curiously I found that a lot of the parents who send their kids to a Steiner / Waldorf school tend to be nerdier. The best example was a couple where the mother was had a Philosophy degree with a Physics PhD and the father travelled around the world as a street puppeteer.
My informed but non-professional understanding is that: the good news is if your kids are biologically your own and you are naturally curious, they are predisposed to be as well. The bad news is that studies show that if you want to steer them towards being more or less that way through parenting style it is not going to have any long term effect. [0] I came to this understanding (which, I'm aware, is pretty different from the public's understanding of child-rearing) from reading, among other things, The Nurture Assumption and the chapter on children in The Blank Slate.
[0] That's not to say that there's no correlation in the real world between parents trying to steer their kid to be more curious and the kid growing up to be more curious, just that there's no causation because both effects are caused by their shared genes.
I dont want to be one of those parents that pushes their kid to the point that they dont enjoy learning or suffer socially.
Asking for a future me: how do you give your kid the best chance / environment to develop socially, but still enjoy learning & embracing the nerdier things?