Through open-ended play before formal schooling, children develop skills like reading, writing, and numeracy. Young kids explore their environment and test their own ideas about how the world works, building understanding with help from others. Countries like Scandinavia that delay formal reading lessons until age 7 have high literacy rates, and early vs late readers show no long-term differences. Kids need time to play, learn informally, and do activities after school like eating with family, which predicts high achievement and fewer behavior problems. Allowing kids to do nothing teaches independence and self-entertainment, more important skills than being a "superkid".

1. The things kids learn through open-ended play before they start formal schooling do enrich the reading, writing and numeracy skills they later acquire .

2. A child learns to make sense of the world by interacting with others and exploring their environment.

3. Young children have their own explanations about how the world works. They need to be given the opportunity to test these hypotheses, correct their misunderstandings and, with the help of more knowledgeable peers or adults, build on what they discover to be true.

5. Children in Scandinavia, with its 99-per-cent literacy rate, don’t get formal reading lessons until age seven.

6. Literacy experts agree that kids learn to read in different ways and at different ages. Early readers hold no long-term advantage over late starters .

7. Children need time to play and develop and do other kinds of learning that happens after hours.

8. Eating together - because it involves sitting and talking with adults over a sustained period - is one of the stronger predictors of high achievement scores and fewer behaviour problems.

9. After-school activities

10. Giving kids the opportunity to do nothing might be the biggest favour we could do them .

11. Being able to entertain themselves and figure out what to do with their own time are skills that outrank any of those.

12. My parents didn’t expected me to be a superkid. They expected me to be independent. A kid probably can’t be both.