Should your older child blog? Absolutely, unreservedly, yes!
Do you want your child’stalent to be discoverable even while still living under your roof?
Then the answer is: blog!
Do you want your child to be able to connect with experts from around the world in his field of interest?
Then the answer is: blog!
Do you believe that your child’s ability to communicate about his talent is as important as the talent itself?
Then the answer is: blog!
Do you want your child to learn to write with passion and focus about something that he cares about?
Then the answer is: blog!
Do you want your child to build a portfolio of hundreds, and eventually thousands, of documented evidences of his talent?
Then the answer is: blog!
Do you want your child to build his own unique voice within the context of a larger field of talent?
Then the answer is: blog!
If you want to get your child up and going on a blog focused around his or her talent within 42 days, then I recommend you buy and print out my “Blog to Your Talent” guide. Hand it off directly to your young adult to do it on their own. Also check out the full e-course to get even more personal hand-holding from me. All the techniques in the guide, I have applied to my own teenage sons.
Blogging about your talent and the projects related to trying to build your talent, opens doors for your child to be able to talk directly to the “big dogs” in his chosen field of focus. This is why I encourage every child to blog so he can create a living and growing portfolio that can be used starting today, not for when he turns eighteen or twenty one. In what other way could a young person still living at home use a resume to open doors for him to the experts in his field? A static resume on a white sheet of paper will do absolutely nothing for your child. But a dynamic blog can work miracles.
As a result, my son Nicholas, who is 12 years old, is featured at a Raspberry Pi conference in the UK. See him brought up starting up at the 11 minute mark in this clip. Your homework assignment: can you hear what this expert is saying that made it possible for Nicholas to be able to get through the noise to someone like him?:
Excerpt from the up-coming e-course “BLOG TO YOUR TALENT” with e-guide and videos.
Lesson 10: Provides Immediate Access to Sources
Blogging has a direct source advantage over normal essay writing. Through a blog you can provide web links to online resources that you recommend. These would be resources that the reader could use to get more details to inform himself further or possibly act on. You are doing your reader a great favor because you are taking the effort to filter for him the best links available. If you take care to provide useful links, your reader will gradually come to respect
you as a well-connected and careful person in your field of talent.
Take Action
Write a post entitled “Resources I like for [name of talent]” and list the current Internet links where you like to visit for your talent. Write a one line description of what each resource is about. Expect to update this post over time with more links as you discover more useful resources.
See this idea in action
Resources I like:
http://jonathansfilmblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/resources-i-like-for-videography.html
How do you get the expert to open his door to your child? Hint: the answer is in blogging (Photo credit: Klearchos Kapoutsis)
At some level of his growth, your child will want to interact more with experts in his field of talent. The problem he can run into is that experts don’t have time to open the door to gawkers and will only tolerate those who are just as seriously committed as they are. How does your child show is he part of the committed ones? He shows it by documenting his performance, over time, through a blog that others can easily check. He also does it by writing in that blog with emotion and inquisitive engagement, and not just facts – that is how he will open up those doors.
Starting a talent at a young age is like the power of a snow avalanche – your child will accumulate so much knowledge and practice before age 20 that he will sweep away all competitors in his wake (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Part of the power of putting in 10,000 hours of deliberate focus on a talent is that it makes it very hard for those who adopt a talent late in life (such as right after college) to come anywhere close to out-performing those who develop their talent early in their childhood. Consider for example that if a child writes about some aspect of his talent, say WWII history, three times a week from age 10 to age 20, that he would have put in over 2,000 writings well before the average college student has even started on a major that has a similar historical focus. If your child majors in history with a WWII focus, he has already out-thought all the others on that same subject by a 2,000 fold factor! Where others don’t even know they could eventually have a unique voice, your child would come across as amazingly confident, dripping with conceptual and tactical details, and supremely at ease in his already well-developed voice. At that point in time, of all the student portfolios, who do you think a college professor or a prospective employer would rather have a second interview with?
Is your child writing essays that sound anonymous? Have him write about his talent instead (Photo credit: BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives)
Are you worried that your child does not care about what he is writing? You should be, because not caring means he is not learning how to develop a specific voice that others will want to listen to and it means he is not learning to write something useful even in the face of incomplete knowledge. Typical ‘non-caring’ writing will produce high-school research papers that no one but the teacher will read: papers that are lifeless, mechanical, and based on topics that were chosen because they were easy to find in the school library for citation proof. Though there is a place for the mechanics of writing, you should not allow it to be more important than writing for a purpose. As parent of a child developing his talent, you do have a ready solution to the caring problem: insist that your child always connects his essays to an aspect of his talent.
Your child should document his talent learning process with a blog for three very good reasons.
Encourage your child to blog to document his learning process on the subject of his talent. Do not have him limit himself to just the final results and success stories of his talent development. Why should you encourage him to journal his learning in a public way?
There are three reasons to blog:
Blogging will train him to speak in his own unique voice.
Blogging will help him be self-aware and take ownership of his own learning path.
Blogging will show potential mentors in his field of talent that he has the kind of motivation and seriousness that is deserving of their expert attention.
Do you want to help your child find blog post ideas related to his talent interest? Grab a pen, sit him down, and ask him for seven questions about his talent that he wish he knew the answer to. Then take each of those questions and turn those into three smaller questions. If he researches and summarizes his finding on each of those questions, he will have content for 21 blog posts. Rinse and repeat for more ideas.
Imagine you are a river guide on the California Sacramento River. You are considering choosing between one of two teenagers, George and Nathan, to come along as paid part-time help in exchange for being able to study the river up-close.
Who of the two would you choose?
You don’t owe any favors to their parents, so to make up your mind, you take a quick look at their blog using your Smart Phone. So far, so good. They are both building their portfolio online via a blog so that others like you can get a much better feel for their true accomplishments and their drive to succeed. That’s when you notice that each has a VERY different style of writing about their interest.
One has obviously read up on the river and reported back the many scientific facts as discovered by experts. The other instead writes about specific interactions he has had on the river and what he is doing.
You browse their blogs and find the following two sample posts:
George writes: I read up on river on Wikipedia and here is what I found in my research: “The Sacramento River is an important river of Northern and CentralCalifornia in the United States. The state’s largest river by discharge, it rises in the Klamath Mountains and flows south for over 400 miles (640 km) before reaching Suisun Bay, an arm of San Francisco Bay, and thence thePacific Ocean. The Sacramento drains an area of about 27,500 square miles (71,000 km2) in the northern half of the state, mostly within a region bounded by the Coast Ranges and Sierra Nevada known as the Sacramento Valley. Its extensive watershed also reaches to the volcanic plateaus of Northeastern California. Historically, its watershed has reached farther, as far north as south-central Oregon where the now, primarily, endorheic(closed) Goose Lake rarely experiences southerly outflow into the Pit River, the most northerly tributary of the Sacramento.”
Nathan writes: This is the third morning I went down to the landing at 4AM to watch the river guides take off for the day and to help a few of them load up. I asked permission to take pictures and put them on my public Flickr account. I got the email address of one of the river guides and will email him my best picture because he would like to put it on his business website. I was surprised at how early the guides have to get going in the morning and they told me it’s because they have to get to the best fishing holes before the sun gets up too high and the fish at this time of the year are much further upstream. I took some temperature readings of the river and logged it in my field journal and took a sample of the water so I can study the microbes on the microscope at home. I have a picnic cooler to carry it back home so that the microbes don’t die before I can match them up with this special study guide my dad bought for me on the Internet. I have been able to identify about 10 bugs so far and will post my sketches up with their scientific names.
Which one are you likely to want with you and the customers? Which one do you think is the most interesting boy to have along?
Clearly you want your own child blogging from a first-person point of view like Nathan. And at all costs, you want to avoid him sounding like George, who is stating true expert facts, but revealing nothing of his personal engagement with the river.
To start your child’s first blog today that takes just minutes to set up, I recommend using Posterous. Five of my children currently use Posterous because they can update it from phones, web browsers, and even by email. You can load just pictures too, which is very convenient for younger children when they want to show more than explain or discuss what they are doing. The blog will also allow you to have it titled with the right descriptive you want without having to yet buy a domain name. I recommend your child creates multiple blogs, one for each big skill he is developing as part of his talent.
Use Physical Item to Help Walk Through Presentation
Is your child trying to pitch himself to the next level of expertise in a club or asking a group for an opportunity to exercise for them an aspect of his talent? I asked for advice from my friend Carl Miller, an expert on staging yourself in theater and an accomplished public speaker. Here are some tips I came away with:
Have child create a portfolio of his accomplishments, whether of the physical items themselves, or of the photos of the work, or the paperwork.
Give a presentation that sounds natural by simply talking and walking through the order of your portfolio.
Pass around in the audience a physical item that represents your abilities and helps the audience follow the details you want to emphasize in your presentation.
Finish the presentation with a direct appeal to what your child wants and with an attitude that, because of the portfolio of accomplishments, the request is a reasonable one to make of the audience.
Dovetail your child’s standard historical study with a blog post related to his developing talent as it was during that time period.
Start your child writing blog posts today with these five questions:
Does the blog post focus on answering one basic question?
Does it relate to his on-going focus in some way?
Does it relate to the historical time-period he is studying?
Is there a personal observation or interpretation?
Is there something you can compare to that will help your reader understand what you are saying?
I gently ask those questions of my children every time they write and they gradually flex their writing accordingly. At this early stage, it is more important that they start writing something in their own words about their topic of interest then it is to delay because they don’t have an excellent writing style.
