I Moved My Kids To 8 Different Countries. It Taught Them A Rare Lesson I Fear Others Won't Learn

"People assumed we were running from something or chasing some Instagram version of freedom. We weren’t."

My son, Mahaan, was nine the first time I watched him fail at something in real time.

We had just moved to Sintra, Portugal, and he’d joined the local football league. No one on the team spoke English. No one looked like him. In those first weeks, I’d watch him keep glancing back at us between huddles, a look on his face that said, clear as anything, “I have no idea what these people are saying.”

There was no app or translation he could pull up mid-drill. He just had to stand there, not understanding, and figure out what to do with that.

What he did was sit in it. Over several weeks, he learned to read his coach’s hand gestures. He slowly found ways to connect with his teammates that didn’t require language – a pass, a nod, a joke that worked without words. By the second month, he was best friends with half the team.

I think about that season a lot now, mostly because of how rare it’s becoming.

Every conversation about kids and AI seems to land on the same worries: cheating on essays, shortened attention spans, a generation that can’t write a sentence without a prompt. Those are real concerns. But after two decades spent studying how children actually learn, and a handful of years watching my own two kids grow up in a dozen different countries, the thing that keeps me up isn’t plagiarism.

I’m afraid we’re raising a generation of kids who will never have to sit inside discomfort long enough to learn what they’re made of.

There’s a concept in learning science called assimilation and accommodation.

Assimilation is when new information fits neatly into what a child........

© HuffPost