How to Raise a Smart Child

Don’t measure “intelligence” on a single scale

The term “jiatama” or core cognitive strength does not have one fixed academic definition. In general, it refers not to simply reproducing memorized knowledge, but to understanding a problem you have never seen before, thinking through it, and responding on your own.

However, when we look at how children’s minds work, “thinking ability” alone is not enough to explain it. Some children solve problems well but are extremely afraid of failure. Others are sensitive to other people’s feelings but have a hard time noticing what they themselves are doing. These reflect different dimensions involved in learning and behavior: cognition, non-cognition, and metacognition.

Understand, feel, notice

Imagine a friend who falls down and starts crying. Cognition is understanding the situation: “They fell and hurt their knee, so they’re crying.” Non-cognition is feeling, “That looks painful,” or “I feel sorry for them.” Metacognition is noticing, “I want to help, but I’m too embarrassed to speak up.”

In real life, these three do not work separately. People understand, feel, and notice while deciding what to do next. It helps to think of core cognitive strength as the integrated ability to engage with the world using one’s own mind.

So to nurture core cognitive strength, children need rich language so they can perceive the world in detail, opportunities to think about everyday events, experiences with failure and emotion, and chances to reflect on their own thoughts and actions. Through these everyday accumulations, the three functions of understanding, feeling, and noticing gradually develop.

If you don’t know it, you may look at it without truly seeing it

When people hear cognition—the ability to understand—they often think of comprehension or thinking. But before that comes perception. If you do not first recognize what is in front of you, you cannot think about what it means. Walk through a park with a child who knows very little about plants, and they may only see “trees,” “flowers,” and “grass.” But a child who knows words like “cherry blossom,” “zelkova,” “dandelion,” “hydrangea,” and “silver grass” sees each of those as something distinct in the very same scene. Road signs work the same way. To a child who does not know the no-parking sign, it is just a red-and-blue circle. To someone who knows its meaning, it appears as information: “You may not park here.”

Vocabulary and concepts increase the resolution of the world

Expanding vocabulary and knowledge is not simply about making a child “know more facts.” The more a child knows, the more information they can extract from the world. The same is true for emotions. A child who only knows the word “sad” cannot distinguish inner states as finely as a child who has words like “lonely,” “frustrated,” “anxious,” “embarrassed,” and “jealous.”

“Language ability” is often understood as building skills like kanji writing or reading comprehension. In reality, it is the broader ability to grasp the world through vocabulary and concepts, create meaning from words, and think about relationships among ideas.

Even if a child can read kanji, that does not always mean they understand the text

Some children can read a textbook aloud very smoothly. They can pronounce the kanji correctly as well. Even so, when you ask, “What was it about?” after they finish, they may not be able to answer. They may be able to convert written characters into sounds (phonological encoding), but not go as far as constructing the situation those words represent in their minds.

For example, to understand the sentence “A boy is running through the park holding a red umbrella,” it is not enough for “boy,” “red,” “umbrella,” “park,” and “run” to exist as five separate words. The child needs to form a single mental scene: a boy holding a red umbrella and running through a park. Understanding is not about processing one piece of information after another in isolation. It is about creating a meaningful mental representation.

Even if a child can calculate, they may still struggle with word problems

If you ask, “At an average speed of 40 km/h, how far will you travel in 1.5 hours?” some children can instantly answer 60 km. But ask, “If you travel at 60 km/h on the way there and 40 km/h on the way back, what is the average speed for the round trip?” and they may say 50 km/h by taking a simple average. The correct answer is 48 km/h. They remember the speed-distance-time formula. But if the distance is not explicitly given, they cannot set up the equation. A child who truly understands is not mechanically converting the words into a formula. They first construct the situation in their mind and then translate that situation into an equation.

What can you understand from what you know?

Take the sentence, “The Nile is the longest river in the world.” Then ask the child, “Which is longer, the Shinano River or the Nile?” If the child understands the meaning of “the longest in the world,” they know the answer is “the Nile.” But some children think, “You’d have to compare them to know.” In that case, the issue is not a lack of knowledge. It is that they are unable to extract a relationship that is not directly written from the information in the sentence.

Inference is about connecting knowledge to knowledge

Between “knowing” and “being able to think from what you know,” there is another layer of cognition. A child who knows that roads get wet when it rains sees wet roads in the morning and thinks, “Maybe it rained during the night.” Then they may go further and consider another possibility: “But maybe a street-cleaning truck came by.” Thinking begins when children connect pieces of knowledge, form hypotheses, and consider whether those hypotheses make sense. A child with strong core cognitive strength is not necessarily the one with the most knowledge. It is the child who can use what they know to think beyond it.

Memory and understanding are not the same

After reading a folktale aloud, you ask a child what it was about. One child repeats the sentences they heard with remarkable accuracy. Another child does not remember the exact wording, but says, “It was about someone who got greedy and ended up losing everything.” The first child shows strong memory. The second has extracted the meaning of the whole story and abstracted it.

Understanding a text does not mean memorizing the words exactly as they were said. It means connecting the information in the text with the child’s existing frameworks of knowledge and experience—their schemas—then constructing in their mind what happened, why it happened, and what the story ultimately means as a coherent whole.

Before reading comprehension comes listening comprehension

When children read text, they need to look at the string of letters, convert it to sound, recognize the words from that sound, extract meaning, and then connect relationships between sentences to understand the content. This chain of processing is listening comprehension. Children who are not yet comfortable with reading sometimes use so much working memory on phonological encoding that they have too little left for building mental representations.

When children listen, on the other hand, there is no phonological encoding load. That makes it easier for them to devote cognitive resources to understanding meaning. That is why we first nurture “If I hear it, I understand it,” and then build “If I read it, I understand it” on top of that. When evaluating a young child’s early comprehension, it is important to look at how well they understand spoken language.

Before numbers, there is quantity

Math uses numbers and calculation symbols. These are symbols for representing quantities that exist in the real world. Imagine a recipe for oyakodon that says, “2 servings, 100 grams of chicken, 4 eggs.” We process those as numbers and amounts. But when someone actually cooks, they also have a sense of what 100 grams of meat looks like and how much volume 4 eggs will make.

Before the equation 5×6, there is the quantity “five groups of six.” Before the equation 6÷2, there is a situation like “divide 6 into groups of 2” or “share 6 between 2 people.” This real-world sense of quantity is called “kasa.”

Some children who struggle with word problems rely too heavily on memorized procedures and do not have enough experience building that sense of quantity in their minds from the text. Once children can feel the “kasa” that corresponds to the quantities numbers represent, math stops being mere symbol manipulation and becomes a way of working with relationships in the real world. When that does not happen, they may be unable to set up equations correctly from word problems.

For example, children often find it hard to use this sense of quantity with fraction division. 4÷1/2 is 8, but because it is hard to understand intuitively, school often teaches children to solve fraction division by flipping the divisor and multiplying. However, if they can think in terms of measurement division—how many times 1/2 can be taken from 4—they can understand why the correct answer is 8.

Logic is not only in workbooks—it is everywhere around us

When people hear “logical thinking,” they may picture puzzles or difficult math problems. But there is logic even in preschool pretend play. In restaurant play, customers arrive, are shown to their seats, look at the menu, place an order, receive their food, eat, and pay the bill—in that order. It would be odd if the food came before the order, and it would be a problem if everything were cleared away before the child had eaten.

Cooking also has an order. You cannot put eggs in the frying pan before you crack them. You cannot decorate a cake before it is baked. In experiences like “The ground got wet because it rained” or “The ice melted because it was left outside,” there is cause and effect. Logical ability is not the power to explain things with difficult words. It is the ability to notice that events have sequence, causes, conditions, and relationships—and to connect those correctly. In this way, everyday play and life experiences lead to later logical thinking.

Even smart children do not always feel confident in themselves

Some children do very well in school. They quickly understand what the teacher says. They can solve difficult problems. And yet they may still feel, “I’m not that capable,” “What if I fail?” or “It has nothing to do with me if someone else is doing it.” High cognitive ability and stable self-worth or initiative are not the same thing.

When a child tries a difficult puzzle and fails once, do they think, “I couldn’t do it, so I’m done,” or do they think, “Maybe I can do it if I try a different way,” and try again? This difference cannot be measured by tests of kanji or arithmetic alone.

A friend is struggling right in front of them. Cognition is understanding, “They’re having a hard time.” But non-cognition is the emotional movement of feeling, “I feel sorry for them,” or “I want to help.” Non-cognition includes emotion, empathy, motivation, initiative, self-control, self-efficacy, and relationships with others. If cognition is the ability to understand the world, non-cognition is the ability to feel it.

Thinking and choosing for oneself

Agency is the ability to have one’s own wishes while also understanding the surrounding situation and other people’s perspectives, and then deciding, “What should I do?” Children with agency can cooperate with others when needed and act while taking responsibility for their own judgment.

It is also important for children to have self-efficacy—the sense that “I can’t do it yet, but I may be able to if I practice.” It is not cognitive ability alone that moves knowledge into real action. Children also need self-efficacy and agency.

Smart and kind—yet somehow absent-minded in daily life

Some children have strong cognitive ability and understand other people’s feelings well. And yet, in everyday life, they seem oddly forgetful or unaware. They carefully carry home a cake, but when they open the box, everything has slid to one side. They buy eggs and bring them home, but some are broken. They do know that “cakes collapse if tilted” and “eggs break easily.” Even so, while walking, they are not monitoring themselves closely enough to notice, “Is the box tilting right now?” or “Am I swinging the bag too much?”

This function of observing one’s own cognition and behavior is metacognition. Some children look at a math problem and simply say, “I don’t get it.” Others can say, “I understand what the problem is asking, but I don’t know which numbers to use.” The second child is aware of where their understanding reaches and where it breaks down. Metacognition is the ability to step back, look at how your mind is working, and adjust when needed.

Stepping away from your own habitual way of thinking

When children keep looking at a problem from the same angle, they may not find the answer. But if they step back and ask, “Is this really the right way to think about it?” “What would it look like from the opposite side?” or “Is this similar to another problem I solved before?” they may begin to see different relationships.

Intuition and flashes of insight do not simply fall from the sky. They can emerge when the knowledge and experiences a child has built up connect in a new combination. Metacognition—being able to look down on one’s own thinking and loosen one’s attachment to a single approach—creates room for those new connections to appear.

Even in the same event, children take away different things

People often say children should have a wide variety of experiences: camp, travel, sports, museums, cooking. Of course those experiences matter. But simply having an event happen does not automatically build core cognitive strength.

Imagine a child starts a fire at camp. One child may stop at, “We lit a fire at camp.” Another may notice a relationship: “The thick logs wouldn’t catch, but when we started with small twigs, it burned well.” A child might also feel, after a friend encouraged them, “If I had been alone, I might have quit halfway.” Or they might notice a change in themselves: “I didn’t want to come at first, but once I got here, it was fun.”

By reflecting with questions like “How was it?” “Why do you think it went well?” “What made you happiest?” and “What would you do next time?” children can extract meaning from what happened. When they understand an event, feel something about it, and reflect on it internally, it becomes an experience. Nurturing core cognitive strength is not only about increasing the number of activities children do. It is also about developing a mind that can draw meaning from those activities.

Everyday life itself becomes material for thinking

When parents hear about building core cognitive strength, they may imagine difficult workbooks or special enrichment activities. But the home is already full of material for thinking. While cooking, a child can wonder, “How much is one cup?” While shopping, they can talk through, “If I have 500 yen and spend 180 yen, how much will be left?” While taking a walk, they can notice, “The leaves are yellower than they were yesterday.” After reading a picture book, they can think, “Why do you think this child got angry?”

In those everyday moments, children repeatedly perceive, understand, infer, feel, and reflect. Even when doing the same cooking activity, simply mixing ingredients exactly as they are told can end as nothing more than a task. But if a child wonders, “Will this amount be enough?” “The batter is thicker than before,” or “Why did it rise?” then understanding and inference begin to grow from that experience. More important than the number of experiences is paying attention to what is happening inside the child’s mind at that moment.

What parents can do is not so much to rush in with the right answer as to create opportunities for children to put into words what they saw, felt, and thought. Casual questions such as “Why do you think so?” “What was different?” and “What would you do next time?” help turn perception into understanding, understanding into thinking, and events into experience.

Thinking skills and knowledge are not opposites

You may hear people say, “Don’t focus on memorization—focus on thinking.” But children cannot think without knowledge. If they do not know what a cherry blossom is, they cannot think about cherry blossoms. If they do not know the concept of “mammal,” it becomes much harder to think about what dogs and whales have in common. Knowledge is not the enemy of thinking. It is the material that makes thinking possible.

As vocabulary and knowledge grow richer, children can perceive more things in the world. When they connect the information they perceive, it becomes understanding. When they compare, classify, infer from, and apply those understood relationships to new situations, it becomes thinking. Supporting this flow of vocabulary and concepts → understanding → thinking from the language side is language ability. And when children become aware of how they feel about events and what they themselves are thinking, non-cognition and metacognition are added as well.

Core cognitive strength rests on a foundation of knowledge. It is the work of the mind that understands the world, feels it, thinks about it, and turns it into something a child can use in real life.