10 Ways To Grow Tiny Superhumans - Ben Greenfield's Top Tips For Raising Strong, Resilient, Happy Kids

Whether you have kids, plan on having kids, or know kids, you live in a privileged era in which you have the ability to enable the kids in your life to be tiny superhumans who look, feel, think and perform like optimized human beings, and you're about to hear exactly how.

Mozart learned to play the piano at the age of four, composed his first piece at age five and wrote his first symphony at age eight.

Pablo Picasso, when he was just twelve, had an astonishing grasp of the fundamentals of art and was producing photo-realistic anatomical sketches.

Giovanni Bernini was churning out intricate, life-like stone sculptures at only eight years old. But these folks aren’t special childhood prodigies, idiot savants, or some kind of unique autistic geniuses.

These are normal human beings.

Sadly, in our modern era, we’ve forgotten how to nurture and grow an amazing human body and mind, and instead settled for a generation of kids that wind up on peopleofwalmart.com - attached to leashes and chewing on Ritalin.

The fact is, we live in a modern era in which we have the capability to enable the child in our lives to become tiny superhumans, and grow up with optimized physical and mental capabilities.

But unfortunately, it’s very easy to make parenting and teaching mistakes that create a host of issues in children, including lack of proper muscle and brain growth, immune system weakness, low IQ, stunted growth, obesity, depression, attention deficit disorder, social anxiety, and other frustrating problems that parents now accept as all-too-common.

In today's podcast, I'm giving you the entire recording of my 2014 book "10 Ways To Grow Tiny Superhumans". In it, you'll learn things like: -Cutting-edge research on how birth methods, bacteria, dirt, germs, farms, pets, and families make a life-long impression on a child’s immune system...9:00

• We're actually hard-wired to eat our own boogers; strengthens our immune systems.
• Babies born via c-section have lower health quality than natural born.
• Colostrum is important.
• Dirt isn't necessarily dirty.
• Natto. Tastes terrible, but it's great for you and your kids.

-Why the modern paradigm of low-fat food is one of the worst dietary practices possible for a growing child’s brain and nervous system...13:10

• You want lots of fat; my kids eat lots of bone broth.
• You want them to eat "brain food." 
• Total cholesterol below 200 is associated with low IQ.

-How to foster an ideal combination of play, healthy competitiveness and a desire to succeed in a child through strategies such as roughhousing and wrestling...15:05

• Rough housing teaches to deal with unpredictable situations; how to lose gracefully; how to deal with pain.
• People who rough house are more socially mature.
• Stronger bond with your kids; releases more oxytocin.
• Gets them more physically active.

-Ways to enable your child to spend more time on their feet and wearing the proper footwear – two important decisions that will affect their posture for life...16:50

• "Think outside the chair."
• Standing work stations for kids.
• Rarely wear shoes.
• Kids with poor posture have poor posture as adults.
• Overprotective modern footwear inhibit foot health for life.
• Kids can reshape and restructure bones in just a few months.
• Choose flexible shoes. Foot games to develop motor skills.
• Massage feet; happy feet socks.

-How to immerse your child in healthy and safe forms of unstructured free play that enables kids to solve their own problems, control their own decisions, and follow an internal moral compass...21:09

• Preoccupation with safety has stripped our kids of independence, risk taking and discovery.
• Feel less in control of their own fate.
• Free schooling, unschooling
• Recommended books: Duct Tape Parenting, Baby Knows Best, Free Range Kids
• We're not creating perfect kids; we're creating kids who can think for themselves.

-Creative methods of exercise and fitness that make your children a part of the process...26:50

• Use your kids as weights while you workout.
• Play "follow the leader"
• Jogging strollers.

-What modern electronics can do to a child’s developing brain and body, and how you can protect a child without completely unplugging or disconnectin