Why fifteen, and how this list works
My daughter is six months old, which means I have roughly nothing to go on yet about who she'll turn out to be. What I do have is a belief I've held for longer than I've been a parent: that most people are never deliberately taught the principles and skills they end up running their adult life on. They pick them up by accident, late, usually from a bad experience that a five-minute conversation years earlier would have prevented. I don't want that to be how my daughter learns to eat well, or to spot someone treating her badly, or to have a habit that keeps her spine straight at fifty.
So this is the master list — the working curriculum, and the reasoning behind how I built it.
Why fifteen, not eighteen
Eighteen is a legal line, not a developmental one. If I plan the curriculum to finish at eighteen, the natural failure mode is that everything slides right — there's always another three years, until there isn't. Targeting fifteen means I'm forced to have the harder conversations earlier, and it leaves three years of margin if something doesn't land the first time. I'm treating fifteen as conservative on purpose: better to finish early and keep reinforcing than to discover at seventeen that something important never got covered.
Why principles and skills, not knowledge
I'm not building a list of things she should know. I'm building a list of things she should be able to do — cook a meal, read a book she chose herself, tell when a habit is quietly damaging her, treat someone decently under pressure. What she gets curious about beyond that is entirely hers to choose, and I don't think it's my job to pick it for her. A parent who decides their kid must know a specific set of facts is optimising for the parent's comfort, not the kid's independence. A parent who never teaches anything deliberately is optimising for nothing at all. The list is the attempt to hold the line between those two failure modes: teach the transferable thing, stay out of the way on everything else.
Why age milestones, and why they're provisional
Grouping by age (0–4, 5–8, 9–11, 12–15) instead of by subject is deliberate — the question I want the list to answer at any point is "what does she need now," not "what does the reading section eventually contain." But I want to be honest about how much guessing is in the current placement. Some items — reading fluency at five to eight, arithmetic fluency in the same window — are placed with real confidence; they track how most children actually develop. Others — exactly when to have the posture-and-bad-habits conversation, for instance — are placed on instinct and will probably move once I've watched her actually get there.
Why one master list instead of a running series
The list itself stays singular and current — there is one canonical version, and it gets edited in place, the way a spec gets edited rather than re-published. But why it changed is worth keeping. So the mechanism is: edits happen quietly on the master list; anything that changed for a real reason — a milestone that turned out to be wrong, an item I initially missed, something I read or watched happen that changed my mind — gets its own dated post like this one, arguing for the change. The list tells you what I currently believe. The posts tell you why I used to believe something different.
This is the first post in that series. There will be more as she grows and the list turns out to be wrong in places I can't yet predict.