Father | Emergency physician Learning about parenting, literacy and childhood. Curiosity, not control.
Australia
Joined April 2025
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Our boy is learning to stack wooden blocks.
Six high is the current record.
He places each one carefully, pauses to admire his work, then reaches for another.
Sometimes the tower collapses before he's finished. Sometimes he knocks it over himself.
Either way, he's delighted.
I suspect I'm rather more attached to the six-block record than he is.
Curious Dad retweeted
Yes, many critical-social-justice dogmas can't withstand intellectual scrutiny, so their proponents try to protect them via intimidation and walling off the university commons. Civil discourse and viewpoint diversity are threats to this tactic.
Sunday afternoon at the local school.
Our boy was running around the jungle gym while a group of older boys nearby played with Nerf guns.
One of them wandered over and showed him how to pull the trigger. Far too difficult for an 18-month-old, but I thanked him all the same.
Then he ran back to his mates.
No adults organising anything. No lesson. No activity. Just a group of boys making their own fun.
@JonHaidt would be pleased!
We went bushwalking yesterday.
Our boy’s highlights:
“Water!” (Creeks and waterfalls)
“Rock!” (He kept stopping to pick them up).
And one stick that became, in quick succession, a staff, a walking stick, and a sword (I showed him how to sword fight).
He loves nature and animals. And there we were, beautiful rainforest all around, and the rocks and stick won!
We spend a lot of time thinking about what our children should learn.
Reading, mathematics, music, sport, languages.
But what about the sort of people they become?
An old rule of thumb asks us to consider, before speaking:
Is it true?
Is it kind?
Is it useful?
You needn’t be religious to see the wisdom in this. To value long-term relationships over the false satisfaction of the moment.
Character deserves as much attention as competence.
At our street party, the older kids and adults were charmed by our 18-month-old.
A prompted “please”.
A “thank you”.
Hello and goodbye.
A few high fives and high tens.
It’s cute, of course. But that isn’t really why we teach it.
Those little courtesies are some of his first ways of showing other people they matter.
And people tend to respond in kind.
A parent’s job isn’t to give a child confidence that their dreams will come true, but the enthusiasm to pursue them without needing that guarantee.
Curious Dad retweeted
"What's something you've never done before without an adult, that you would like to try?"
Going to ask my kids this in the morning!
Parents, I'm a psychology professor and the developer of Independence Therapy for Anxious kids.
The easiest way to set your child on a path to independence is to begin with one simple question.
"What's something you've never done before, without an adult, that you would like to try?"
You might just be amazed at the answers you get.
Share what your child said below!
Our son loves closing the car boot.
He presses the button, says “bip”, then watches it come down.
He never gets tired of making something happen with one little push.
I never get tired of watching how pleased he is with himself 🚗
Many such cases
Major Aussie tutoring company suddenly shuts down and tells parents to turn to AI instead: 'Overpriced' trib.al/AAzuLok
A hostile room changes who speaks.
The people who like to fight grow louder in it.
The quieter ones, even when they have something worth saying, often decide it isn’t worth the trouble.
After a while, the room starts to believe that the loudest people are all there is.
Tone is worth remembering, not just online. At home, with friends, out and about. Anywhere people should feel free to speak.
Online toxicity silences the majority and fuels power users
In online political discussions, a small fraction of highly active users typically generates the vast majority of content while most people silently observe. This vocal minority dominates the conversation, creating a distorted picture of public opinion that looks far more polarized than it actually is.
In the modern attention economy of social media, extreme or hostile content often gains the most visibility. This creates a spiral of silence among most users
A new experiment reveals that polite and constructive environments encourage silent readers to post their first comment, but the most active users are driven to post more when discussions become toxic.
So being polite and constructive is the way to create a better environment.
psypost.org/how-online-toxic…,
Our house rule for the kids is pretty simple: be polite.
For us, that includes not swearing.
Not because I think swearing is some terrible moral failing. I just think there’s something good about learning to express yourself well without reaching for it all the time.
When they’re adults, they can make their own choices.
But if they do swear, I’d like it to be because they chose the word, not because they couldn’t think of a better one.
“Profanity is the parlance of the fool. Why curse when there is such a magnificent language with which to discourse?"
-Theodore Roosevelt
I’ve thought about this a lot lately as I see more and more public figures using profanity to make a point. It seems like they’re trying to demonstrate passion or attract a younger audience. Whatever the case, I think it lessens the impact of what they’re trying to say. There is a time and a place for profanity and it isn’t in public or in professional conversation. It is indeed the “parlance of the fool.”
Curious Dad retweeted
Having kids forces you into good habits simply because you have to model what you want your kids to do. You want your kids to not swear so you stop swearing. You want your kids listening to beautiful music so you listen to beautiful music. You want your children eating healthy food so you make them healthy food and that’s what you end up eating. You want them getting lots of fresh air and exercise outdoors and boom you’re right there outside with them. You want them brushing their teeth twice a day and flossing and suddenly you’re doing it like clockwork too. It’s amazing how looking after someone you love can make you look after yourself better.
Our son has always loved the bath.
First it was the bubbles as the water ran in.
Then the silicone toys: seahorse, whale, walrus and crab. 🦀
Now it is a small drinking bottle with no lid.
He fills it.
Pours it out.
Fills it again.
Over and over, laughing as though the water has done something completely unexpected.
Then I suppose, for him, it has.
Curious Dad retweeted
The real reason children no longer enjoy reading.” Mary Wakefield has a theory in the latest Spectator. Instead of screen addiction, she blames school curricula which teach “to the test” rather than reading for enjoyment. Children are so busy analysing brief extracts, they can’t enjoy the book as a whole.
I read incessantly as a child, including illicitly when I was supposed to be sleeping. Not “great literature”, it was Dr Dolittle, Biggles, Bulldog Drummond, Just William, Arthur Ransome, Percy F Westerman. It would certainly have included Harry Potter if he’d been around then. I don’t believe I ever had my “comprehension” tested. I just loved reading.
Is Mary Wakefield right?
Curious Dad retweeted
This paragraph by Richard Feynman hits so hard:
“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”
Curious Dad retweeted
Children who eat dinner with their family most nights do better in school, have fewer behavioural problems, and are less likely to develop eating disorders. A 2023 umbrella review in the journal Nutrients combined the results of 57 reviews and found that family mealtimes were consistently linked to better outcomes across every domain measured.
The review found that children who ate with their families regularly had higher fruit and vegetable intake, lower rates of obesity, better academic performance, and fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety. The association held after controlling for income, parental education, and family structure.
The mechanism is not the food. It is the conversation. Family dinner is one of the few remaining settings in modern life where a child sits with adults, without a screen, and practises talking, listening, and being heard. The vocabulary exposure alone is significant: children at the dinner table hear a wider range of words than children who eat alone, and vocabulary at age five is one of the strongest predictors of academic success.
The review also found that the quality of the meal mattered less than the fact of sitting down together. A takeaway pizza eaten at the table with conversation produced similar benefits to a home-cooked meal. The key variable was the shared time, not the menu.
Nobody has time. Everybody is tired. The research says that twenty minutes at a table, phones off, food on plates, talking about nothing in particular, is doing more for your child's brain, body, and mental health than most interventions that cost money and require appointments. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3744…
