Science Minded

One of the most useful things I ever learned about children is this: They don't all experience the same world in the same way.

Some children seem to arrive earthside ready to join the party. Others need to watch from the sidelines for half an hour before they'll even consider taking off their shoes.

Some barely notice the scratchy tag in their shirt. Others can feel the microscopic crumb that has somehow made its way into their sock.

Some experience disappointment as a small bump in the road. Others experience it with their ENTIRE BODY.

This is temperament.

Long before children develop their beautifully complex personalities, we see relatively stable, biologically influenced differences in how they respond to their environment.

You can think of these as a kind of proto-personality: some of the early ingredients that, together with relationships, experiences, development and environment, contribute to the person a child becomes.

In their landmark researchers Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess described nine dimensions of temperament, including things like activity level, intensity, adaptability, persistence and approach or withdrawal.

Importantly, these aren't categories your child either "has" or "doesn't have".

A child can be highly adaptable but intensely emotional. Slow to approach but incredibly persistent. Highly sensitive but fairly predictable in their rhythms.

And no combination is inherently better than another.

What matters enormously is goodness of fit: how well a child's temperament fits with the expectations and environment around them.

Because sometimes the child we describe as "difficult" isn't actually difficult.

They might be a high-intensity, highly sensitive, slow-to-adapt child living in a world that keeps expecting them to be easy-going, flexible and unfazed.

Understanding temperament doesn't mean we stop guiding children. It means we get much better at understanding the child we're actually guiding.

Swipe through the nine traits 👉

Comment and let me know, which one made you immediately think, "OH. That's my child"?

References: Thomas & Chess 1977

Children need wide fields AND solid fences.

Wide fields =
Room to move
Explore
Choose
Experiment
Be loud
Get messy
Take manageable risks
Have ideas we didn’t plan

Solid fences = The boundaries that protect safety, relationships and the things that genuinely matter.

The problem is that so often (for initially good reasons) we build fences everywhere. Childhood is covered in fences:

"Don’t climb that"
"Don’t touch that"
"Sit there"
"Use it this way"
"Stop running"
"Because I said so"

We end up spending all day enforcing boundaries that were never particularly important in the first place.

Instead of holding boundaries we've got stuck in the habit of holding, it can be so helpful to stop and ask:

Who needs this boundary and why?
Is this about physical or emotional safety?
Are we protecting people, property, values, the status quo?

Or... are we simply making children easier for adults to manage? (and sometimes that's a good enough reason too).

Strong boundaries matter. So does freedom.

The art is knowing which is which and having the flexibility to pivot.

References: Grolnick & Pomerantz (2009); Joussemet, Landry & Koestner (2008)

This Father’s Day, I wanted to share something pretty incredible:

Modern fatherhood is changing the male brain and we think it all comes down to caregiving.

We know pregnancy, birth and lactation create profound hormonal and neurological changes. But research shows that the everyday work of caring for a baby changes the brain too.

Holding, feeding and settling them.
Getting up overnight. Learning their cries. Comforting them.
Laughing together. Playing.
Doing it again and again and again.
The human brain is plastic. It adapts to what we repeatedly ask it to do.

And compared with previous generations, dads in many Western countries are doing substantially more direct, hands-on caregiving. Many also report wanting to be even more involved.

Their brains appear to be adapting too.

Research has found changes in fathers’ brains in areas involved in attention, motivation, empathy and responding to their baby.

One particularly fascinating study compared mums who were primary caregivers, dads who were secondary caregivers and gay dads who were primary caregivers.

Researchers looked at two interconnected brain systems involved in parenting.

Very simply, one helps us emotionally tune into a baby’s needs and respond quickly. The other helps us read their cues, understand what they might need and work out how to respond.

Primary-caregiving gay dads showed strong activity across both systems.

And among fathers, doing more childcare was linked with stronger connections between them.

In other words, their brains seemed to reflect the caregiving they were doing, not simply whether they were male or female.

Perhaps some of what we've historically thought of as differences between “mum brains” and “dad brains” also reflects something much simpler: Who was doing most of the caring?

So here's to the Dads who are in there doing the work.

You’re not just building a beautiful relationship with your child. All that caregiving, connection and love is shaping you too.

As you help build their developing brain , they’re helping reshape yours.

Happy Father’s Day.

References: Abraham et al. (2014); Feldman et al. (2019); Provenzi et al. (2021).

A 11 year old put me in my place...

The other day I was volunteering at my son’s school for Science Week. We were making art with leaves, noticing their different features, looking at veins and colour variation and exploring the biology of plants.

At least, that was the science I was supposed to be thinking about.

The science I ended up thinking about was heaps cooler:
The developmental science of pre-adolescent slang.

One of the Grade 6 boys, who is 11, told me he was going to use six or seven leaves.
So naturally I said: “Ha. 6 7.”

He looked at me with the kind of pity and disdain that I suspect only an 11-year-old can truly master.

And said: “That is SO 2025.”

Absolutely devastating, hilarious and also FASCINATING.

Because slang isn’t just children making up ridiculous words to confuse us.
Language is one of the ways young people build social identity.

As children move towards adolescence, their social worlds expand beyond their families and peer relationships become increasingly important. The way they dress, the music they like, the things they find funny and, yes, the words they use, can all become ways of communicating:

‘I know what you know.’
‘I belong here.’
‘We’re part of the same group.’

And importantly:

‘We are not the adults.’

Sociolinguistic research has shown that adolescents use language creatively to create and maintain exactly this kind of group distinctiveness. Adolescence is also a particularly important period for exploring and consolidating social identity.

Which explains why adults adopting youth slang can be so exquisitely cringe.
Part of its usefulness is that it belongs to them.

So when their Mum starts saying “rizz”, or Dad describes dinner as “lit” or the developmental science lady at Science Week proudly demonstrates that she knows what “6 7” means...

The inevitable eye roll isn’t just tween attitude, it’s a tiny glimpse of something developmentally important happening.

Our little ones (who are becoming big ones) are figuring out who they are, who are their people and who THEY are as people separate from us.

Anyway, 6 7 is over.
Please update your records accordingly.

References: Eckert (2003); Crocetti (2026)

I saw a TikTok recently that suggested a tiny change in thinking:

Next time someone cuts you off in traffic, instead of assuming they’re an inconsiderate jerk, assume they’re desperately trying to get home to do a poo.

😂

Ridiculous? Yes.

But also… kind of brilliant.

Because life gets a little easier when we stop assuming people are doing difficult things because they’re difficult people and start wondering whether they might be having a difficult time.

Known in research as "Unconditional Positive Regard", this concept is particularly powerful with children because it helps us embrace the idea that they are so rarely trying to give us a hard time. It's MUCH more likely that they’re having a hard time.

Maybe our child didn’t ignore us. Maybe shifting their attention away from what they were doing was genuinely hard.

Maybe they’re not trying to ruin everyone’s morning. Maybe getting dressed, finding their shoes, remembering their bag and leaving the house is asking more of their executive functioning than they have available right now.

Maybe they’re not being dramatic about the broken banana. Maybe, for their three-year-old nervous system and hard to manage emotions, it really does feel that big.

Maybe they’re not smirking because they don’t care. Maybe they’re uncomfortable, nervous and have absolutely no idea what their face is supposed to be doing right now.

This doesn’t mean pretending behaviour doesn’t matter. I mean, sometimes people cut us off in traffic because they’re inconsiderate jerks. Sometimes children knowingly do things they shouldn’t.

But we rarely know someone else’s internal experience with the certainty we think we do.

And the story we tell ourselves changes our response.

“They’re deliberately making my life difficult” primes us for battle. “They’re having a hard time. I wonder what’s going on?” makes room for curiosity.

Same child. Same behaviour. Different adult.

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give children is simply to think highly of them.

To make our first interpretation generous, and when necessary, assume they really need to poo.

A child laughs after knocking over another child's tower of blocks.
We intervene to help.
And they laugh...

We think "Ohhhhh no you didn't"

Because now it doesn’t just feel like they did something they shouldn’t have done.

It feels like they don’t care. Maybe they’re even enjoying our frustration.

It can look and feel incredibly provocative.

But we have to tread carefully, because a smile or laugh isn’t a reliable window into someone else’s intentions and laughter isn’t always evidence that a child thinks something is funny.

Humans smile when we’re happy, of course. But we can also smile or laugh when we’re nervous, embarrassed, uncomfortable, overwhelmed or unsure what to do next. Children do this too.

In tense social moments, children can smile or laugh when they’re nervous, embarrassed, unsure what response is expected or they might be trying to reduce the intensity of it all.

Sometimes that grin in a tense moment may be less: “I think this is hilarious.”

and more: “There is suddenly a LOT happening here and I don’t quite know what to do with myself.”

That doesn’t mean we ignore what happened.

The tower still matters. The other child still matters. The boundary still matters: “I won’t let you knock down their building. Let’s see what we can do to help.”

What changes is the story we tell ourselves about the child while we hold the boundary.

It changes the story from: "This child has no empathy and is going to become a serial killer"
to: "This kid might be confused and need some support with their developing social skills"

It's so important for us to remember that behaviour gives us clues, but it doesn’t give us direct access to another person’s mind.

Have you ever had a child smile or laugh at exactly the wrong moment?

References: Niedenthal et al. (2010); Rychlowska et al. (2017)

Why do children ignore us when we KNOW they heard us?

Sometimes because hearing us and being able to stop, shift attention, hold our instruction in mind AND act on it are completely different developmental tasks.

When we say, “Shoes on, grab your bag, find your hat and get in the car”, we’re asking a young child to use attention, working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility all at once while completing a minimum of four separate tasks.

And for a 4-year-old, sophisticated language itself is still brand new.

So before deciding they’re ignoring us (which they very well may be), we can try to reduce the developmental load:

• Go to them
• Get their attention
• Use fewer words
• Give one step at a time
• Show, don’t just tell
• Help them start

This doesn’t mean children never deliberately ignore us. Of course they do. It means “they heard me” isn’t the same as “their brain could organise a response quickly”.

Sometimes the most effective instruction is the one we help them get started on.

What instruction do you find yourself repeating 82 times a day? And why is it always shoes 😂 Let me know in the comments, I'll go first!

References: Diamond (2013).