Brain growth

From the creative and magical to scientific and factual. This little excerpt is from the start of chapter four in How minds change, a wonderful book by David McRaney.

I’m sharing this because it’s so easy to forget that what we think is real isn’t actual reality. It’s just our brain’s interpretation of reality. And that means we can change our reality by changing how we think about it. When I feel like I’m being a crap dad or I’m getting angry, it’s this idea that helps me get back on track.

“The brain, trapped in a black box, slowly, effortfully constructs a model of reality that over time gets better at predicting and explaining the regularities in its environment that have excited some neural pathways and not others. Our experiences in the world begin with shapes and sounds and colours, and as we become increasingly better at perceiving them, we interact with objects around us and begin to categorize them. Later, when we are old enough, with the help of others who have already gone through this process, we add language. At first, we associate the currently agreed-upon sounds with the aspects of reality they describe, and then we learn lines that represent those sounds on paper, and off we go learning about things we may never directly experience, except through books about Paraguay and podcasts about serial killers and movies about teddy bears that can talk.”

Hopefully it’ll help you too.

The Lore of the world

This blog post is flippin’ wonderful.

The idea behind it is, when you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself. So simple, yet creative, it’s like a quick tickle for your brain.

Here’s a snippet.

“The pain will keep you awake at night. One day those baby teeth fall out, only for the process to repeat. Secretly, a new set of adult teeth will have been formed in your jaw via mineral deposition; it is as if your body is the earth’s mantle, and can secrete a kind of white rock. During this metamorphosis, your baby teeth will first become wiggly, then loose, and eventually drop, bloody, onto floors and pillows and held-out palms. This is somehow satisfying.”

Grab a coffee and a 5 minutes and read the rest here.

When a dad asked for the gift of time

This is a lovely article about the legacy and memories you’re leaving your child, whether you like it or not. It’ll make you think about your dad and how your kids will remember you, which is always worth reflecting on, because it makes what you do next that bit better.

Diffusing the feelings after keeping calm

This evening, in the face of a teenager shouting at me to go away, I stayed calm. I felt that pent up energy in my stomach, but didn’t react to it. After everything had settled down, I could still feel it sitting there. It’s remarkable how quickly kids, even teens, move past a stressful situation. I think it gets harder as you get older. 

So now I have these feelings that I need to defuse, which is something I’m still working on. Sometimes going for a walk helps so I can think the whole situation through. Sometimes it’s doing something mindless to forget, like watching rugby, the next episode in a series, or doing a jigsaw puzzle (I’m 44, it's OK). Sometimes nothing seems to work, apart from getting to the end of the day and just going to bed. But that’s OK if I’ve managed to stay calm. My REM can do the rest.

Pick your battles

This pearl of wisdom goes for every age. If toddlers really want to stop and look at the digger in the building site doing its thing and you’re not in a rush, why not? If your four-year old wants to wear that princess outfit to the shops, what’s wrong with letting him? If your teenager is still up at 10:40pm on a school night and they’re doing well in school and pulling their weight around the house, why not?

Each one of those could have been a battle. But what it costs you in terms of energy, frustration, needing to repair the relationship after, often isn’t worth the win. So, pick your battles, because you will have them. What I’d like to learn is how to get those feelings to dissolve quickly. Something I still need to crack.  

Of course we’re making this fatherhood thing up

Research from 2010 found that dads with young children in the 2000s spent two-to-six times more time caring for their kids than dads from the 1970s and 1980s.

I was born in 1980, so for me, this means I’m making much of this up. Hence the years spent on this blog. Not to say that my dad isn’t great, he is, but things were different. If you were born after me, it’s still the same. We’re all making this fatherhood thing up. That’s OK, as long as we keep thinking about it, learning about it, trying new things and being willing to change when things stop working. And also going easy on ourselves, because people have been doing this for millennia and things have worked out OK (mostly). So, feeling like you’re making it up is normal. 

Dan's powerful story

Dan, one of the earliest readers of these emails, told me a story prompted by one of the articles in last week’s edition. It was so bloody good, I asked if I could share it with you. Being the wonderful human he is, he said yes. Here it is. 

Your letter and the article by J. Connor (here’s that article) really struck a chord — it made me want to share something.

We’ve just come back from eight days in a remote village in Ghana. No electricity, no running water, nothing familiar. Living in huts with an NGO, no westerners or tourists anywhere to be seen.

And it was incredible — for my wife, the kids, and me.

The boys had no option but to use a hole in the ground as a toilet, wash with a bucket, swim in a parasite-filled lake, and eat the same beans every night.

And yet — they were really really happy. They loved it. And so were the people around them happy.

Sure life was tough by our standards, and yes, people were “poor,” but there was a sense of calm and contentment. No drama, no complaints — just life, being lived. And LOTS of play.

This isn’t about congratulating ourselves for going. It’s about what we saw in others and what I'd like to learn from them. And your linked piece helped me understand it more clearly.

Young people in the UK should feel excited about their lives. They have more opportunities, better health, more freedom, and more resources than many could dream of.

And yet so many of them — and us — feel stuck. Like the future is closed off. Like we’re boxed in.

It’s nuts, isn’t it?

As you point out, the real issue is context. It’s the frame we’re living inside. We’re surrounded by messages of crisis and uncertainty and a sense of limited options and endless dead ends — and it’s repeated so often that it starts to shape how we see everything.

But I know now how badly that lens is warped. As is the sense of what matters in life. We’re not actually stuck. We’re just seeing things through the wrong filter. And we are unable to look beyond the blinkers and doom and make choices that can make us happy.

I don’t know what’s to blame — the media, consumerism, the loss of faith or meaning — probably all of it. But I agree with your main point: it’s not about phones. It’s the deeper context that’s robbing people of happy lives.

And almost as testament to the power of this context, coming back to the UK felt jarring at first. So much here suddenly seemed absurd. But within 1-2 days, we were back in the crazy context of UK living and all its anxiety driving stuff. Like nothing had changed.

I really hope we can change that. It seems very hard to though. It’s just so pervasive in how we live.

Dan

Dan’s words hit home for me, because I’ve been feeling stuck in a rut for a little while now. Routines we’ve slipped into as a family don’t bring joy and excitement. On my cycle commute into the office, I find my mind wandering to places away from London and thinking about living life there instead. A sign that life needs some sort of shake up, but shaking it up feels harder to do now because the kids are teens, they won’t just come along with us. They question everything and have their own ideas about how they want to spend their time. 

While we have a sort of tradition around holiday adventures, I wonder how things would be different if we’d shaken up life a few more times in the past when they were younger. Or at least labelled some of the things we’d done as a shake up, so they felt like that was part of our family culture, wasn’t a scary thing and always ended up with things better than before.

Interesting thoughts, but not useful to me right now. They might be for you though. Me, I’m going to think about ways to shake up our lives, even if just in small ways. 

If you're interested, here's how Dan ended up in Ghana -

We ended up there by luck really… we had a bunch of air miles... Accra was a place we could fly to on them over Easter, and my wife had previously had a work trip (when she worked at VSO) cancelled as she had a health problem. So it felt like we had to do it!

We then found the village set up via a friend who knew about it and planned our trip around our visit there.

Back story to the village is interesting too... three Spanish girls ended up in the village a few years ago, as a priest told them they had a volunteering set up there. When the girls arrived they realised there wasn’t. But they stayed and helped the village figure out how to host visitors and have them live with them and spend money in their community.

Brian interviewed me, then I interviewed him

Brian Comly runs, amongst other things, MindBodyDad, a blog for dads who are properly into health. He interviewed me for his blog and I interviewed him for mine.

Brian asking me the questions

You’ve interviewed fathers from many different backgrounds. What is one lesson that completely changed the way you think about fatherhood?

Good question. It would have to be about time and how short it is. I think about that a lot by remembering a quote one of the dads I interviewed. Actually, this guy was a grandad. He said,

“There's a last time for everything. A last time they sit on your lap, a last time they hold your hand in public. Make the most of it.”

It’s as close to a literal, loving slap in the face as you’ll get. It sorts me out every time.

How has your view of masculinity shifted since starting Being Dads, and how do you see that influencing the way men show up as fathers today?

I’m more aware of the different flavours of masculinity out there. I’ve spoken to so many different dads, from those who subscribe to that classic 80’s alpha stereotype, to climate activists, the work-centric providers, stay at home dads and many in between. Across all of them, I’ve noticed fatherhood forces at least reflection, if not real change. They all want to be the best dads they can, and they all want to be with their kids to some degree. The model of masculinity that’s been imprinted in their brain constraints or enables that change to greater or lesser degrees.

The desire to have a strong connection with your kids as a dad has always been there, though. Studies into the diaries and private lives of Victorian men have shown they have deep feelings of love and a desire to be connected, but society back then was very much about men being distant disciplinarians who never showed emotion, not even in private. Dads wanted real connection with their kids, but it was very much a rarity, which you feel when you look at these pics here. You just don’t expect, nor have you ever seen, images of dads of that era being so….free.

In Victorian times, there was one definition of masculinity. We live in times where that’s fragmenting. There are lots of them, which means there’s a lot more flexibility for men to change as they become dads.

With so many distractions competing for our attention, what do you believe are the most effective ways for a dad to stay truly present with his children?

First, I think it’s important to remember that you won’t always be truly present. That way you go a bit easier on yourself when you slip. Over the years, I’ve found that being hard on myself only makes things worse.

There’s the obvious stuff that’s helpful in building any habits – change your environment to make it easy to do what you want to do. Things like leaving your phone in another room, or putting it on silent, keeping family time for just family time and nothing else.

But the most effective thing, for me at least, is to remind myself I will miss these moments and there aren’t many left. That thought gives me a boost that’s a mix of attention, letting go of other things and cherishing the moment too.

A lot of dads struggle to express emotions or show vulnerability. What would you say to a father who wants to lead with emotional awareness but is unsure how to begin?

Funnily enough, I’ll start with what I said when you asked about attention. Go easier on yourself. There’s a study that shows being more self-compassionate is correlated with having warmer relationships and less conflict with your kids. That and just thinking about it more, both in the moments you feel that internal tension that comes up in moments when you want to be a certain way but don’t feel you can, and at the end of the day when you think back over how the day was and what you could do better next time. This combo of it being at the front of your mind and not beating yourself when you’re not as good as you hoped, really works.

When your kids are grown, what do you think they will remember more—what you told them or how you lived each day in front of them?

How I lived. And that’s a bit of a scary thought to be honest. There’s so much I want to change! But I try to focus on the positives, the areas where I am being a good role model, and I try to remember that life is about working at being better on all sorts of fronts, all the time.

I try not to get hung up about the areas that I can’t change, because they are out of my control. Lastly, I try to remember that how wealthy I am or not, how cool my work is or not, how much stuff we have and how great our holidays are, don’t matter to my kids. What really matters is that I chose to make time to just spend with them. No grand plans, or big activities, just being together, having fun, supporting them, showing them I love them. I know that’s what they will remember, because that’s what I remember about my dad.

Go to all the school things

Walking back from getting my haircut this afternoon, I passed a line of year 1 kids, 5 - 6 year olds decked out in hi-viz bibs. I heard one of the teachers call the class name - ‘Morris’. They were on their way to the cricket club around the corner for sports day.

Both my sons were in year 1 Morris. It made me think back to their sports days, going to watch their class assemblies, me volunteering to help out with school trips and the school fairs. Great memories that I remember working hard to be available to make.

The funny thing is, if I hadn’t made that effort, I’d have just walked past a bunch of kids and thought nothing of it. Instead, I relived some wonderful memories that made my day a bit brighter.

Different European parenting styles

French, Italian, Germanic, Icelandic, Polish, all sorts of different parenting styles tried by British journalists in this article.

It’s well worth a read because it makes you realise we’re all just making this stuff up, following the unwritten rules of those that have done it before us. Which of course means we can choose to change them.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/21/uk-parents-try-european-parenting-approach-bed-sharing-late-dinners

JFDI

I found myself writing this when Julie Hodgins tagged me in a post about the story behind the book designed and lay out she did for me.

This brought back memories! It's me on draft 20-something of my book. It doesn't look like much for 10 years work, but a lot went into The Patient Parent.

Here's the back story. I had an anger and impatience problem with my parenting, but couldn't find anything to help. I was feeling pretty stuck for a while, then decided to work it out myself. Just Fucking Do It - JFDI - has become one of my mottos ever since. It's a hard one to follow, but a firm fixture for me.

JFDI has taken me on all sorts of fun adventures along the way. Over the years I've helped thousands of other parents, and worked with parenting and children's organisations in all sorts of places (all this is a side project, joint 3rd priority with health after 1st family and 2nd the day job 4.5 days a week).

The book works (if your kids are under 12, because teenage years are a different game). The hardest part is remembering, or choosing to actually do the stuff that works.

Especially as a parent because there's so much to do so something has to go. It's a lot easier to just not choose and go with the urgent. That way you've got an excuse, or there wasn't a commitment in the first place so there's no attachment to the choice being made.

Making a choice is really hard and, as this writing rolls out of me, pretty much stream of consciousness, I realise that's what also makes JFDI so hard to follow. It's about making a choice, a commitment about the kind of person we want to be. But doing that, at least when I've JFDIed life, has led to great things happening.

If you've got this far, thanks for staying with my flow, hopefully that's given you a good thought for whatever comes next for you.