With two decades of experience of a fully remote company, they know a thing or two about the challenges that presents and how to mitigate those challenges. One of the benefits they offer is a co-working allowance. Each month, we get money to either pay for a co-working space or, and this is the great bit, pay for food/drink in cafes.

In my little village in North Yorkshire, there aren’t co-working spaces nearby but there are a whole bunch of places that are nice to sit, will provide me coffee and a sandwich, and let me see that other people exist out and about. Those sorts of places tend to like you to spend some money while you’re there hogging their heating and wifi, and in recognition of this, Automattic let me expense food and drinks while working.

It’s not unlimited and I can’t take the mick (no alcohol, no three-course meals), but it’s a great way to get out of the house and patronise local businesses.

Today I’m at the Punch Bowl Inn in Marton-cum-Grafton and it’s wonderful. A classic old British pub. Small windows and low ceilings (it’s real old) so it’s not too hot, a really broad menu, Kiss from a Rose playing, and historic flourishes everywhere. What’s not to like?

Anyway, my sandwich is just turning up so I better get to it.

I’m not here to dive into that just yet, but I am here to talk about my reading over the last 5 months of parental leave!

Books I’ve read

This covers the period February 2026 to the start of July 2026

The Wee Free Men

I was coming off the back of a slog through Les Miserables and wanted something new, light and fun. I love Pratchett and had never read this one…and it was exactly that: fun. Not as much depth as some of his books but very enjoyable all the same. Maybe one for my eldest child soon…

The Mistborn Trilogy

I loved these, but they took me a whole bunch of time (around 7 weeks). I’d never read Sanderson before but had heard a lot about him and thought this would be a good setting off place (a 99p deal on Kindle sealed it). Wow. Love the magic system, love the world, and love the twists and turns along the way. Found the first two books fantastic…wasn’t as fussed by the third book but I was committed by then.

I haven’t added more Sanderson since, but honestly…I really enjoyed these.

The English and Their History

I only dipped into this, as I sometimes do when I’m at a loss for what I should read next. I first read it on holiday years ago and loved it - very accessible, very detailed, and ultimately a great primer into the country I live in. I did 9 days of this and clearly decided that I wanted to get back into a story after reaching the Battle of Hastings (or thereabouts)

Reaper Man

Back to Pratchett, and one that I enjoyed the first time I read it but had never really clicked with, in the same way I had with the Watch series. It has one of the more beautiful moments in all of Pratchett (aside from the entirety of the Night Watch book): Death giving up some of his time for the little girl. I was floored the first time I read it and I was this time too: build up a currency and give it away - perfect storytelling.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Again, not the whole thing, but I dipped in to this book that I first read when I was working in my first graduate job (at Mars). The book really impacted me and I’ve re-read it a couple of times since then: it’s so easy to slip into the anti-patterns the book gives and I find it helpful to remind myself of them and reflect on what I’m doing as a father and husband.

The Rose Field

I moved off of the Kindle for this one, as I bought this as a present for my wife when I was last in Oxford. As a child, I read (and loved) Pullman’s Dark Materials and I’ve re-read the whole series at least two more times - as an older teenager and as an adult. Each time I get more from them and I think they’re just the absolute pinnacle of…well, maybe children’s literature. But are they really children’s literature? Whatever they are, they’re magnificent.

I don’t think the newest trilogy are nearly as good, but that’s an impossibly high bar. I remember finding the first two books pretty interesting, and this one had its moments too. Not my favourite, and I ended up rushing the last book because I didn’t want to take it on holiday with me but wanted to finish it before I left!

A Fine Balance

I’ve already written a review of this book here so I won’t add much more here, other than the book is long - it took me a whole week on holiday, 49 sessions and more than 10 and a half hours.

The Master and Margarita

This was longer and trickier than I thought it’d be, but was a lot of fun. I loved the take on Pilate, and though I don’t really get any of the Moscow-specific details, it was nice to see a book where it felt like the author was enjoying themselves writing it.

The Remains of the Day

I’m still reading this now, but I started it on parental leave so am counting it. It’s going really well so far. Very different from any of the other things I’ve read while on leave, but that’s fine. Embarrassingly, I’ve previously written a book and claimed that it was tonally similar to Ishiguro. It’s not. Not even close. This is restrained and beautiful. Fair play.

Anxious Generation

I don’t really know where/how to include this (and the next entry) as I listened to them, rather than actually read them. However, I still think that counts and so I’m fine to put it here. I talked about the book here so won’t go into more detail.

Free-Range Kids

I listened to this immediately after the Haidt book and found it much less academic, but a whole lot more fun than his book. Between the two of them, I feel like I’m excited to take a much more ‘hands-off’ approach to parenting.

Conclusion

It’s been a busy period and I’ve been doing a lot else, but it’s good to know I’ve kept up with my reading and there’s quite a range of books that I’ve gone through. Maybe I should do twice-yearly check-ins and keep a track on all the stuff I’m reading and what I thought of it. I know GoodReads is supposed to be about that, but I’ve never really clicked with it.

So, why don’t I just outright say that it’s better? Because I feel like you lose something through LLM-based programming. I’ve produced something, but do I really understand it? Often not. Let me give you an example of a project I recently worked on…

Morrisons More

My wife and I tend to shop at the Morrisons in Boroughbridge and they have a loyalty card program (who doesn’t)? When poking through that online account I found that they have digital receipts, showing everything that I’ve bought at Morrisons over the last year.

It’s all rendered through a painful Javascript system so no raw HTML and each Javascript call is protected with multiple authentication tokens and…well, it’d be a pain. In the past, my options would either be to spend a long time building something bespoke, manually copying and pasting all of the receipts into a text file and then parsing, or giving up and accepting I’ll never do analytics on my purchases (or maybe make a GDPR request?)

Now, I fire up Claude Code and explain what I want and hey presto - 30 minutes later and a few authentication tokens copied and I’ve got my entire shopping history.

30 minutes later and I know how much milk I’ve bought over time and how that changed with the addition of a new child. And what proportion of my weekly shop goes on dairy versus meat versus fresh produce. Mad, right?

Then I realised that my wife’s history wasn’t included as she has her own More card. Previously I’d have re-run all the code using her authentication tokens and then merged somehow. Instead, I just asked Claude to make this ‘multi-account’ and again, hey presto, it just works.

So far so good, right?

Where it went wrong

I’d got all my analytics ready and was happy as Larry - I shared with my wife and told her to stop buying so much chocolate. But then we dug in because some of the totals seemed off. Half of the products were misclassified. Rice pudding was classified as rice. Pork and Ale sausages were misclassified as a drink. Water chestnuts as a soft drink.

Had I been doing it myself, these are mistakes I wouldn’t have made. It would have been obvious because a clear step post-classification would have been to examine some of the labels and check they were working. I didn’t do that because I didn’t even know to do that - I just let Claude code go and off it went.

Fortunately, I caught it and then embarked on a session of “let’s check the classification” but only really by accident. I’ve made similar mistakes before

• assuming part of the process has worked seamlessly, and not really realising how much rested on that assumption that I hadn’t checked.

It’s that lack of checking key assumptions, and the frightening speed and obfuscation…just, the whole thing together means it’s possible to move quicker with LLMs than your understanding can keep up with. So you end up with a project that’s nominally yours but that you don’t deeply understand all parts of.

It turns you into a project manager of a multi-faceted project…but you look and feel like the developer. When somebody asks me about details of an LLM-assisted project, I imagine I feel like a senior manager does when somebody asks them about the work of their skip-level reports. It’s probably OK because they’re generally good, but honestly…I’m not sure.

Conclusion

Check out the project here if you’re interested. But the more pressing conclusion is that I’m still learning how to work effectively with LLMs and I don’t think I’ve quite got the balance. Ultimately I’ve probably got to accept going slower in order to ensure I understand and keep ownership of my own projects. Lest I become the bumbling middle manager trying to claim credit for my much smarter reports.

I’m spending most of my time trying to find cool places. We open all our doors and windows when we wake up, then go round shutting everything up at about 9am and retreating into our rooms as hermits. Then come 9pm we dash round the house and open everywhere up again to try to drag the temperature back down.

I swear 30 degrees in the UK is so much warmer than 30 degrees elsewhere. Maybe it’s because we’ve still got stuff to do and so can’t lounge about with a cocktail (I cycled to and from school today!). Maybe it’s because our houses are all designed to trap heat. Reception class has been shut because they don’t have air conditioning. Taekwondo has been cancelled. Our cleaner cancelled.

The baby is sleeping in a 31 degree room in just his nappy and I’m frantically looking at how I can get air conditioning set up.

Perhaps the only saving grace (aside from the thunderstorm this morning) is the fact that we’ve smashed the heat records from 1976 and so we can now safely put to bed the old ‘you think this was bad…you weren’t there in 1976’.

I actually have a fun story from that summer (even though I wasn’t even nearly born). I can always work out which summer it was because my dad told me that he nearly missed one of his O-level exams because he was sunbathing because it was the hottest summer ever, when his teacher realised he wasn’t there. Fortunately, the teacher lived nextdoor to my dad and so phoned his wife and said to shout over the garden fence and tell my dad to get to school pronto.

Worryingly, this doesn’t look like it’s going to be a once-in-50-years kind of weather phenomenon, and instead might end up being an every-year or every-few-years kind of thing going forward. Maybe that changes the maths on air conditioning and we’ll finally have to cave.

Probably depressing times for the planet. Though I suppose if we shouldn’t overreact to cold days and claim those as evidence of a lack of global warming, we probably shouldn’t overreact to hot periods either.

Anyway, this isn’t a global warming sort of post. I’m just really really hot.

My eldest managed to get to stage 5 in swimming. Objectively, lots of children have done that. Lots have probably managed it earlier than him. But it’s something he’s been working towards for ages. We were debating stopping swimming lessons for him because they’re a hell of a lot of work for my wife and me, and there seemingly wasn’t any progress. And then he did it. He was so so pleased to tell me and you could see how proud he was. Me too. Now, all is forgotten and we’re getting ready to book stage 5 lessons like fools.

My four-year-old confided in me over breakfast that the reception children get to go to a ‘learning room’ and learn things while the nursery children play. She wanted to go and learn things with reception but was too shy to ask the teacher. I asked if she wanted me to do the asking and she nodded enthusiastically.

Today she had her first reception lesson. Apparently the other children shouted that she wasn’t reception and shouldn’t be allowed in, but the teacher said she was allowed because she was interested. And then she did the reception work and was quicker than the reception children. The other kids were impressed (as were the teachers) and she was beaming as she told me. She got to learn, and she got a bunch of kudos.

Again, there are lots of kids that are smart or good at writing or skip years or all sorts of things. But when they’re your children and you’ve seen them work and know their fears and anxieties and what they love and what motivates them…to see them achieve and watch them burst with happiness as they tell you…

Well, it’s a proud couple of days I’ve had and I look forward to many many more.

Goals

I didn’t want to waste my parental leave - to look back and think ‘where did the time go?’

Key things that I wanted to achieve included:

1. Lose weight
2. Keep writing
3. Achieve ‘things’

Let’s take each of them in turn:

Lose weight

I was coming off of the back of 6 months of pretty unhealthy living. No exercise and lots of late night snacking and beer. I’d gone from a fairly muscular 68kg to a much less muscular 72kg.

I managed to do a big bunch of weight loss early on with a diverticulitis-enforced diet, but have made much more progress on the ‘muscular’ thing with gym attendance. I was trying to go every other day and have managed 35 different gym sessions since I started on leave for an average of around twice a week.

Not bad, overall. Every half-term/term I stop going as I don’t really find the time. I’ve been ill or away. But aside from those big things, I’ve pretty much kept up every other day. I switched my lifting pattern from 3x5 to 4x8 so my numbers aren’t necessarily comparable but before my third child I was doing (at most):

Deadlift: 3x5 of 82.5kg Squat: 3x5 of 72.5kg Bench Press: 3x5 of 55kg

After 6 months of inactivity I dropped down to:

Deadlift: 3x5 of 60kg Squat: 3x5 of 60kg Bench Press: 3x5 of 40kg

Right now I’m running the following:

Deadlift: 4x8 of 77.5kg Squat: 4x8 of 65kg Bench Press: 4x8 of 47.5kg

Looking at that, it feels like my deadlift’s in the best place it’s been since I was much younger, my squat could probably get pushed up a little higher and my bench press should do the same.

More importantly (though looking at the numbers is pretty cool), I feel pretty good. My workouts are good, the right length, keep me interested and I feel good afterwards. Going to 4x8 appears to have boosted my muscle growth - I feel a lot bigger/more muscular now.

On the eating side of things, I’ve had good swathes of eating healthier. For me, that usually means eating the same things as I would have done, but without evening snacks, beer, and hoovering up the children’s leftover food. Right now (with the world cup on) I’m not doing such a good job on the diet side of things, and my holiday was a major eating/drinking event…but generally, I’m pretty happy with this.

My vitamin ‘habit’ has dropped off pretty precipitously. I saw a study had come out saying that Omega-3 supplements showed no measurable positive outcome in a long-term study, and it’s so hot and sunny that surely I’m getting the requisite vitamin D? I don’t know…really I just lost interest.

Let’s see if I can keep the exercise up through the rest of the year, and knock the drinking on the head after the world cup.

Keep Writing

I don’t need my only avenue of writing to be this blog (I love writing and would love to dedicate more time to novels) but I’m mainly going to focus on my writing here. I started off at a furious pace, writing a blog post every day

• I knew this was never going to last and set myself a quiet goal of 1 post a week. This is my 56th post of parental leave so I’m averaging nearly 3 posts per week. Go me!

There was a big gap and things fell apart somewhat when I went on holiday. I don’t mind that at all, though. Life is for living, and if a metric encourages bad behaviour, it’s a bad metric. Knowledge is setting a SMART goal. Wisdom is knowing when to ignore it.

I’ve not been able to do much writing that wasn’t part of the blog because I can’t dedicate long periods of time to writing really, and a lot of my head space is being taken up with DPhil things. It turns out, getting a PhD actually takes a bunch of work. Who knew?

Achieve Things

I didn’t specify the things because I guess I didn’t really know what they should be. I’ve been working through a ‘snagging list’ for the last week or two that includes random odd jobs (go to the tip, make a will, repot house plants, paint outside furniture etc.) and progress has been pretty good. We’ve also managed a big house job, multiple holidays, and plenty of familial visits and activities.

The things I thought we might do before I started parental leave (mainly making a tree house) haven’t been done…but I’m not too sad about that. Honestly, when I go through all these blog posts I realise I’ve done so much…it’s hard to be mad about any kind of lack of achievement.

I really wish I’d been able to get an academic paper published…and I’m close. But it’s something that just doesn’t work on any kind of normal timeline. All in all, not bad.

Conclusion

I had big goals. I’ve largely achieved big goals. Not going to give myself 100% on anything, but I’m certainly getting a 2:1 in any kind of reasonable assessment. Two more weeks of blazing heat and then it’ll be back to work.

Bring it on!

After that perfect start to the day, I showered in peace, got dressed into summer gear and headed to the park with all 3 children for some time on the swings. My eldest boy cycled ahead of us and was already playing football with some of his schoolfriends when we turned up. My 4-year-old got on my knee to do some ‘higher, king of the sky’ swinging. My baby lay on my chest in the bucket swing and laughed and crawled about.

We headed back and had a relaxed lunch and then kicked about in the garden and on the trampoline for the rest of the afternoon. The 6-year-old and 4-year-old played the worst board game of all time together (policeman and thieves)…the 6-year-old teaching the 4-year-old how to play.

My wife and I both called our fathers and exchanged news/gossip/greetings.

The children were bathed and put to bed, and now I’ve just finished a beer and am watching the world cup on the TV.

Hard to think of a better way to have a happy father’s day than that, really.

You can already hear the sound of children lacing up their shoes, ready to throw off the shackles of their smartphone and rediscover climbing trees, cycling to the park, scrumping apples, and whatever else teenagers might have been doing in 1950s America before Mark Zuckerberg ruined it all.

Never mind the fact that when the Online Safety Act’s age checks went live last July, Proton VPN’s UK sign-ups jumped more than 1,400% within minutes. Half the top-ten apps in the UK App Store that day were VPNs or verification tools. AI tools can generate convincing false identity documents in seconds. So I’m told. Apparently. Within months of age checks going live, the House of Lords was debating how to stop people using VPNs. Who could possibly have foreseen this? Aside from..well, everybody. Teenagers know how to use the internet. More breaking news at ten.

Fortunately, Australia are already running this experiment so we can learn from them. Drowning under the weight of free time, their teenagers are now seeing hitherto untold exam success. The only problem their Government currently has is how to manage the ‘good childhood’ epidemic that is now sweeping their nation. Oh wait. No.

After an initial spate of account deletions, the Australian Government has now quietly amended the law to redefine what it was actually regulating, beginning the long hard work of understanding which part of the social media platforms are worth trying to target. Hardly the actions you’d expect to see of a ban that’s been a roaring success. Does the research say that the social media ban has successfully transformed the lives of Australian teens? What do you think?

Fortunately, we’re at least taking some of the things the Australians have learned. Rather than a fixed list of ‘social media’ apps (because of course, there’s no way that teens would switch to different platforms) we’re targeting a specific set of features: “user-to-user platforms, whose purpose is to enable social interaction and which allow users to post material, alongside algorithms.” The usual big-hitters (plus YouTube, which has raised eyebrows) are given as examples, and we’re told that Signal and WhatsApp are not intended to be in scope. “Post material, alongside algorithms” is funny. What is eBay? What is Vinted? What is Mumsnet? What does “alongside algorithms” even mean? Who decides what “purpose” a platform has? The devil, they say, is in the conspicuously missing detail.

A monstrous cynic might say that MPs debated this ban in March and it was soundly defeated. And that since March, very little has changed about the evidence base, the extent or depth of perceived harm, and the mechanisms to enforce a ban. In fact, they might conclude that the main thing that has changed has been the local election and a potential leadership challenge. And that, by announcing the policy now but not explaining any of the technical details and suggesting that they’ll all come later, Downing Street has set up a problem that somebody else might have to deal with. Not me, of course. I could never be so cynical.

What would be better than this, then? What does the grown-up version of this look like? We need to be explicit about the actual harms we’re trying to prevent. “Give kids their childhood back” sounds good…but which kids? What version of childhood? We need to be explicit about age and identity verification: how it’d work and what trade-offs we’re willing to make. Simply saying that Ofcom should run a rapid study to work out how to do this makes it sound like a quick-to-solve technical problem. Politicians must know that that isn’t true. Finally, we need to have a societal discussion about what we actually expect teenagers to be doing instead. Would we rather they spend four hours a day talking to their friends online, watching TV, scrolling TikTok, playing at the park or…or what?

The Olden Days

As we were driving through Tenerife I was telling my son about colonialism and why the Canary Islands are Spanish and we were looking at all the banana plantations and I was thinking about wealth and poverty.

Much of what I saw of the islands looked poor, or at least poorer than rural North Yorkshire. I thought back to a time when there would have been local farmers providing food for the people, and woodcutters, and miners, and smiths, and…

Essentially, it used to be that each settlement had a number of jobs that came with a settlement that allowed it to function. Any given number of people needs a smith, and a doctor, and a priest, and a tanner etc. There were multiple ways to be ‘wealthy’ because people need a whole bunch of goods and services and you needed to live within around 20 miles of those goods/services (because that’s how far you could travel in a day).

This led to a whole bunch of small but thriving communities.

Better Transport

As transport improved, the distance you could travel in a day increased and thus you didn’t need as many goods/services nearby. When travel by horses was the only option, a doctor who lived 30 miles away was practically useless. Now, a doctor who lives 30 miles away is perfectly good for me thanks.

Better Business

Rather than a woodcutter in every village, why not have a big forest and sell wood to multiple villages. It’ll be cheaper and so mean that everybody will pay less for their wood. It’s just good business, right?

It’s hard to argue that everybody should pay more just to support local business. Comparative advantage means we should all specialise.

Except it further hollows out the ways of making a living in a given place. As the world shrinks through increased connectivity (including physical connectivity), opportunities for earning become scarcer.

Tenerife

Where does that leave Tenerife (or Great Ouseburn, for that matter)? I don’t want to buy anything that can only be made on a volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic. The odds of the best builder, or luthier, or consultant living on Tenerife are vanishingly slim so what comparative advantage do they have? Right now, there might be the odd industry that survives because of imperfect connectivity, but surely at the limit, as connectivity tends to infinity, industry after industry will vanish?

The climate was the reason I was in Tenerife, and it’s probably their only comparative advantage (hence the reliance on tourism).

In a globalised world, with comparative advantage and agglomeration, doesn’t every small area either get lucky and become the leading location for a given niche, or see all of its industries destroyed?

Holdouts

I can think of a few holdouts, but I feel like it’s only a matter of time before they go too. Teachers and doctors are the big ones, where any community of a given size needs them. But education can happen online and at some point, surely the best teacher in the world online will be better than the best teacher you can find in your village/town?

Then there’s plumbers, hairdressers, pub landlords, childcare…basically a raft of professions that rely upon proximity. But all of these are effected by globalisation too - I can watch plumbing videos and try things myself, cheap beer from supermarkets makes pubs less attractive etc.

There are some professions that benefit from local knowledge (solicitors, estate agents) but all of those local advantages will start to disappear as more of life moves online (and so local knowledge gets ingested by the latest language models).

Holdouts exist, but I don’t see them holding out forever.

Conclusion

I love systems where everybody makes logical decisions and yet the outcome is bad for most/all involved. Of course it’s logical to want to pay less for your wood. Of course it’s logical for a company to set up a woodcutting business in a big forest. Everybody makes good decisions. But the end result is that small communities of the type that people like to live in slowly die.

Happy Friday.

So many tablets

It was a pretty fancy resort and so a fairly middle class crowd. Every morning, we’d sit down for breakfast and be surrounded by other families with children of generally the same kind of age. I’d estimate that around 50% - 70% of the families had an iPad (or similar) with them and propped it up in front of the children while they ate. Generally it was one tablet that multiple children huddled round. Sometimes it was multiple tablets or phones. In one instance, it was a baby of about 6 months watching a phone.

Instinctively, I feel that this is bad. All kinds of bad. The problem is…I know the research and I know how weak it is and how disputed pretty much all elements are and so I know how difficult it is for regulators to make a strong statement here.

So far, I believe they’ve said that you should try to have no screen time for under 2s, and at most an hour a day for under 5s. Maybe these families were abiding by that (well, not those with the baby on the phone) but more likely, they probably weren’t.

However, a big theme of my writing of late has been about the sheer number of ‘guidelines’ for parents that can turn what used to be a fairly rewarding and somewhat easier job into a full-blown life-changing nightmare. And usually off the back of pretty sketchy evidence and asymmetric risk profiles (whereby health providers can give advice where their downside if you follow it to the letter is none, whereas yours is pretty substantial).

And here I am, despairing that parents aren’t following guidance that is given off the back of pretty sketchy evidence that causes huge cost to parents.

Why?

Because I really think this case is different.

Tablets are Easy

Tablets get used a lot because they’re basically a cheat code. You can turn any problematic event/behaviour into compliance simply by sticking a £50 device in front of your child for the duration. Wedding ceremony where you need them to behave? Plane flight where they need something to do? Car journey that’s going to drag on forever? Give them a tablet and turn them off for an hour or two.

But can we parents be trusted with what looks like the nuclear option? After a tough day at work, your toddler is having a tantrum because they don’t like peas and can’t they have their tablet? You look at your wife in a resigned way and dig it out. “Just this time” you say.

But kids aren’t like that. You opened Pandora’s box and now your life will never be the same again. Because what you’ve done is taught your child (using the most basic of behavioural economics) that in order to get their favourite toy, they have to be a nightmare. It’s no surprise that next time they want to watch their tablet, they’ll be a nightmare.

Just one meal becomes most meals and now, if you want your child to eat any food or if you want a second’s peace, the tablet is an integral part of family mealtimes.

Replacing Learning

Tablets are a shortcut. You aren’t able to moderate your child’s behaviour in the situation and have them behave how you’d like them to, so you buy them off with digital opium. As a parent, you’re not learning how to calm them down or handle their mood or moderate their behaviour. As a child, they’re not learning those things either. We’re not letting them sit with discomfort and boredom…we’re saying that those things can and should be soothed away by the bright lights of the screen.

This is actually I think the strongest argument that surrounds the whole screen time debate for children (and for adults, too, to some extent). The harm doesn’t necessarily come from the screen, but from what the screen replaces. If you spend every meal time reading a book, you miss out on the conversation that takes place over mealtimes and valuable social learning and bonding. If you’re running through educational books, maybe you’d say that the trade-off is fine. Maybe you wouldn’t. If you’re running through trashy novels and you’re not fully socially developed yet…well, that sounds slightly closer to toddlers on CoComelon.

The point is, you wouldn’t say reading books is harmful, right? You’d just say that there are times and places to read books and times and places to engage with the world. The iPad probably isn’t bad for you. It’s only using it to the exclusion of other things that is.

That’d also explain why the research is so sketchy and open to interpretation. We don’t regularly ask “what would you have been doing instead?” - we just ask how long you spend on a screen. If you’re replacing 1 hour of vapid TV time with 1 hour of vapid iPad time…well, so what? If you’re replacing 1 hour of playing with friends in your garden, I bet all sorts of negative effects are going on. I’m not saying that tablet use is especially bad, but I think that anything distracting you from family mealtimes is something to be careful of.

It’s Never Just Once

Just once is fine, right? Right?

Of course just once is fine. A few times is probably fine. As far as the research is concerned at the moment…well, it’s a bit shaky, but maybe plenty of tablets are fine. Probably not though, on balance.

The advice I’d give is don’t tie tablet use to a regular activity. Your child has to know that this is an exception and it has to be clear to them that it’s an exception. Daddy has a headache isn’t clear to them and isn’t really an exception. Brushing teeth isn’t. Mealtimes aren’t. Car journeys aren’t (unless they are). You pick your own exceptions, but be realistic and honest with yourself.

The Swedes do Lördagsgodis - sweets (as much as they want) on a Saturday only. Maybe Saturday is the exception. All I’m trying to say is that tablets are incredibly effective at hooking us. Small children (at least mine) are wonderful manipulators and use all kinds of ingenious tricks to get their own way. If you don’t go in with clear boundaries, you’re going to get destroyed.

Conclusion

I’ve not offered any kind of conclusive proof that sitting your toddler in front of tablets for their meals is bad. I am deeply uneasy about it, though.

I think the reason I’m so troubled by it is because tablets at breakfast on a family holiday feels like the worst possible time/place for children to be on their tablets. Our earliest memories are typically unusual experiences with close people between ages 5 - 10 i.e. family holidays. Breakfast is the first meal of the day and is theoretically early on when everybody has full reserves of energy. Mealtimes are the perfect opportunities for people to sit and share in the company of others.

To see so many children missing out on what could be formative bonding experiences with their family felt sad. It felt like I was watching a family who had surrended, and I don’t know what the true long-term cost of that surrender is.

I know that’s controversial and snobby and…well, nobody likes having their parenting questioned. But the sight of family-after-family ignoring each other over breakfast as their toddlers devoured cartoons made me worry for the kids, and definitely worry over the state of current screen-time for toddlers research.