Your parents miss you and wish you'd call. Later you'll miss them and wish you could.

Something I wish I'd done while my mother was still alive: I wish I'd written an essay, just for myself, about what she was like as a person. I knew her pretty well, but I'd know her better if I'd had to observe her and ask her questions in order to describe her in writing.

One way to tell what your kids have an aptitude for is what kinds of advice they listen to eagerly. This probably works for adults too, but not as well, because adults have learned to be diligent about things that bore them.

Explained liberal and conservative to my 10 yo and 7 yo on the way to school. I ended up describing them as forms of bias that each produced distinctive patterns of error when they hit the truth.

Parenting trick: When one of our kids does something really good (usually but not always at school) we give them the “royal treatment.” For the next couple days, all the rules are slightly bent. Stay up late? Candy with breakfast? Ok, since they're getting the royal treatment.

When my kids tell me things I didn't know, I always make a big deal about it in order to encourage them to learn more such things.

One thing you learn after having kids is what's the biggest favor you can do for anyone with kids: something that helps their kids.

I was trying to explain to my 7 yo how powerful it is to be able to read, because you can now learn anything from books instead of waiting for teachers to teach you. When I described a shelf of books as an army of robot teachers, he started to get it.

Trick that delights 7 year olds (n=1): Show how you can draw a pyramid with any shape base by drawing a polygon, drawing a dot above it, and drawing a line from each corner of the polygon to the dot.

Most of making things is figuring out why they don't work.

When I was a kid, I thought mistakes were simply bad, and to be avoided. As an adult I realized many problems are best solved by working in two phases, one in which you let yourself make mistakes, followed by a second in which you aggressively fix them.

I talk to my kids as if they were naive colleagues. I think they learn a lot this way, and if not, it at least seems fairly harmless.

The idea of spending (small amounts of) “quality time” with your kids is dangerously mistaken, because the best moments happen at completely random times. You not only can't predict them, you may not even know they've happened.

Asked 7 yo how many Star Wars characters he could name. He named 59. Measured by space occupied in his brain, Star Wars is his Greek myths.

If there is a better background noise to have in your house than a 7 year old laughing, I can't imagine what it is.

Interesting game to play with kids: do back of the envelope calculations about what percentage of sentences have ever been said (on Earth), and encourage them to invent short sentences that probably never have been.

10 yo asked what age kids are the most difficult for parents. Told him newborns are the most overall load, but teenagers cause the highest spikes, because they have the highest ratio of power to judgment.

As I explained to my son, one of the most important techniques for doing well on standardized tests is simply to go back and check your answers. Because most standardized tests are too easy, the difference between a good score and a great one is avoiding random slip-ups.

Something I taught my 7 yo on the way to school: Don't underestimate how many people you can help. One person can help thousands of other people.

Told 7 yo I wrote an essay about having kids. He asked if there was anything about him in it. I showed him the paragraph where I said that you don't just love your kids, but they become your friends too. He had a big smile reading that.