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.

10 yo asked when I'd let him and his 7 yo brother walk to school by themselves. I told him the task was not to get himself to school safely, but to get his brother to school safely. I could practically hear his brain struggle to assimilate this paradigm shift.

If you ask parents what they want for their kids, many will say “I just want them to be happy.” But there are drugs that achieve this, and taking them results in disaster. So that is probably not what we should want.

My 7 yo grades my bedtime stories, and though I should know better, I find these grades highly motivating. I'm still on a high from getting an A+ on last night's. And a B- I got several months ago still rankles.

Most nights our sons react to the announcement that it's bedtime as if bedtime were some new thing we'd just invented that day in order to oppress them.

We discovered a very effective new way to make our boys drink more water. Burping contests. To his great delight, 7 yo is the family champion.

One surprising thing I've learned from being a parent is that kids often know the words for things they're not supposed to know about, without really knowing what they mean. The solution is to do nothing. The last thing you want to do is ask “Do you know what that means?”

Back in high school I told my dad, 'I'm going to have a computer someday.' And he said that it cost as much as a house — the downpayment on a house. And I said, 'Well, I'll live in an apartment.'

Good activity if you're home with little kids who like telling stories: let them dictate stories that you type for them. For younger kids the physical act of writing is the bottleneck, so this liberates their imagination.

Something I told my 11 yo recently: The apparently random collection of things you learn when you're young makes you into a sort of key. Then you have to find the lock it matches. But that's not as hard as it sounds, because the matching lock is usually nearby.

I tell my kids that it's a custom that swearwords are reserved for adults. But if they doubt the force of custom, they should imagine showing up for school one day naked.

Something I taught my 11 yo today: Some amount of programming consists of copying and pasting lines you've already written, and then changing a few parameters. But the better the language, the less of this you do.

When teaching kids to program, it's good if you're doing something too, instead of standing over them, so they can experiment (which is an important part of programming). But you can't be doing anything uninterruptible. Sorting Lego is perfect.

Don't worry about kids acquiring bad programming habits when they're first learning. The only habit that matters is the habit of programming. Tidiness can come later. Enthusiasm can't.