Things I'm learning from my kids about habits
Children are the most honest behavioural scientists alive. They have not yet learned to flatter your protocol.
My kids do not care about my longevity practice. They care whether I will play with them after dinner, whether I am present at breakfast, and whether the answer to “can we go to the beach?” is yes more often than it is no. This is, I have slowly realised, the highest-quality user research I will ever get.
Three things they have taught me this year.
Rituals beat resolutions. Adults love resolutions. Kids run on rituals. The difference is that a resolution is a future commitment with no scaffolding; a ritual is a present habit with all the scaffolding hidden in plain sight. We don’t decide every morning whether the kids will brush their teeth. We have a song, a stool, two toothbrushes in the same cup, and the bathroom light on a timer. The decision was made once, in the architecture. The behaviour follows.
Effort is detectable, performance isn’t. Kids spot a phoned-in conversation in three seconds. They cannot tell you whether the work meeting that drained you was important or unimportant — and frankly they’re right not to care. Their feedback signal isn’t was your day successful?; it’s are you actually here? That’s a much better health metric than I gave it credit for.
The body’s hardware is honest. Tired dad is short with the kids. Slept-eight-hours dad is patient. Walked-this-morning dad listens better. There is no productivity hack, no breathwork app, no nootropic that closes that gap. The hardware decides. I find this clarifying. It removes a lot of decisions.
I write about hospitals and biomarkers for a living. The most evidence-based intervention I run is going to bed at a reasonable hour so that two small humans get the version of me they deserve.