In a strange sort of way, I’m looking forward to Emily getting to the "But why, Daddy…" phase of child development.

30 years ago, when I was growing up, my parents invested heavily in encyclopaedia. How else to satisfy the curiosity of three precocious children? Other than providing the best answers possible to the extensive and occasionally tedious litany of questions about the world.

Tony Buzan, when we met him a few months back, made a big thing about the intellectual capacity of children being disproportionately greater  – before traditional education systems (and probably tired parents) drill it out of them. I don’t want that for Emily if we can manage it – I’d love for her to continue to be curious about the world for as long as possible.

Which is reason #3984 that I’m grateful for the Internet. It’s amazing and probably taken for granted that we now have persistent access to the world’s knowledge. All you need is an understanding of how to search and how and when to trust information (not trivial in itself), and virtually any (likely) question can be answered. Unless she proves to be a philosopher or particle physicist, in which case she’ll find more questions…

I just need to be careful that I don’t shortcut my answers too much… "Because, the Internet," might turn her into a Daily Mail reader*….

* If this doesn’t make sense now, keep hitting refresh on Chris’ Daily Mail headline generator until it tells you the Internet causes cancer, or some other ill. I think that headline actually happened earlier this year. Mental.