She pointed out one of the “baby” posters the other day when we were in the car and passed one. I said “Actually that’s a baby seed but the people who paid a lot of money for those posters made it look like a baby on purpose, because they think everyone who has a baby seed should have to grow it into a baby whether they wanted to or not. And that I think that’s telling lies and shouldn’t be allowed."

I knew this day would come. I was, of course, hoping it never would-hoping that my daughter would never be mean to someone else's daughter-but as they say, I wrote the book on girl bullying in elementary school, so I knew that there was a pretty good chance that despite all of my best efforts, one of these days, my girl was gonna act like the mean one. This morning, she told me about it.

Despite the "Bully-Free Zone" posters that line the school cafeteria walls and the Zero-Tolerance policy that was boasted about during last September's Back-to-School night, your experience is that the school would rather not address the problem at all. The responses you get from your child's teacher include bland lip service [...]

Cyril Connolly, the 50s critic and writer, said that the greatest enemy of creativity is the pram in the hall, but I think that was completely wrong. It was the enemy of a certain kind of dilettante life that he aspired to, the man of letters, but for the real novelist the pram in the hall is the greatest ally - it brings you up sharp and you realise what reality is all about. My children were a huge inspiration for me. Watching three young minds creating their separate worlds was a very enriching experience.

The concept of the alpha wolf is well ingrained in the popular wolf literature at least partly because of my book "The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species," written in 1968, published in 1970, republished in paperback in 1981, and currently still in print, despite my numerous pleas to the publisher to stop publishing it. Although most of the book's info is still accurate, much is outdated. We have learned more about wolves in the last 40 years then in all of previous history.

One of the outdated pieces of information is the concept of the alpha wolf. "Alpha" implies competing with others and becoming top dog by winning a contest or battle. However, most wolves who lead packs achieved their position simply by mating and producing pups, which then became their pack. In other words they are merely breeders, or parents, and that's all we call them today, the "breeding male," "breeding female," or "male parent," "female parent," or the "adult male" or "adult female." In the rare packs that include more than one breeding animal, the "dominant breeder" can be called that, and any breeding daughter can be called a "subordinate breeder."

“This is rule No. 1: There are no screens in the bedroom. Period. Ever.”

In the end, Dahl says, “coworkers and brothers who were linked to a father who had his child immediately after the [Norwegian paid paternity leave] reform — versus immediately before the reform — were 3.5% and 4.7% more likely, respectively, to take parental leave.” But when a coworker actually takes parental leave, “the next coworker to have a child at his workplace is 11% more likely to take paternity leave.” Slightly more pronounced, the next brother to have a child is 15% more likely to take time off. And while any male coworker taking leave can reduce stigma, the effect of a manager doing so is more profound. Specifically, “the estimated peer effect is over two and a half times larger if the peer father is predicted to be a manager in the firm as opposed to a regular coworker.”

There is a big difference between avoiding major hazards and making every decision with the primary goal of optimizing child safety (or enrichment, or happiness). We can no more create the perfect environment for our children than we can create perfect children. To believe otherwise is a delusion, and a harmful one; remind yourself of that every time the panic rises.

Moran spoke out after child welfare organisations here called on the Government to follow the UK's example by placing anti-pornography filters on Irish home broadband connections. The Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children argued that pornography was damaging to young children and should be removed from their line of sight.

But Moran warned this would only lull parents into a false sense of security. "If we imagine the access people had to porn in the past – that access is now complete and total. They have access to the most horrific material out there. We now need to focus on parental responsibility about how kids are using the internet."