Four days into the English Week in my daughter's school, I haven't got chance to join the activities until today. So what is it about the English Week that attracts bookworms like me? Partly, it's the book sale with discounts. Partly, it's the character dress up day when students are encouraged to dress like their favorite book characters. I missed this activity for two years because I happened to be on call in my hospital.

At last, I got the chance to read

Decades of research, as well as a recent Time magazine article, has suggested that reading a great novel can be therapeutic.

Come to think of it, stories might give us better insight than a scientific paper, or create a stronger bonding between the reader and the family than any counsellor.

For daddies too busy with work to spend time with children - and I count myself in - the best prescription is Richard Paul Evans' The Christmas Box .

The young man in this fiction has been working hard to build up his

Think about a choice you made recently. Any choice. Which you're 110 percent certain that it's a good choice. That way most people are guaranteed to agree with your choice because the correct choice seems so obvious that we don't have to prove it.

Now, here's the bad news: Most of such choices turn out to be wrong. Although we're confident with our correct decisions, the growing evidence from studies have shown otherwise. That's an inspiring lesson

I gave a few talks on creating common grounds recently. This idea is not new, and certainly not mine. One of the lessons I learned from preparing the teaching material is what psychologists call the "name letter effect" or "shared-initials effect."

Let me give an example. With my name beginning with the letter K, I would be way more likely to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief appeal than people whose names didn't begin with the letter K. The same applied to those R-

Laissez-faire term break, too loose? Not always. Our preoccupation with homework has deprived out children of what should have been some of the most nurturing experiences of childhood.

It's my daughter's school term break this week. When I say break , I mean it. A break without homework. Now that autumn is here, we chose to go outdoors. It's not hard to understand why the natural world is a child's favorite classroom. Can you imagine what we did at the

Over the years as my daughter has grown from an infant to toddler to grade-schooler, I've read quite a collection of books on parenting. These books have given me a thousand suggestions, many of them insightful, and others somewhat run-of-the-mill. Rarely is there a book delving into pages after pages of academic papers, citing meta-analysis with critique. And no wonder: parenting isn't rocket science, after all.

I remember reading somewhere that parenting and plumbing have much

Marie Kondo's debut guide book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has been published in more than 30 countries, teaching us to be happier by letting go of the stuff we don't need. Recently, I've been reading her second one, Spark Joy , and learning to tidy up in a way that will spark joy.

Technically, we aren't told to discover joy simply by discarding things. One line in particular from the secrets cracked me wide open. She said, “

Brand name school works, but only if you measure it that way.

That's what Julie Lyncott-Haims, Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Advising at Stanford University, teaches us in her book How to Raise an Adult . One of the oft-quoted measures, the U.S. News college rankings, simply reflects how hard a school is to get into - to say nothing of the tuition fee - and what a group of other educators think of it, which is a function of how hard it is

Reading a handwritten message from one's daughter is the closest some of us are ever going to come to knowing what's meant by love, so it’s no wonder I experienced that feeling when I received one from mine.

"Dear mum and dad," Jasmine wrote. "I love you. I miss you so much when you are at work. You guys are the best." Next to my daughter's message is her drawing of what the best dad means: all the good books

Try this. Rewrite the sentence "the flower in the window" as "the geranium in the window."

The name geranium immediately gives us the scene by the window - red petals, green circular leaves, all straining toward sunlight. This is what I've learnt from Natalie Goldberg after reading her classic Writing Down the Bones . Don't say "fruit," Natalie reminds us, and tell what kind of fruit - "It is a pomegranate."

Give things the dignity of names, to paraphrase