I see it in the field of health and well-being all the time: eat one cup of those berries a day to enjoy this benefit. Eat another cup of that vegetable a day and live forever. You only need to journal for ten minutes a day to reduce your cortisol levels. 

Extend that to parenthood and the theme continues: sit together for dinner at least three times a week to harness this developmental benefit, or limit screen time to X to avoid Y outcome.  

Taken individually, it’s hard to argue against instilling these good habits and routines in your family's lives. They’re not time consuming, you don’t need to travel anywhere, and they don’t require you to remortgage your home. 

And yet, still we fail.  

Every day.  

We climb into bed each night and shunt aside the wins. Instead, we focus on the losses, the things we didn’t do that we should have and vice versa. 

And we’re somehow confused by this. ‘How am I failing?’ we say to ourselves. ‘Why am I struggling to find an extra ten minutes to prep fresh vegetables for a healthy meal?’ 

This is a trap.  

The trap of a reductionist.  

Because it’s easy to peer into the stream of modern life, extract a single variable and slap it on a poster: ‘Walking with the kids to school is better than driving them.’  

But that single variable is then dropped back into the stream to coexist with all the others that make up our lives: jobs, social media, school drop-offs, energy levels, play dates, adverts, enforcing boundaries, notifications, commitments, thoughts that pop into our heads – the unforeseen things that swing by to hijack our time and attention. 

A single social variable taken and analysed on its own does not represent the world we live in.  

But we’re forever forgetting that. 

I’m at fault here. This morning, I chose to write this Lessons in Dadding entry instead of a stretch routine and morning walk. I could feel the negative self-talk desperate to start a row with me about taking my body for granted. 

Damn you, reductionist thinking! 

So keep doing the best you can with what you’ve got. If you can eat healthily, walk to school with your kids, sit around the dinner table together – great. Keep going!  

But for those of us wondering why a few plates fall from the twenty-eight we’re spinning, don’t be fooled by reductionism. 

And don’t let it make you feel shitty either.  

Though that’s easier said than done.