I am Associate professor at Uppsala University and head of a wonderful research group. Any technical innovation finds me skeptical and I am always the last to know what’s going on on Facebook. Hence, writing a blog is not something my colleagues and friends would have guessed me for doing.

But now that I’ve been writing the blog for five months I find it fun and rewarding. For one thing, I have already had more readers than I ever will for my scientific articles. Another advantage is that when you try to explain a concept or new finding you have to learn more about it yourself, which means I keep learning. So from an experiment during my sabbatical – the blog is here to stay, for at least another while.

This is not a private blog, but it is not strictly professional either. I think that has to do with my subject area: parenting research. The nice thing is that I can carry a conversation about my research with just about anyone – no prior knowledge on rats, stem cells, astrophysics, or linguistics is required. The drawback is that, while anyone can express an opinion on the subject, a researcher is bound by evidence and what we know to be true today. There are of course, many truths when it comes to parenting and they change over cultures and time.

Being a parent I know that parenting is so much easier in theory than in practice so I have no illusions of anyone – except hypocrites and liars – being perfect parents. I certainly am not! Luckily, kids don’t need perfect parents, they need parents who can keep to a couple of basic rules and keep doing their best. In any case, I share both professional and personal thoughts and try to make an effort to keep them apart.

If you want to read a bit more about me you can do it here (in Swedish).