There’s a book in my bathroom. Not in the bathroom in the sense that someone reads it there regularly — I put it there on purpose, adjusted its position three times over several weeks, and waited. My daughter is seven. She hadn’t shown much interest in this particular book. I’d mentioned it once, which is to say I made the mistake of recommending it, which of course meant she’d now rather read anything else.
So I stopped recommending. I started positioning.
The first spot: on the edge of the sink, next to her toothbrush. Too obvious. Too much like a trap — and children have finely tuned trap-detectors. The second spot: on the small shelf above the toilet paper roll. She glanced at it. Progress, but not reading. The third spot: propped at a slight angle against the wall, directly in her sightline while sitting. Three days later, she picked it up. A week after that, she was annoyed when I tried to return it to the shelf.
This is not a story about bathroom optimization. It’s about the moment I realized that a great deal of what we call “growth” isn’t something we can demand — it’s something we can design.
I work in instructional design. I spend a great deal of professional energy thinking about how learning environments shape cognition — how the structure of a task, the timing of feedback, the scaffolding of complexity can make the difference between genuine understanding and shallow performance. The central insight of the field, which took educational psychologists decades of humiliating experimental failures to establish, is this: learning is not a transaction. You cannot simply deliver content to a human and expect retention, understanding, or transfer. Context is not decoration. Environment is not neutral.
I knew all of this. I applied it professionally. And I had somehow managed to not apply it at home for seven years.
The bathroom incident broke through something. If I could design a learning environment so that my daughter would spontaneously engage with a difficult book — not because I asked, not because there was a reward, but because the situation made picking it up the path of least resistance — then what else could I design? What other behaviors that I had been demanding, or begging for, or anxiously monitoring, could simply be made easier to choose?
This is the core of what I now think of as growth design — treating the family home not as a place where character is built through exhortation, but as a learning system where the architecture of daily life can be shaped to support the behaviors we actually want.
Most parenting advice exists on a pendulum. On one end: the tiger parent, optimizing ruthlessly, drilling flashcards, tracking violin practice hours as a hedge against uncertain futures. On the other: the “lying flat” philosophy, which is not really a philosophy so much as exhaustion wearing the costume of principle — if nothing works anyway, why not let children be free? Both positions treat growth as something that either happens through force or doesn’t happen through deliberate omission.
Neither is quite right. Both assume the parent is the primary agent.
The instructional designer in me finds this puzzling. In every other domain where we want to reliably produce a complex outcome in humans — medicine, engineering education, military training, therapy — we do not simply demand the outcome and then blame the individual when they fall short. We design systems. We study failure modes. We iterate on the environment.
But at home, we shout. We compare. We send to rooms.
The problem isn’t that parents are bad. The problem is that most parents are unconscious — not cruel, not stupid, but operating on autopilot programs inherited from their own parents, who were operating on autopilot programs inherited from theirs. The 4C/ID model, which I use professionally to design complex skills training, has at its foundation a concept that translates roughly as: you cannot build a complex skill by drilling its components in isolation. You must embed the components within meaningful wholes. When we teach our children only isolated behaviors — say thank you, sit still, practice this — we are not building anything coherent. We are building behavioral compliance with no transferable architecture.
I am writing a book about this. It will probably have a terrible title — current working title is The Bathroom Book, which either is brilliant or will doom it to being shelved in “Humor” at the airport bookstore. The audience is Chinese parents in their 30s, specifically those who have already figured out that the old system doesn’t work, but haven’t found anything convincing to replace it with.
I am not qualified by credential to write about parenting. I have a PhD in educational technology, which is adjacent but not identical. I have one child, which is a sample size of one. What I do have is a framework for thinking about how humans learn complex things, and the fairly unfashionable conviction that this framework, applied carefully and without being too precious about it, can do more for family education than another book about building resilience through outdoor play.
The book’s central argument is simple: growth is not random. It happens inside environments. Environments can be designed. Therefore, growth can be designed — not engineered with false certainty, but shaped with intention and feedback, the same way we shape anything else worth building.
The bathroom book is chapter one. My daughter doesn’t know she’s in the introduction.
This post was auto-drafted by GuanYu / 关羽 from Zhien’s knowledge vault. Last reviewed: 2026-05-09.