Voices

A teacher and mom of three just roasted modern parenting in three acts

She has receipts. Teachers have thoughts. Parents might want to sit down.

Some dear friends of mine recently had a baby, and as one does, I offered some unsolicited advice: "Wait as long as you think you can to get them any screen, then wait one more year." I thought I was being extreme. According to a viral TikToker whose message Mark Wales unpacks today, I was being soft.

An elementary teacher and mother of three who posts as @earlyedventure is telling modern parents to throw away the iPad, full stop. And that's step one of three.

From there, she moves to shoelaces, toppled towers, and a closing hypothetical involving a cop, a child, and a very specific outcome we are not going to spoil. This isn’t just classic “these damned kids and their rock and roll music” style opinionating either. The comments section and a huge amount of science have her back. My friends might be getting a follow-up text.

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And what did we learn?

In yesterday’s Daily GOOD, we shared the magic trick to unlock the real healing power of placebos.

Just for fun, I asked GOOD readers if they knew which of these drugs was fake. The hard part is that they all sound equally absurd! One in four of you spotted Zylovexa as the fake, though a few of you commented that, of all the options, it’s the one you wish was real.

• Sofdra: For people who sweat like it's a sport (27.6%)

• Hympavzi: Keeps hemophilia bleeds in check (7.9%)

• Zylovexa: Treats the fog that lingers after a virus (25.0%) ✅

• Myqorzo: Quiets a heart that's grown too muscular (39.5%)

Science

Planting a trillion trees won't help if 900 billion of them die

If you’re going to plant entire forests, you should probably do it right.

Opening a story with a lazy idiom is bad writing, but in this case failing to see the forest for the trees is absolutely literal. The world is planning to plant a trillion trees this decade, whole forests, but one pilot project in Turkey put 11 million trees in the ground and lost nearly 90% of them in just three months.

Ecologists John Parker and Justin Nowakowski think they know why. Stretch neat rows of identical trees across an empty field and you haven't built a forest, you've built a factory with roots. Pests love it. Droughts can obliterate it. Wildlife can't live in it. And the forest itself doesn’t survive.

Since 2013, Parker and Nowakowski have been running a 60-acre experiment near the Chesapeake Bay to test what happens when you plant the other way, the way a forest plants itself. Mixed and chaotic. Thirteen years later, the trees are telling a very clear story.

Health

The least exciting appliance in the house might be punching above its weight

Quietly humming away in the corner, making everything better…

I'll be honest. When research lands claiming a popular home appliance quietly sharpens your brain, my first instinct is to flip to the back and see who paid for the study. A HEPA trade group? A filter manufacturer? Some Roomba-adjacent conglomerate with something new to push? Well, apparently not in this new research on HEPA filters and brain function.

Researchers Nicholas Pellegrino, Doug Brugge, and Misha Eliasziw ran a one-month randomized trial with 119 people living near two Massachusetts highways, funded by the NIH, using real HEPA purifiers and fake ones that looked and sounded identical. The manufacturer donated the units at a discount and was excluded from the study design. The results ran in Scientific Reports last week.

For participants over 40, scores on the executive-function and mental-flexibility tasks came in 12% faster after a month on the real thing than after a month on the sham. That’s not nothing, especially for a box most people ignore until allergy season.

It held up to the skepticism. Which, for a study this on-the-nose, is half the story.

On April 23, 1635, a group of Boston voters agreed to chip in public money, specifically the rent from three little islands in Boston Harbor, to pay a man named Philemon Pormort to teach their sons. The Boston Latin School was born, and with it, the radical notion that maybe education shouldn't just be for rich kids with tutors.

The school itself was a bit of a fixer-upper. For its first decade, classes were held inside Pormort's house (the actual schoolhouse wouldn't open until 1645). Boys, roughly seven to fifteen, were marched through a brutal seven-year curriculum built almost entirely on Latin, Greek, and classical literature. Mornings started at 7 a.m. Summer and winter sessions only. The goal was blunt: get these kids ready for Harvard, which opened one year later and casually required incoming students to read Cicero in the original.

By 1647, Massachusetts required every town of 50+ families to hire a teacher, laying the template for American public education we still use today. Boston Latin itself never closed. It went coed in 1972, still costs nothing, still ferociously rigorous. Five signers of the Declaration of Independence passed through its doors, including its most famous dropout: a restless printer's apprentice named Benjamin Franklin.

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