Best Beginnings Episode 4: What Sergei Urban told us about play, curiosity and why you don't need to be a scientist

Sergei Urban does not describe himself as an educator. He describes himself as a parent who needed to keep his kids busy.

That is, more or less, how The Dad Lab started. His wife suggested he put what he was doing on Instagram. He did. Within 12 months he had a million followers. Today he has over 10 million, more than 3 billion YouTube views, and a book translated into more than seven languages and used in classrooms worldwide, including by the Australian government. He built all of it without a science degree. He has a master's in economics and a kitchen cupboard. In this episode of Best Beginnings, he joins George Looker to talk about what he has actually learned from a decade of sitting on the floor with his kids.

The thing that made his content take off, Sergei says, was not the science. It was the permission. Parents weren't looking for educational theory. They were looking for something they could do on a Sunday afternoon with a tired child and whatever happened to be in the house. When the Skittles video went viral on Facebook, people didn't just save it. They scrolled through everything else he had made and found a whole library of the same thing. Simple.

What Sergei is describing, though he doesn't use this language, is exactly what we see at Babyzone every week. Parents who love their children deeply and feel like they're not doing enough. His answer to that isn't a programme or a reading list. It's confidence. You don't need to know the science behind a thing to try it with your child. You just need to be willing to find out what happens alongside them.

He talks about creating what he calls an educational environment. Not a classroom, not a set of structured activities, just a home where whatever a child picks up has something interesting about it. One example: small wooden blocks held together with sticky tape, so children can build things with hinges that actually move. No instructions, no right answer, just materials and time. He's clear that this isn't about a parent actively teaching. It's about the space around the child being rich enough that whatever they choose to do has some value in it.

One of the most striking things he says in this conversation is about what actually creates the bond between a parent and a child during play. It isn't the activity. It isn't what the child learns from it. What matters is whether the parent is genuinely curious about what's going to happen next. Children can feel that, he says. When you're excited to try something yourself and your child happens to be there too, that's where the bonding happens. That's where memories get made. He contrasts this with taking children to the cinema for a birthday party: five friends sitting in the dark for ninety minutes with no interaction at all.

The conversation gets honest about mess and about mistakes. Early on, Sergei shared a photo that had a shark matched to the letter S, which doesn't work because the sound doesn't match. He wasn't a teacher. He learned by doing, in public, with millions of people watching. His point is that this is fine. Parenting, he says, is a collection of lots of different mistakes. Kids survive them. What matters is the intention.

He goes further than that, though. He talks about a baby in a high chair throwing a carrot on the floor. From the parent's perspective, it's mess. From the baby's perspective, it might be the first time they've ever thrown anything. They're running a scientific experiment: what happens when I let go of this? Where does it go? What sound does it make? His argument is that the impulse to stop the mess is sometimes the impulse to stop the learning, and that parents who can sit with a bit of chaos are giving their children something important.

On screen time, Sergei is frank in a way that feels unusually honest. He doesn't have a television at home, though he's quick to say this was his wife's idea and not his. He talks about growing up with cartoons available for one hour on a Sunday morning: if you missed them, they were gone for a week. The world children are growing up in now is different. Every moment of boredom can be instantly filled. He tells a story about giving his older son an iPad as a toddler. One app taught the child to sort shapes, which was useful. But they noticed that when the iPad was taken away, the child would become angry and distressed in a way that felt like more than disappointment. They quietly removed it over about a week, telling him it needed charging, and after a while he forgot about it. Sergei doesn't frame this as a cautionary tale about bad parents. He frames it as what parenting actually looks like: you try something, you notice what's happening, you adjust.

The deeper point he makes about screens is worth sitting with. Entertainment gives you answers. A real experiment gives you questions. A child who has just watched a colour climb up a piece of kitchen roll wants to know why, wants to ask someone, wants to try it again differently. That conversation with a parent, the "what happened? Can we change something?" moment, is where learning lives. Screens can't replace it because they skip over the part that matters.

At Babyzone, we've seen this play out through our everyday maths work with families. Parents often assume maths means equations and worksheets, but Sergei's experiments are full of maths without ever announcing it: volume, measurement, spatial reasoning, counting. When a child is pouring water into a glass until it's completely full, they're learning about capacity. When they're cutting a strip of paper towel to the right size, they're learning about length. It doesn't feel like a lesson, and that's the point.

On raising children in the age of AI, his answer is not creativity or coding. It's critical thinking: the ability to question information, to notice when something doesn't look right, to double-check. And boredom. The willingness to sit in a room with no devices and come up with something. He points out that adults can still do this because we remember what life was like before the internet. Children who grow up with instant access to everything may find it harder, which is why giving them stretches of unstimulated time matters more now than it used to.

Sergei also talks about his approach to his children's strengths, which runs against what most schools tell parents. The usual advice is to identify what a child struggles with and work on that. His instinct is the opposite: find what they're excited about and give them more of it. If they're drawn to music, give them more music. If they love building, give them more materials. His reasoning is simple: a child who is good at something is already engaged. Build on that, and the confidence and persistence they develop will carry into other areas too.

There's a moment near the end of the conversation where George asks Sergei about the version of fatherhood he's putting out into the world. Sergei talks about a time he took his son out on a scooter and forgot the helmet, posted about it on Instagram stories, and got a comment telling him he had too much influence to be careless about something like that. He sat with it. The pressure of modelling something, even when real life doesn't always cooperate. But he comes back to the same place: you do your best, you try, you fail sometimes. He also says something that I think a lot of parents need to hear, which is that it's not only about the children. Parents need time for themselves too. Date nights with his wife. Hobbies. Thinking about who they are beyond being someone's mum or dad. His boys share a birthday, born two years apart on exactly the same day, which now means a long weekend of two separate parties. Fatherhood, he says, is not a performance. It's just showing up and doing the thing.

If you take one thing from this episode, make it the experiment Sergei recommends every family try this weekend. Fill a glass with water right to the top. Put a piece of card over it. Turn the whole thing upside down and let go of the card. If it works, the card stays and the water stays in the glass. Sergei's explanation for his children: the water wants to get out, but to get out it needs to let air in, and the card won't let the air through. Try it over a bucket the first time. And if it goes wrong, that's fine too. You can't fail a science experiment.