Are all dads bears?

Over the break, the boys, Dawn and I took a road trip to Melbourne. The mini men were silently dancing in the back seat with their iPods firmly planted in their ears.

Sporadically a wrong lyric was loudly sung. I winked at them in the rearview mirror.

At the hotel mid-journey, Chick sat on the bed twitching his toes while he was engrossed in his Nintendo DS.

I was in a playful mood so I leapt from my bed and landed on his feet pretending to eat them, growling like a bear.

Apart from being slapped around the head with the DS and lots of kicking, there were lots of giggles and squirms.

Beau eyed me cautiously and then started twitching his toes too, just to join in.

Some Saturday mornings when I was a kid, my father’s imminent arrival at the breakfast table was announced with the growls and grizzles of a bear with a toothache. My sisters and I weren’t safe to stay in our chairs with mock bites and beard rubs coming at us.

Mum used to feign surprise and laugh as if her children were about to be digested by a deadly furry animal, yet with the care of a blue-eyeshadowed, perm-coiffed woman on Valium in a dress, flinging cereal at us.

Are all dads grizzly bears? We all naturally turn into growling, toe-biting, wrestling and hairy creatures that our sons eventually turn into. I can confirm there is no bear school to attend.

Perhaps my editor, Mr International Bear of the Year, could confirm. Though he hasn’t chased me around his office growling — yet.

There is currently a study underway, measuring the effects of play time with dads and their children. The study hopes to uncover if father-child play time teaches children skills in later life including confidence and physical agility.

What they should be looking for is if grizzly bears remind children of their fathers. If you hear a growl at the breakfast table, do you run and curl up into a ball (does this happen at the Oxford on a Friday night?) and do children have beard stubble marks from playful biting on their little toes?

Either that or if their dads have computer game marks on the side of their heads.