My Blogs

  Recently parents have been asking me whether anxiety in children can make them physically sick. The short answer is YES. Anxiety is a whole-body and brain experience and can trigger the following reactions in the body if it happens too often for too long. Feeling and being sick Diarrhoea and constipation Neck, shoulder, back…

School can be a place to exhale and feel safe Many children have complex home lives. Parents and carers doing their best in most cases but often juggling too much for too long with their emotional and physical needs unmet, sometimes since birth. Trying to function and raise children in a time of scarce resources…

Living with a child whose trauma is emerging takes many things. Emotional resilience and availability, the capacity to be hit, spat at, have objects thrown at you, to hear awful things from the child, compassion, calmness the list goes on and on. Especially as it often triggers our own trauma so that is an additional…

What’s going on? Highlighted across all forms of media are stories about the rising numbers of children suffering from a range of mental illness. Alongside this are stories of schools using shaming tactics in the name of behavior management. This is NOT a coincidence. Ironically mental illness and shame have a close relationship. Shame induces fear…

Have you ever caught yourself giving a child the look to stop their behaviour, only to regret it later, as: You realised it wasn’t them who did it They burst into floods of tears….for ages You hear later that their cat died last night You knew it wasn’t really about them Can stickers replace the…

Adoptive parents may well be screaming at the screen if they’ve just read the title of this blog For those who live with their adopted children, it may well be ridiculously obvious! For example, if you go into adoption with expectations of creating a loving family environment for and with a child, only to discover…

Dear Educators, I am writing this note to you so that you will hear my voice and not jump to conclusions about me. I am coming to your school in September and these are the things you need to know about me. 1. I’m a great kid! 2. I come with a past. 3. I…

An article in the Telegraph caught my eye on Twitter this week. It reported that a shortage of childcare staff in Japan has seen them begin to use robots! Yep – I did say robots. Robots designed to look after children are being introduced in Japanese nurseries in an attempt to ease the nation’s acute…

I was talking with my friend and colleague Mike Armiger one fine evening last week over fish, chips and a pint! As is oft the case we were puzzling over the conflicting views, policies, beliefs, and practices used in education for ‘behaviour.’ Especially as the dominant discourse and practices still seem to cling to doing…