Disenfranchised grief in adoption (and other similar family set ups) is a topic close to my heart - grief that society (and often family)...

Emotion coaching has come up a few times this week in work with parents. When the first emotion we see and feel from our children is...

Yesterday I had the honour and the privilege of spending the day with a group of kinship carers - thinking together about the difficult...

I've got NVR groups underway, new individual families as well as existing families, I’m just restarting university for the second/last...

Deciding where to set our expectations for our children can be tricky when there's trauma, disabilities, and other things going on like...

Learning to feel safe after a lifetime of being on guard is going to take time. In adoption, fostering, or kinship care - “a lifetime of...

Where there’s family violence, there’s shame. Children can be violent and aggressive for all sorts of reasons. For some children big...

When children are experienced as delightful, when that’s communicated through words & actions, children experience themselves as...

We’ve got a reactive cavapoo who barks a lot when anybody walks past the house, especially if they’ve got a dog. Initially there was no...

When things are going well it's easier to be intentional in our parenting. It's much more of a challenge when we're out of our window of...

My conscious thinking brain knows this. My unconscious emotional brain sometimes doesn't. When we're feeling wound up by our kids it's...

Human beings learn by experience - things going well and things going not so well. It’s tempting to feel as though we need to say...

I love this quote by Karyn Purvis - an expert in developmental trauma, attachment difficulties, and therapeutic approaches. She was one...

Today I did something I've been meaning to do for a while. I set up a Facebook group for parents who've completed an NVR parent group...

Children’s brains are wired differently to adult brains. The bits of the brain that help us manage our emotions and impulses, reflect on...

Parents often ask if it's okay to use consequences in NVR parenting. Consequences are part of life. We can't avoid them. Consequences are...

What a beautiful illustration by Hazel Mead. Reminding us to always to consider what's going on underneath the surface, to look beyond...

Parenting is hard. Really hard. Therapeutic parenting is beyond hard. In all the therapeutic parenting advice (specific to...

This statement can really help to shift our nervous system state when we’re struggling with children’s behaviour. I think there are few,...

There's no blame or shame in NVR - there’s no blaming or shaming of parents and there’s no blaming or shaming of children. When our...