At the dog end of last term I was struggling to write a letter to my daughter’s school explaining just how badly their ‘minus points’ behaviour system had played out in our family, when Dr Amber Elliot’s new book ‘Why Can’t My Child Behave?’ fell through the letter box. At first I thought ‘great, a …
Review of ‘Why Can’t My Child Behave’, by Dr Amber Elliott Read More »
This week the Department for Education announced a £19.3 million fund for therapeutic services for adopted children and their families. The news jostled with bigger stories and didn’t exactly grab the attention of the nation, but it’s something I’ve been waiting for a long time. I occasionally blog for the online Social Work publication Community …
‘No Matter What’ is my memoir about adopting two children from the UK care system. Yesterday I received a parcel containing six unblemished copies of the book from the publisher Jessica Kingsley. The process of writing it has been long and difficult and I’m not ashamed to say that the sight and feel of those …
Caring for the children of trauma, or indeed any child with complex additional needs can at times leave one feeling entirely grey and bleak. It is exhausting in the proper sense of the word. And you can’t just escape from it for a few days and ride ponies around the New Forest. When I catch …
The retired judge, Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss is in my opinion, a brick. I have long admired her for her no nonsense, common sense approach to complex problems, her humanity and her sharp intelligence. She is never mealy-mouthed, but straight as a die, and posh, in a good way. Despite retirement, she clearly keeps busy and has been …
I have always written. As a small child I wrote about everything which happened in my tiny life; the day my parents bought a freezer, how much I enjoyed fish fingers, the fire in the chip shop at the end of our road. As a teenager I wrote at length about friends and boys and …
Blogs can be great shop windows displaying all our best work; a fabulous piece of art, a successful bake, an example of marvellous parenting in the face of extreme challenge. And try as I might to share my mistakes as well as my triumphs, mine is probably no different. You don’t get to see the …
If I had to summarise 2012 in a nutshell it would be this: a year of challenge and growth. Any year in the life of an adoptive family is coloured to some degree by traumas past, but this year, for us has been both difficult and pivotal. So this post, the last of 2012 is …
Several months ago I was tweeting about a book I was reading and finding particularly useful: Attachment-Focused Parenting by the American Child Psychologist Dan Hughes. Every community of people bound by an experience has its heroes and Dan Hughes is a hero to many of those living and working with the child survivors of neglect and …
(To be sung with a lilting reggae rythmn.) Son he is my darling and my number one, He came to me at three and a half. He a big boy now, he is my lanky honeybun But he still need me for a hug up and a laugh. Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, life goes on, yeah. La la …
