Blog

Feeling the wind about to knock me over is a childhood memory I’ll never forget. This week I took a small group of children for a similar experience… to look out at the snarling sea and feel the force of the wind. They sat transfixed for ages, staring out into the waves, facing the storm. They weren’t afraid of the weather… they were exhilarated by it. No fear of falling over or being caught by the rapidly approaching waves… and perhaps they were even a little too fearless… but no one got knocked over or got their feet wet.

This beautiful moment seemed to symbolise a current theme as I try to engage the people I know in conversations about the situation of the world in which we find ourselves.

As people who care for the future generations, do we have the courage for facing the storm which seems almost ready to engulf us?

The question of how best to serve our children is one that could easily be a recipe for depression if we do not ask with the understanding that we’re all doing our best. I wish I was better at drawing because I can envisage a cartoon: there’s a child playing innocently on the ground while two parents create a shield upon which the full weight of an avalanche is bearing down, threatening to crush the family. The avalanche is not natural but composed of a number of dark factories labelled Big Pharma, School, Video Games, Social Media and Junk Food.

Even working in concert with my partner, the pressure to resist all of these forces is very challenging, it asks an enormous amount of us. It’s humbling to imagine what that might be like for those parenting alone. And yet, two people is not enough to be able to protect children from the unbelievable pressures exerted by society today. This is why The Genius Tree and New Paradigm Education are seeking to build a community which shares some of the same values.

When your job is to protect children but the authorities are advising, perhaps with the best of intentions, to harm young people… what do you do? Isn’t it the moral thing to ignore harmful advice? What do we do when the guidelines for child protection becomes child abuse?

For those who wish to see their youngsters enjoying life, the education system is the worst place to be right now. The Genius Tree is committed to ensuring that young people do not end up alone in the bedrooms with only their gadgets for company.

The web of love is one of my favourite activities for the end of the day. My two year old is pretty feisty and it really takes something to calm her down when she’s finally lying down in bed. We removed her cot recently and she’s still adapting to the new found freedom of a junior bed. She can easily get up and fall prey to the temptations of books and toys so I need to do something which can gradually relax her while occupying her attention.

Managing bedtimes with children can quickly become a grinding, daily ordeal of family life or provide a magical moment to end the day, depending on how we approach it.

Managing bedtimes with children holds an important key to unlocking the family happiness we all wish for and here we explore how we’ve come to deal with it.

This is the first of a short series of blogs on the subject of managing mealtimes with children.

As an event which generally occurs three times a day for a good 18 years, at least, either a family establishes some good practices or these daily rituals become trials we must endure… grinding us down. The act of eating together can be something which actually brings everyone together for a genuinely enjoyable experience, it might require that we explicitly express our intentions in order for that to happen.

If the art of successful real estate comes down to location, location, location, then the art of happy parenting comes down to sleep, sleep and more sleep.

With everything we’ve learned from recent scientific studies of sleep, of which there are many, the wisdom of our grandparents about getting kids to bed on time has been soundly confirmed, should we ever have doubted it (and I certainly did).