Tomorrow’s world will be very different from the one we grew up in and the way we bring our children up has to change. If you want proof, just look at the development of technology over the last few years, which has thrown all sorts of parenting challenges our way. The simple fact is the old parenting techniques don’t work so they have to change.
Over the last ten years I have worked with thousands of parents, and want to help millions more. There are parents out there who are uncertain what to do, juggling work and parenting, maybe even coping on their own which can cause stress and guilt.
I have always got on well with children, meeting them at their own level and understanding them. I’m respected for building relationships with children who have been labelled as unreachable. People say I have a talent for seeing through the behaviour and I have spent years developing my own rule book to raising children.
Deciding to leave the classroom many years ago was tough, but to be able to help more children, I needed to work in a local authority. In this role I was able to use the skills I had learnt and help others to avoid the mistakes I made in my early years in the classroom. I worked with thousands of adults to help them understand the children they were working with, working with some of the most extreme behaviours in the UK. In fact for one job I even had to wear a cricket box for protection.
To have more of an impact I left to set up special needs service The Root Of It which was designed to find all the professionals a child could need to unpick and address their special requirements, The Root Of It was recognised as the Best New Business at the National Entrepreneurs Convention 2014, expanding to provide a service across England in its first 18 months.
Join the parenting revolution!
On behalf of tomorrow’s adults and today’s children I am calling for change. This is what I believe:
- Tomorrow’s world will be different; we owe it to our children to prepare them for it.
- What was good enough for us is not good enough for our children.
- That we should help children learn to deal with their emotions. Never smack your child – if you get to that point, then it’s about you, not your child, you don’t know what to do
- Bad behaviour is normally because a child does not know how to deal with a situation or get something.
- Ditch the traumatic sanctions and the naughty step. The naughty step should be banned, it’s traumatic to force them there time after time and doesn’t teach them how not to lose their temper, just to hide it.
- Adults are not always right, don’t be a dictator to your children. If you insist on winning every battle, you are a dictator, and they could either grow up being expected to be dictated to or to be a dictator themselves.
As a result I wrote The Parent’s Guide to the Modern World to help parents and carers know what to say and do NOW to help their child succeed in the future. Covering technology, behaviour, social skills, emotions, moral dilemmas and more.