It is often the case that no matter who hurts us in our lives, it is our families that have the ability to hurt or give us happiness more readily than that which we can imbibe and feel from other people. It is our families after all that know all our ‘buttons’ and press them…
Tag: children
New Birth
I know this isn’t usually an Autumn subject, though Shelley once famously said that ‘If Winter Comes can Spring be far behind?’, but having now been accepted by my friend’s two year old son to the extent I have been cuddled and then had a mouthful of juice spat in my face (Oh how I…
Children
My close friend has now had a second child and one month old she is adorable. And completes a family of a two and a half year old son. I spend happy house with the son going through his books and being shown trucks and figures and lots of cars. I have to build the…
Writing For Children
I knew I wanted to write for children when I was fourteen. I think it was the absolute joy of finding all those fairytales, reading C.S.Lewis and Hugh Lofting, J.R.R.Tolkien, Hans Christian Andersen, and the amazing fables of Greece, Rome and India. I think I still loved those kinds of stories in my adult life…
Reaching Out
When I was eleven we lived in a village that had a seriously lovely, if small, beach. Strewn with coloured shells that still today glisten on the shell box my mother made. It was whilst there that I went swimming in the sea for the first time and letting go of a rock kicked out…
Pied Pipers
I love children’s fairytales though the traditional ones have a longer history than as merely bedtime stories read aloud by parents to wide-eyed children fantasising about magic and witches. In their way they were morality tales. In the original story of Sleeping Beauty the prince raped the sleeping princess; Hansel and Gretel is about the…
Catch A Falling Star
I was involved in a discussion about supporting your children in their dreams, no matter what those dreams are. I looked back on my childhood and remember my mother being very positive about all the things I hoped to do, and in the interplay of families I took on a few of her dreams too….
Children Of The Sea
I love sea horses. I am sure it is because of their heads because I even loved them after I saw all the different kinds of sea horse there are even to those that look like bits of floating seaweed. And I was very interested when learning about their habits that the male and female…
Education
In the insightful book ‘The Boy Who Was Brought Up as A Dog’, Perry points out that in a lifetime of work he discovered the crucial importance of the first three years of life to the actions and reactions of the adult. It is in those years, when we barely speak, when we are putting…
Children
Most children learn to lie around the age of four. More intelligent children learn about lying around the age of three. These first lies are usually very obvious to parents, and are mostly altruistic. As the child ages the lies develop and so does the face, with that typical ‘face’ that parents know so well…