Author Archives: admin

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Emotions and Young Children

As adults we usu­al­ly show a range of emo­tions. Hav­ing said that I realise that for most of my life I didn’t show a large range of emo­tions! But of course as we get old­er, and hope­ful­ly reflect on our own upbring­ing and its effect on our devel­op­ment, we should realise where some of our […]

How Do You Explain?

How do you explain to a moth­er that there’s a hap­pi­er way to greet her daugh­ter at the end of the day? How do you explain that her daugh­ter has ‘fallen in love’ with a piece of music with video, that I play…every day…and that her daugh­ter now ‘requests’ what I call “the pret­ty music” […]

UX (User Experience) For The Under-5’s And Their Teachers

For those of you who don’t know the term ‘UX’ means User Expe­ri­ence, some­thing I feel I’ve long been aware of but nev­er had a name for until my sons got into the world of the web many years ago. The phrase makes per­fect sense once you think about it. I think about it most […]

A Fond Farewell

Steve Job­s… You died near­ly two months ago. I am still writ­ing and stor­ing these blog arti­cles on a beloved iMac which is over 10 years old – thank you. In so many ways I haven’t moved with the times and yet thanks to Steve I have. I am for­tu­nate to have one of the […]

Prosody — A New Word For Me

I’ve tak­en the lib­er­ty of using this descrip­tion from the Cen­ter for Spo­ken Lan­guage Under­stand­ing at Ore­gon Health and Sci­ence Uni­ver­si­ty. Prosody involves “…the melody, tim­ing and into­na­tion of speech, refers to the ‘how it is said’ not to the ‘what is said’ of lan­guage”. “We use prosody to con­vey mean­ing, intent and emo­tions. The […]

For All You 30-Something ‘Successful’ People

The time is com­ing. There is much you should be think­ing about. Have you met the part­ner of your dreams? That’s great. If you haven’t don’t get des­per­ate – I’ve seen what ‘desperate’ can do when they have to meet on match­dot­com and then ‘have’ to have a child because time is run­ning out (By […]

Effects Of Pain And Trauma

From a per­son­al view­point I still recall those teach­ers and fam­i­ly mem­bers who treat­ed me with great kind­ness. I am for­tu­nate that, by and large, my whole fam­i­ly was warm and car­ing, albeit some­times emo­tion­al­ly reserved – typ­i­cal­ly Eng­lish? I can­not say the same for the many teach­ers I’ve encoun­tered in my life­time. It is […]

Responsibility

Just say­ing: If we hold own­ers respon­si­ble for the behav­iour of their pets why don’t we hold par­ents respon­si­ble for the behav­iour of their young chil­dren? Just saying.

The Therapeutic Parent

What makes some par­ents bet­ter than oth­ers? Why are some babies and young chil­dren so ‘togeth­er’? Just exact­ly what makes the dif­fer­ence in one child over anoth­er, regard­less of socio-eco­nom­ic sta­tus? May I tell you? It is impor­tant to note that what social sci­en­tists have long referred to as ‘socio-eco­nom­ic fac­tors’ (in oth­er words, you […]

Native Languages

I find that when I’m speak­ing to an Eng­lish per­son or writ­ing, I hope still in my own lan­guage, I feel much more flu­ent. Yet only recent­ly have I come to think of Eng­lish as my native lan­guage. It is inter­est­ing to note that the major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans wouldn’t be aware that I was speaking […]