My vision for a different world

My whole life has led up to this point. The point where I can offer a whole hearted, whole bodied contribution to the world, backed by physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual experience and resources. I know my onions. I have done my 10,000 hours. I am here, ready, able and willing to share my knowledge with the world. I am ripe.

This work is almost too important to write about. Everything I say misses out a thousand other things I want to say. Each word is utterly inadequate and clumsy. Yet when the words come together, when they accumulate, when I just keep writing, there is hope that I can say something that expresses the vastness of what I know and what I long for.

I am offering expertise and devoted commitment to growing healthy strong resilient children in a troubled time, an unequal and harsh world and an uncertain future.

I offer support to parents and professionals who work with children and young people, to create a world where children’s needs are met, where they can grow strong and clear and able to grow into adults who can change the world for the better.

I rest confidently on current neurobiological research that is sitting harmoniously with global and ancient indigenous wisdom. The deep knowledge of what it is to be human and what are our deepest needs for health and happiness. I know in my bones and in my clear thinking that the way we bring up children through parenting, culture and schooling passes on our culture and ensures its future. That what children learn they then perpetuate as adults.

I know that in the current dominant culture in the UK and all around the world where European colonisation has occurred, something is deeply wrong. The escalating ‘success’ of capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy has led to the end of our only planet’s capacity to support us for much longer. As a human race we are in a momentum that does not allow us to stop the headlong ride to the cliff edge. The systems we have set up do not enable fast enough change to save ourselves. I can see quite clearly that this is madness. I know that system change is the only chance we have to make something different.

If we change how we bring up children then we can change the whole world in one generation. Humans have evolved over millions of years but we have evolved the adaptability to meet the challenges that face us in one lifetime. How extraordinary. We have ancient evolved needs but ingenuity and creativity in meeting them. Imagine if we got really clear about what those needs are and could find ways to meet them. This is my work. I know what we need, the optimum environment for human thriving and I want to join with all the parents and professionals I can find to recreate and remember the world we belong to, our only home.

It is all about connection and relationship. We need to be seen, heard and loved in order to be truly human. We need to see the soft eyes, to hear the kind tone in the voice of those who love us. We need it as babies of course, to convince us that we can survive in this loud strange world. But we also need it throughout our lives. It really is as simple as this, we need to be loved by others in order to function. Put more scientifically, our embodied nervous systems need the coregulation of others to survive and thrive.

And yet we live in a system that is all about separation and domination. Our babies are taught to be independent as soon as possible. Parents are told not to pick their little ones up too much in order to avoid spoiling them. Books and professionals give advice about how many minutes a parent can leave their baby to cry. We are absolutely lost in the wilderness. How can more people not see the cruelty and harm in this?

I care about the well being and happiness of each individual child and their need for love and safety. I also see this as social justice, global equality and environmental work. Planet saving work. The best offer I have towards deep system change. I know that no child is free until every child is free. I know that I live with huge privilege. That I can concern myself with my own child’s every need and mood while children in many places in the world, including my own country are going hungry. I know that children are losing their lives because of climate change and that this is only going to get worse.

Globally we are facing seemingly impossible crises: climate change, biodiversity devastation, mass extinction, fatal inequality. Our current and historical systems have caused this and are perpetuating it. We need our children to have new ideas and the capacity and resourcefulness to work together to put them into practice. We need to bring up creative, ingenious, resilient collaborators to turn things around, to bring back hope, to stand a chance of survival. The roots of this are in childhood. We need to bring up our children differently, deeply and radically differently.

Of course we can only do this if the adults can recognise and realise their profound influence as parents, carers, teachers, community members and decision makers, on the whole life of the child in front of them. Every smile, frown, raised voice and moment of attention has a lasting impact on the child’s biology, even to the point of changing their genetic expression of DNA. The loving eyes of the parent become the eyes with which the child sees the world. There is no separation. An adult who has been deeply loved as a child is able to care about others on the other side of the world. Global connection and empathy begins with a baby’s relationship with their caregivers and how that is supported by the immediate and wider community. An education that values awareness of others around the world, is connected to nature and that provides warm resonant relationships builds the capacity for a child to become an adult with personal, relational and global resourcefulness. We are all connected. We all suffer when the connection is broken and we are told the lie of separation, that our main goal is independence and productivity. That we have to earn the right to approval and even survival.

Imagine a world where we truly remembered and respected the needs of babies. Where there was always someone available to pick up a crying infant and comfort her with holding, songs and love. Where no child was punished or manipulated by adults wanting to break their wild spirit in order to make them fit into a world that requires brokenness to make others rich. Imagine a world where there was a liveable future – how can we possibly keep going as usual when that is in doubt?

My work is to be a thought leader and collaborator in this model of thinking and change. I offer training, support and resources to parents and professionals in how to care for children in a way that builds connection to themselves, to others and to the earth. This work sits within the wider fields of parenting, childcare, education, social justice and earth protection.

A baby who knows herself to be safe and loved by parents within strong community becomes an adult who embodies the radical change our world needs to survive. This is parenting and education as radical activism, childcare as common humanity.