Not so long ago I was reminded of a time when I was working with a group of excluded 14-year-olds. As an outsider, I often find that children and young people will open up to me more readily than someone working inside the system. Although it breaks my heart when they look to me for solutions I am powerless to provide.

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In the world of conference speaking, people often use the phrase ‘The Big Take Home’ or ‘The Big Take Away’, and almost any guide to public speaking will tell you that all presentations should have one. It’s a perfectly valid piece of advice and I always find it useful to decide on the main point I want people to leave with, even before I start writing a speech.

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Having parked up in town, I was standing in a queue to pay before displaying, and the little girl in front of me was pestering her mother to be allowed to put the money into the machine. “Let me do it, mummy. Let me do it. Let me. Let me mummy, please.”

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I was recently reminded of ‘The Liver Birds’ the 1970s sitcom starting Nerys Hughes and Polly James (check) as a couple of flat sharing girls carving out their own lives in Liverpool. I was around six when it first came out. I remember sitting at the top of our stairs with a pal from school ‘playing’ the girls. It was my life’s ambition to move to a city and share a place with a girlfriend. It’s commonplace now, but at the time such an arrangement was anything but. The Liver Birds were so different from any other portrayal of women on television at the time. They were my heroines, showing me that I didn’t necessarily need to marry a man to get out of the familial home and on with my life. I loved them.

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We can’t achieve anything that we can’t imagine ourselves doing. It sounds obvious, but it’s easy to forget how potent this truism is when it comes to our children. How our children think about themselves, how they imagine they are is the most powerful influence on how they think about their own future.

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