You Can't Be It If You Don't Know It Exists
05-11-2020
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.
The Sense of Possibility
02-07-2020
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.
Show Me The Money!
01-02-2020
I was recently speaking with a group of children about what they felt was missing in their current educational model and something that came up time and again was the lack of tutoring in how to manage their financial affairs.
Hold The Front Page!
21-12-2019
Earlier this year The Guardian printed a piece by the winner of their Young Sportswriter of the Year (ages seven to nine) award; one Caleb Waterhouse, aged eight.
It’s a piece about the snowboarder Katie Ormerod and how inspirational she is. It’s coherent, informative and charmingly rendered in the vernacular of youth whilst still being eminently readable. The link is at the end of this blogpost.
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Child-Man!
02-11-2019
It’s not news that children - especially little boys - love superheroes. In the run up to, and during, Halloween it’s been possible to see youngsters dressed up in every flavour of crusader, caped or otherwise.
I have been asking mini-sized Batmen, Supermen, Iron and Spider Men amongst others what it is that they love so much about these characters. Mostly the answers revolve around their various superhuman capabilities and the fact that they are the good guys who can overcome any danger or threat to themselves or humanity as a whole. Behind these words lie the truth of the matter.
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