Evidence-based explorations across community life, family development, and systems thinking. Thoughtful analysis to inform your ongoing research and understanding.
Practice wisdom, leadership, and professional development grounded in real-world children's services experience
Six interconnected essays exploring why professional attempts to change people fail, grounded in evolutionary biology and neuroscience
Through Angie Thokden's morning chaos, discover why changing people defies physics. From professional burnout to family resistance, explore the fundamental impossibility that shapes every helping relationship.
Why the brain's 12.5 watts can't overcome 3.5 billion years of evolution. Through mathematical principles and Kahneman's psychology, discover why resistance increases with pressure and cognitive architecture makes change neurologically implausible.
How evolution's complete 'nonsense' is pure biological genius. From the giraffe's five-metre nerve detour to human resistance patterns, discover why psychological responses developed as survival mechanisms, not design flaws.
The moral injury of promising impossible transformations. Following Angie through her professional crucifixion—stretched between political demands for change and evolutionary reality of resistance. How workers become unwilling participants in systematic harm.
What Darwin actually taught us about adaptation versus change. How influence works through environmental adjustment, not direct intervention. The biological approach to supporting human development without triggering resistance mechanisms.
Understanding the impasse between what we want and what's possible. How to work with rather than against human nature in family development and professional practice. A compassionate examination of why we keep trying to change others despite knowing it doesn't work.
Applying Berne's Transactional Analysis to UK child protection meetings, examining how structural features create predictable professional-family dynamics. Introduces the novel "system proximity typology" revealing why Glasgow's reform model works whilst most interventions maintain dysfunction.
Why families remain volatile despite therapeutic intervention. Exploring research on nonverbal communication that reveals how continuous body signals shape relationships more powerfully than words—and what this means for therapeutic practice, organisational dynamics, and institutional accountability.
Lieutenant Columbo's investigative approach demonstrates how apparent confusion can mask sophisticated analytical thinking. His methodology—building rapport, noticing inconsistencies, allowing space for revelation—offers a powerful model for professionals working with families.
Examining mob behaviour as evolutionary adaptation, from civil unrest looting to the Post Office Horizon scandal. How professional teams become mobs through Drama Triangle dynamics, projective identification, and the stroke economy that silences dissent.
From personal anecdotes to fabricated abuse disclosures, exploring the landscape of deception in safeguarding. When truth becomes transactional, how do professionals navigate between protection and manipulation?
Like attempting to unknot a tangled ball of wool, some problems tighten when pulled directly whilst others require immediate action. Discover why CBT-type programmes can create more problems than they solve, and when patient engagement trumps quick fixes.
When organisations ask "How are we doing?" they reveal they haven't been paying attention. Through Macnamara's research on organisational listening, discover why formal feedback requests signal absence rather than presence, and how the "sugar hit" of consultation damages trust.
Like an overburdened Victoria sponge collapsing under too many layers, our children's services fragment under impossible expectations. This structural analysis proposes parish-based integration where services meet families naturally, not through institutional gatekeeping.
How do we know what we know in child protection? From untrained teaching assistants making first observations to social workers deciding child removal, this philosophical examination explores interpretive bias, partial knowledge, and the ancient human struggle with epistemic uncertainty in modern safeguarding practice.
When passionate certainty impedes what it seeks to protect. From first-century Judea to modern safeguarding, examining how organisational precarity combines with ideological commitment to produce catastrophic outcomes—and acknowledging the uncomfortable positioning of those examining these dynamics.
Through personal experience in bereavement counselling training and decades of family work, explore how confusing wants with needs and shame with guilt creates cascading misunderstandings in therapeutic relationships and professional assessments—precisely when clarity matters most.
An essay exploring the intersection of professional discovery and personal transformation through an unexpected encounter with the son of attachment theory's pioneer.
An academic exploration of how psychoanalytic insight evolved into practical tools for understanding family support dynamics, tracing the journey from Freud's intrapsychic model through attachment theory to Berne's observable ego states. Demonstrates how Parent-Adult-Child frameworks illuminate transactional patterns frontline workers encounter daily.
An academic exploration examining how early ego formation in adverse environments creates lasting patterns resistant to therapeutic intervention. Using the gingerbread metaphor and contemporary research, this bridges psychoanalytic theory with practical application for practitioners working with families.
How childhood dynamics shape adult leadership through the contrasting paths of Christopher and Peter Hitchens. From a father's peace treaty to public intellectual opposition, discover how early family patterns influence professional styles and the value of constructive disagreement.
Through drummer Nick D'Virgilio's methodical practice for a Genesis tour, discover profound insights about brain preparation for high-stakes performance. From job interviews to team collaboration, explore the difference between earned confidence and false bravado, and how genuine preparation enables collective excellence.
Child development, attachment, play, and family relationships—professional expertise made accessible
Understanding how children grow and bond
An essay exploring the intersection of professional discovery and personal transformation through an unexpected encounter with the son of attachment theory's pioneer.
Understanding how psychoanalytic insight evolved into practical tools for family dynamics. Parent-Adult-Child ego states illuminate interaction patterns, stress dynamics, and transactional games in family life.
Examining how early ego formation in adverse environments creates lasting patterns. Using the gingerbread metaphor and contemporary research, this bridges psychoanalytic theory with understanding infant development and family dynamics.
Nature's university: how play shapes the brain, supports emotional regulation, and creates optimal conditions for memory, problem-solving, and wellbeing across a lifetime—from children's bedtime routines to workplace innovation.
Understanding why children lie, when it matters, and how parents can nurture honesty alongside emotional intelligence and social resilience. Explores developmental milestones, theory of mind, and practical strategies for building truthful family cultures.
The best play sessions can sometimes end in tears. Research shows most interactions go through seven stages—and many parents miss the crucial winding down phase. Discover why children can get stuck at high emotional intensity when adults skip from peak excitement straight to separation, and how bedtime routines demonstrate these stages in everyday practice.
How early play and relational experiences build the bridge from concrete to abstract thinking—and what happens when that bridge never fully forms. Explores implications for families, education, professional assessment, and intergenerational patterns.
How children learn and develop optimally
Nature's university: how play shapes the brain, supports emotional regulation, and creates optimal conditions for memory, problem-solving, and wellbeing across a lifetime—from children's bedtime routines to workplace innovation.
How early play and relational experiences build the bridge from concrete to abstract thinking—exploring implications for learning patterns and educational engagement.
How anxiety, the limbic system, and the cortex drive our mistakes, honesty, and learning. Discover why our brain "switches over" in stressful situations and how to Feed the Solution, Starve the Problem.
Individual ants are simple creatures following basic rules, yet as a colony are clever and intelligent and find solutions to challenges such as the best routes to new food sources. Just how brain cells solve problems! Discover distributed intelligence and how learning really works.
Family dynamics and effective interaction
Parent-Adult-Child ego states illuminate interaction patterns, stress dynamics, and transactional games in family life.
Exploring how the Solihull Approach's Dance of Reciprocity helps us understand why endings matter in relationships, and how developing skills for transitions strengthens family bonds through the seven stages of emotional interaction.
Like attempting to unknot a tangled ball of wool, some problems tighten when pulled directly whilst others require immediate action. Understanding when patient family engagement trumps CBT-type quick fixes in parenting and development.
How confusing wants with needs and shame with guilt creates cascading misunderstandings in family relationships and parenting. Precision in these distinctions matters most when families face challenges and need clarity.
Systems thinking, emergence, collective intelligence, and how complex systems actually work
How complex systems actually work
Examining mob behaviour as evolutionary adaptation, from civil unrest to the Post Office Horizon scandal. How professional teams become mobs through Drama Triangle dynamics, projective identification, and the stroke economy that silences dissent.
Applying the principles of collective intelligence to everyday life: how stress responses, transitions, and play work the same way in families, workplaces, and communities. Practical insights for leaders and parents.
When organisations ask "How are we doing?" they reveal they haven't been paying attention. Through Macnamara's research, discover why formal feedback requests signal absence rather than presence, and how consultation cycles create hope and betrayal at a biological level.
Deep insights into how termite mounds, human societies, and the brain all demonstrate the same universal principle: intelligence emerges not from individual units, but from coordinated networks of specialised parts working together.
Navigating complexity in real situations
Applying Transactional Analysis to understand how structural features create predictable professional-family dynamics. Introduces the novel "system proximity typology" revealing why Glasgow's reform model works whilst most interventions maintain dysfunction.
Lieutenant Columbo's investigative approach demonstrates sophisticated analytical thinking. His methodology offers powerful insights for understanding complex human situations.
How professional teams become mobs—understanding collective intelligence failures in complex environments.
Like attempting to unknot a tangled ball of wool, some problems tighten when pulled directly whilst others require immediate action. A systems thinking approach to understanding why CBT-type programmes fail with complex versus adaptive problems.
Through syntropy—order emerging from chaos—explore how patterns and meaning emerge in unexpected ways across time and culture.
Understanding the systemic impasse between what we want and what's possible. How to work with rather than against human nature in family development and professional practice. A compassionate examination of why we keep trying to change others.
How brains, bodies, and biological systems actually work
Right now, as you read these words, two computers are processing the same information—your device and the three-pound mass of tissue inside your skull. Explore the brain's remarkable computational power: 1 exaFLOP of processing using just 20 watts, parallel architecture handling 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, and efficiency that makes supercomputers look profligate. From tennis serves to mosquito flight control, discover how biological computation fundamentally differs from silicon-based systems. First essay in trilogy examining brain computation, predictive coding, and practical applications to safeguarding autonomous adolescents.
Walk into an empty concert arena and look across the seating—row after row of chairs stretching into the distance. But after the first few rows, your brain isn't seeing those chairs at all. It's fabricating them. Understanding how brains construct reality through predictive coding reveals profound implications: the difference between closed systems (where certainty exists) and open systems (where it cannot), why "do no harm" is structurally impossible, how collective model construction creates catastrophic groupthink, and what Spock's certainty about gravity teaches us about professional judgement. From mosquito navigation to executive mobs, discover why humans live in fabricated worlds—and what that means for knowledge, certainty, and wisdom. Second essay in trilogy examining brain computation, predictive coding, and practical applications to safeguarding autonomous adolescents.
How do you improve safety for 16-year-olds on Child Protection Plans who are making their own decisions about where they live, who they spend time with, and how they conduct their relationships? Drawing on Bifulco's Attachment Style Interview research and Berne's Transactional Analysis, this framework presents eight recognisable typologies—from Elephants and Roosters to Panthers and Ravens—mapping how different young people respond to influence attempts. A young person who responds to trusted relationships needs to be led through that relationship. One who responds to peer dynamics needs the social environment to shift. One who will only move when reality presses in needs boundaries maintained, not consequences cushioned. Understanding which pattern you're working with may be amongst the most useful things a professional can bring to safeguarding autonomous adolescents. Third essay in trilogy examining brain computation, predictive coding, and practical applications to safeguarding autonomous adolescents.
Research shows people continuously send signals through posture, tone, and facial expressions—and these signals are harder to fake than speech. Discover the fascinating mechanisms behind blushing, fidgeting, voice changes, and why people believe body language over words.
The body never stops sending signals—and that's the bit that important research in 1967 missed. Most people have heard that communication is 7% words, 38% tone, 55% body language. But what did Mehrabian actually study? Discover what contemporary research reveals about how verbal and nonverbal channels really work together.
The best play sessions can sometimes end in tears. Research shows most interactions go through seven stages—and many parents miss the crucial winding down phase. Discover why children can get stuck at high emotional intensity when adults skip from peak excitement straight to separation, and how bedtime routines demonstrate these stages in everyday practice.
Decades before brain scanning technology, a psychotherapist figured out that identical words mean completely different things depending on tone, posture, and facial expression. Discover how Eric Berne developed Transactional Analysis by watching people interact in therapy groups and recognising that complete communication includes everything people do while talking—not just the words they choose.
Individual ants are simple creatures following basic rules, yet as a colony are clever and intelligent and find solutions to challenges such as the best routes to new food sources. Just how brain cells solve problems! Discover distributed intelligence and how learning really works.
How anxiety, the limbic system, and the cortex drive our mistakes, honesty, and learning. Discover why our brain "switches over" in stressful situations and how to Feed the Solution, Starve the Problem.
Community life, society, culture, and engaged citizenship in everyday contexts
Comprehensive exploration of family life in a Suffolk market town
Serving as both practical resource and community celebration, this four-part guide examines character, safety, education, sports, arts, entertainment, shopping, and services—revealing how Bungay creates the conditions where families truly flourish.
Arts, culture, and community events that make Bungay distinctive. From theatre and galleries to festivals and music, explore how this market town maintains cultural vitality that enriches family life.
Active living and outdoor opportunities in Bungay. From Outney Common to local sports clubs, discover how the town supports family recreation and community engagement through accessible facilities and natural spaces.
Independent shops, local business, and community infrastructure. How Bungay's high street, market, and local services create the practical foundation for family life whilst maintaining character and sustainability.
Bungay's road safety campaigns show remarkable civic spirit. But when you look at where community energy has focused and where fatalities actually occurred, an unmistakable pattern emerges. An evidence-based examination of proportionality, perception, and where to direct limited resources for greatest impact.
Exploring the remarkable natural life of this Suffolk market town
The remarkable biology of Bungay's summer visitors. Every May, swifts return from Africa to nest above Nethergate Street and Wingfield Street—spending 99% of their lives airborne, sleeping on the wing at 3,000 metres, and navigating by inherited magnetic maps. Discover the extraordinary aerodynamics, navigation, social lives, and breeding cycles of these aerial masters.
No brain. No eyes. No calendar. But every autumn, oak trees drop their leaves in a perfectly timed sequence. The answer is chemical messengers—hormones coordinating millions of cells without any central control. The same trick works in humans too.
How childhood dynamics shape adult leadership through the contrasting paths of Christopher and Peter Hitchens. From a father's peace treaty to public intellectual opposition, discover how early family patterns influence professional styles and the value of constructive disagreement.
From herbivores that kill rivals to online cancellation campaigns, a personal exploration of killing as a natural phenomenon humans inevitably participate in. These reflections examine the various positions we adopt to manage this disturbing reality, validating the difficulty itself rather than any particular stance.
Like attempting to unknot a tangled ball of wool, some problems tighten when pulled directly whilst others require immediate action. Everyday problem-solving in life and society—understanding when CBT-type approaches help and when they harm.
A terrible film that won't stop spreading its hidden code. Through syntropy—order emerging from chaos—explore how Hackers (1995) accidentally prophesied cybersecurity's importance, encoded alternative identity, and continues finding new receivers. From hacker culture to queer coding, discover why this failed movie succeeded at something unmeasurable.
From June incorporation through November 2025, this reflection documents YoungFamilyLife's first year: the pivot from planned courses to prolific content creation, transparent discussion of AI collaboration in professional writing, and the philosophical foundations of building an educational platform whilst maintaining full-time statutory work.
Like an overburdened Victoria sponge collapsing under too many layers, our children's services fragment under impossible expectations. This structural analysis proposes parish-based integration where services meet families naturally—education policy that citizens must navigate and understand.
How quiet confidence shapes social dynamics in professional settings. From boardroom peacocking to authentic presence, discover why internal confidence matters more than external displays of power and how genuine influence emerges from steadiness, not showmanship.
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