YoungFamilyLife at 100: Following My Nose

"Like a mature malted whiskey, the YFL Repositorium at 100 has established its character and value."

This writing and publication on YoungFamilyLife marks my 100th essay/content.

I'm proud and pleased with this achievement and what YFL now is – and all from a process I adopted early on in my life of 'follow my nose'. It's a process that comes with risk but can bring opportunity and results that, certainly in my case, I could never plan.

Another part of my process is to walk towards what I fear. I feared, and still fear, setting up a resource that was not good, not thorough, and could misinform.

The Philosophies That Hold It Together

Setting up YFL required establishing an approach that set minimum standards – set philosophies for everything I publish on YFL. Not a mission statement drafted by committee — convictions arrived at through two decades of frontline family work and refined into principles clear enough to govern everything that followed. Five of them.

And the word repositorium — chosen early, before it had been earned, as an act of intention rather than description. A repositorium is not a blog. It is not a resource library or a content hub. The word carries older, weightier associations — a place of holding, of preservation, of accumulated knowledge made available over time. To name something a repositorium when it contained nothing yet was a declaration that what would be placed here mattered, and that it would be held with integrity.

The Name

And the follow my nose approach helped discover the name of the business I established and the website carrying the name – YoungFamilyLife.

Young: that is ME! Because the new generation carries the world forward, and getting the basics right for them makes it better. Makes it all better. It starts with the Young.

Family: not a demographic to be marketed to, not a lifestyle category, but the essential human structure. The thing that transmits everything across generations — warmth and harm, language and silence, attachment and its failures, courage and its absence.

Life: the full expanse of the human condition and every form of its expression. Existentially broad because, well, why not. It can be fun, and it can be controversial. And it can fall flat. And I give myself a licence to write about my more 'out-there' musings.

The Content

So, the content. Well, this isn't how I planned it. The initial YFL business was to deliver courses to local parents who wanted a forum in a training format for quality information to inform their parenting approach. The website was to support the training, but I got delayed and postponed the training, and I kept creating content for the website. The essays and subjects just flowed. I was pulling on all my 25 plus years of training, learning, study and experience of working with families. I've stayed mostly within my theoretical bias, and my knowledge base is mostly set out in content now present. And in writing the content these few months I have learnt so much more!!

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Walking Towards the Fear

Part of walking towards what I fear is a habit I've had since I was a teenager. I grew up in a home where the supernatural was treated as real. Not as metaphor. Real. And I was frightened by it for years. Then at seventeen I made a decision: stop being frightened and go and find a ghost. So I did. I went looking, and I found one. Felt exactly what I'd always feared I would feel.

And then I realised. What I'd experienced matched my fear so precisely that it couldn't have come from outside me. I'd hallucinated it. Built it from expectation.

The lesson wasn't about whether ghosts exist. It was about what happens when you walk toward the thing you fear, with your feet on the ground and your scepticism intact. You find out what's actually there. That has served me well ever since — including in building YFL.

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What Comes Next

The Essays page shows the full range of the content – so far. 100 essays in. There's plenty more to come. I know I will not break sweat to get to 200 essays, but 500? 1000? I'll do my best. Look for yourself at the range of essays available.

The challenge to get visitors to YFL is big. There's lots of content across the internet, much of which I pull on for my writing (reference links always fully cited). My business, like any other, has no right to anything. Actually, YFL is in that evolutionary struggle that I value and celebrate so much. I will adapt to make the most of opportunities, but my hope is YFL's Unique Selling Point is set within the YFL philosophies. That is where my nose is pointing.

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