December 2025
It's one thing to think something might be possible. It's another to test it.
In early summer 2025, I found myself at one of those moments where an idea that had been circling for years suddenly felt ready to land. Twenty years of working in Family Safeguarding and Early Help had given me something worth sharing - not prescriptive advice, but the kind of evidence-based understanding that helps families and professionals think more clearly about what they're facing. The question was whether I could build a platform to share it.
The first test was simple: was the name available? YoungFamilyLife cleared at Companies House. The .com was free. So was the .uk. When obstacles don't appear where you expect them, it feels like permission to continue.
The name itself felt like recognition rather than invention. Young is my surname, but it's also where everything matters - the early years that shape the rest of life. Family is fundamental to life; life is fundamental to families. For everyone, life is everything. The name worked in multiple dimensions, which felt like permission from something larger than strategy.
Incorporation came on 11 June 2025. Then the necessary work of being responsible - I needed clearance from my employer to ensure I could pursue this without creating problems for anyone. That process took time, and I'm glad it did. Doing things properly matters more than doing them quickly.
The website was built through July and went live on 5 August with its first published essay. The original plan was straightforward: a Foundation Years course launching in September, built on the family development knowledge I'd accumulated across two decades of practice. That didn't happen - not because anything went wrong, but because the clearance timeline left insufficient time to promote a course properly. Rushing something half-ready felt like the wrong way to begin.
So I made a different choice.
Instead of forcing a poorly-promoted course into existence, I used the time to build something I hadn't originally planned: a substantial body of written content.
I'd been experimenting with Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, and discovered something unexpected. The ideas I'd been carrying - frameworks for understanding family dynamics, insights from professional practice, theoretical connections I'd been making for years - could now reach the page at a pace that matched how quickly they formed in my mind. What would have taken months of evening and weekend writing could emerge in days.
But this wasn't AI writing for me. It was AI enabling me to write at scale.
The distinction matters. Every essay on YoungFamilyLife contains my thinking, my professional experience, my philosophical positions, my editorial choices about what to include and what to leave alone. Claude provides the scaffolding that lets me build faster - research integration, structural suggestions, the capacity to maintain coherence across 20,000-word pieces. The architecture is mine; the construction equipment is shared.
By the end of August, YoungFamilyLife had established range: essays on psychology, place-based content exploring family life in Bungay, systems thinking, and professional practice. The Columbo essay showed I could present investigative methodology through a creative frame. The Bungay Guide demonstrated local expertise. The early psychology essays laid foundations for what was to come.
September brought the Changing People series - six essays totalling approximately 58,000 words, examining why the professional ambition to "change people" is both ubiquitous and fundamentally misguided.
This was different from the August work. Not just breadth across topics, but sustained argument across a series threaded through a complex fictional framework. Part 1 established an entire ecosystem: social worker Angie Thokden and her six families (the Hakdsons, Pakdens, Jokdens, Brekdens, Copkdens, and Thomkdens), each with detailed dynamics and named children. A full team of colleagues - Marcus (the exhausted team manager), Sarah (who brings coffee and listens), Tom (who leaves at 5pm exactly and never apologises), Mo, Katie, James, Donna (counting days to retirement) - each with distinct personalities and coping mechanisms that stay consistent throughout. Management layers above them. Senior leadership pressuring for evidence of change. Two weeks of detailed diary entries showing the grinding reality of statutory practice.
Then Parts 2 through 6 wove through this same world from different analytical angles whilst maintaining absolute narrative consistency. Part 2 used these established characters to illustrate psychological research - Kelly Jokden's reactive resistance demonstrating reactance theory, the Hakdsons' engagement with support showing Self-Determination Theory in action. Part 3 brought evolutionary biology whilst maintaining every character detail established in Parts 1 and 2. Part 4 returned to Angie sitting in her car (the exact opening scene from Part 1) but revealed her inner experience of moral injury - the same moment, the same world, now viewed from inside her psychological reality rather than the external diary narrative. Part 5 explored what becomes possible when professionals stop trying to change people, threading new possibilities through the established world. Part 6 synthesised everything whilst maintaining every thread - the team dynamics, the family characteristics, the professional pressures, the adaptive possibilities.
Throughout all six essays spanning four days of writing, the characters remained absolutely consistent: Tom still left at 5pm exactly, Sarah still brought coffee to difficult conversations, Donna still counted days to retirement, the "aggressive sitting" story (Mo sitting aggressively in a corner during a difficult team meeting) still sustained team morale when referenced. The Jokdens' children kept their names. The Hakdsons' transformation story told in Part 1 got referenced accurately when theoretically analysed in Part 4. Marcus's exhaustion, his management pressures, his attempts to protect the team - all consistent across 58,000 words.
The series articulated something I'd long believed but never fully expressed: that "adaptation, not change" represents a more honest and effective approach to family support. People don't change in the way professional frameworks often assume. They adapt when conditions allow. Our job is to understand what enables adaptation, not to engineer transformation.
This is where Claude's role becomes clearest. Could I have created this fictional framework manually? Yes, given months of dedicated work building character profiles, family backgrounds, team dynamics. Could I have maintained absolute consistency across six families, ten professionals, multiple storylines threading through six separate analytical lenses, two weeks of diary entries, and 58,000 words whilst also integrating psychological research, tracking theoretical arguments, maintaining narrative coherence, and weaving between external diary narrative (Parts 1-3, 5-6) and internal psychological experience (Part 4)? Not whilst working full-time. Not without months of meticulous note-taking, cross-referencing, and constant checking back through previous parts.
Claude didn't generate Angie Thokden or invent the six families. Those emerged from twenty years of sitting in supervision meetings, watching team dynamics, knowing how the system grinds people down, understanding how families present differently depending on their relationship with statutory intervention. But Claude helped me track every detail - ensuring Kelly Jokden's children remained consistently named across all six essays, that Marcus's management style stayed true to his character when he appeared in different parts, that the Hakdsons' transformation story told in Part 1 got referenced accurately when theoretically analysed in Part 4, that Tom's 5pm departure time never shifted to 5:15pm, that the aggressive sitting story maintained its team significance. When Part 4 returned to that opening car scene, Claude ensured the details matched Part 1 exactly whilst the analytical lens shifted completely.
The architecture is mine - the families, the team, the theoretical arguments, the synthesis of twenty years' professional experience. Claude provided the project management capacity that made building at this scale, at this speed, whilst maintaining this level of internal consistency, actually possible. It's the difference between having the architectural vision for a complex structure and having both the vision and the construction coordination to build it within months rather than years.
From October onwards, YFL moved into territory I hadn't anticipated when I registered the company in June.
The "Killing, Killers and Cancelling" essay explored uncomfortable ground - the ubiquity of killing in nature, human participation in violence both direct and distant, and cancellation as a contemporary form of social death. This wasn't professional practice content; it was philosophical reflection on things we'd rather not examine. It needed a new home on the site, so I created "Young Thinking" - a space for personal wrestling with difficult questions, distinct from the more structured academic essays.
The Hackers essay examined subcultural identity and syntropy - how groups form, maintain boundaries, and create meaning. Professional Groupthink explored the mob dynamics that can emerge in professional teams, even well-intentioned ones.
Then came what I think of as the theoretical trilogy: substantial academic essays on Freud's structural model of preverbal ego development, Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis as an evolution of Freudian theory, and finally "Beyond Compliance" - a 24,000-word examination of how Transactional Analysis applies to UK child protection meetings, including my own novel contribution: a "system proximity typology" that categorises families not by pathology but by their familiarity with statutory processes.
These November essays represent something different from the Changing People series. Where that series demonstrated Claude's capacity for maintaining complex fictional frameworks across sustained narrative, the theoretical trilogy shows Claude's ability to integrate academic research at scale whilst maintaining rigorous citation. The system proximity typology emerged from years of observing meeting dynamics, but synthesising it with TA theory, attachment research, and inequality evidence across 24,000 words would have taken months without Claude's assistance.
I want to be transparent about what AI collaboration means for YoungFamilyLife, because I think the conversation about AI and writing often misses the point.
The question isn't "did AI write this?" The question is "whose thinking does this represent, and is it valuable?"
Claude is a powerful tool. But tools require skilled operators. A horse can carry you far and fast, but someone needs to choose the direction, read the terrain, know when to push and when to rest, and take responsibility for where you end up.
What I bring to this collaboration:
Conceptual direction - I decide what to write about. The "follow my nose" curiosity that led to essays ranging from Columbo's methodology to the psychology of lying to children to the quiet disquiet of examining human violence - that's editorial instinct developed over decades, not algorithmic suggestion.
Professional experience - The insights in every essay emerge from twenty years of sitting with families, observing system dynamics, noticing patterns, making mistakes, learning what works and what doesn't. AI can help me articulate those observations, but it can't generate them.
Philosophical positioning - The "Information Without Instruction" philosophy isn't Claude's preference; it's mine, developed through recognising how prescriptive advice fails whilst evidence-based understanding empowers. Every essay reflects that commitment.
Research judgement - When Claude suggests research, I decide what's relevant, what's credible, what supports or challenges my position. The theoretical trilogy draws on decades of reading - Freud, Klein, Bion, Stern, Crittenden, Berne - that I've integrated across years. AI helps me reference and synthesise that knowledge, but the knowledge itself comes from sustained study.
Domain expertise - Twenty years in Family Safeguarding means I can evaluate whether AI-assisted research is accurate, relevant, and appropriately nuanced. I know when something sounds right but isn't. I know what's missing from a framework. I know which theorists matter and which are fashionable but shallow.
Ethical judgement - Some content shouldn't be published even if it could be. Some framings are harmful even if they're technically accurate. Some topics require care that AI doesn't naturally provide. These judgements are human responsibilities.
Critical evaluation - Claude can be confidently wrong. It can produce plausible prose that misses the point entirely. It can hallucinate references. It can smooth over important tensions in pursuit of coherence. Reading AI output critically is a skill, and it requires knowing enough to spot the errors.
Accountability - My name is on YoungFamilyLife. If something is wrong, misleading, or harmful, that's my responsibility regardless of what tools I used to produce it.
Verification - Claude also serves as a fact-checking tool. When I'm uncertain whether a term or claim is accurate, I check. The collaboration includes constant querying: is this word right? Does this research actually say what I think it says? Is this hypothesis sound or speculative? When we're on uncertain ground, we flag it clearly.
Let me illustrate what this collaboration looks like in practice.
In early November, I watched Hackers (1995) because the promo image of Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller was sexy. That was my entire reason for clicking play. The film was objectively terrible - absurd script, non-existent technical accuracy - but the sexiness wasn't just the leads; it was the whole look of the movie. The costume design, the lighting, the club scenes, the committed aesthetic. And that visual appeal actually had credible input behind it - the director had researched real hacker culture, the production design was deliberately crafted. Friday night popcorn viewing that looked better than it had any right to. Then I got curious: does this have cult status? I fell down a rabbit hole of YouTube video essays and hacker community reactions, and noticed something about how mid-nineties counterculture depicted diversity compared to contemporary DEI approaches - a "fuck you" attitude to individuality, pride in being outside the norm, defiant self-expression rather than structured victimhood.
I brought this to Claude. We talked. Claude offered the frame that "the timing was wrong" for the film's original release - and I corrected this. The film would have failed whenever it was released because it was fundamentally flawed. But there was a hidden code embedded in it, almost accidentally, that kept transmitting. Not mistiming - a fluke of convergence that happened to encode something true. The shallowness of the visual pull belied the depth beneath, and most of the cast and crew seemed to have missed what they'd accidentally created. That correction opened something up. I'd been thinking about the creative counterpart to entropy since 2008, but had been calling it 'dystropy.' When I checked, Claude corrected my terminology: the word was syntropy. And suddenly we had a 5,800-word essay: "Syntropy and the Tag: The Accidental Prophecy of the Awful Popcorn Movie Hackers."
The process felt like horse dressage - careful movements, constant adjustment, each question leading to another, finding gold through patient dialogue. I didn't set out to write about syntropy. I watched a trashy film because the leads were attractive. But following my nose, questioning, correcting Claude's misreadings, allowing exploration to unfold - something substantial emerged. That's what collaboration with AI looks like when it works: genuine dialogue where both parties contribute, where correction is part of the process, where the destination isn't known at the start.
Not all AI systems are equal. I've experimented with various tools and found significant differences in quality, reliability, and the kind of collaboration they enable. Claude works for me because it supports extended thinking, maintains coherence across long pieces, and doesn't fight against my voice. Other tools produced content that felt generic, or pushed toward formats I didn't want, or couldn't sustain the depth I was looking for.
The skilled rider thesis applies here too: knowing which horse to choose for which journey matters.
In preparing this reflection, I retrieved my BSc dissertation from 2008 - a case study written for my Integrative Counselling degree at Matrix College (Middlesex University). It's been sitting in cloud storage for years, and I wanted to see what my writing looked like before any AI collaboration.
What I found confirmed something I'd suspected: the ideas on YoungFamilyLife aren't new to me. They're ideas I've been developing for nearly two decades.
In 2008, I wrote about the buddleia bushes growing from walls in cities - plants with no choice about where their roots establish, growing to the best of their potential given their circumstances. That metaphor underpins YFL's "adaptation, not change" philosophy today.
In 2008, I was already integrating Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Bowlby, Berne, and Stern - the same theoretical architecture that structures the recent trilogy on YFL.
In 2008, I wrote: "My fundamental belief is that there is no existence without relationship. This is as true of matter and energy as it is of people and animals." That relational worldview runs through everything I've published this year.
The 2008 writing is mine - unassisted, unpolished by AI, produced in whatever time I could find alongside full-time work and family life. The 2025 writing is also mine - the same thinking, the same voice, the same philosophical commitments - but produced at scale with Claude's assistance.
I'm including an extract from that 2008 dissertation below. The case study itself is omitted for confidentiality reasons, but the theoretical overview demonstrates continuity: the ideas preceded the tools.
What follows is my original writing from 2008, unedited - including any errors or infelicities. This is what my work looked like before any AI collaboration.
My Theoretical Overview
Relationship
My fundamental belief is that there is no existence without relationship. This is as true of matter and energy as it is of people and animals. The nature and dynamism of relationship defines the nature and existence of the object or being. For me, the beauty of any mathematical equation is not the sum and not the result, but the "=".
At a micro subatomic level a diamond is a fragile matrix that could collapse like a house of playing cards but for the relationship of the subatomic matter. The property of all matter and the universe is dependent on relationship.
Animals require relationship. A sole termite is weak, but in a colony can contribute to a vast and complex termite hill. This, I believe, is also true of people; driving a car is only possible because of the contribution made by people across the world. Survival is impossible without at least one relationship; a newborn baby will die if it is not in relationship with at least one carer. These ideas motivate me.
Survival
As a child travelling by train in large cities I would often see small spindly and seemingly pathetic buddleia bushes growing out of walls many feet above the ground. My reaction to seeing this was "What a stupid place to grow, it has no hope!"
These days I see the bushes as having no choice of where their roots establish. They either grow or don't. Each bush is growing to the best of its potential, and if it could find more water, nutrient, and sun, it would grow fuller. The later this happens in its life so its potential reduces. Potential cannot just be measured by "biggest" or "best", or "most splendid", but also by "peace" and "easiness of living".
People, I believe, are like buddleia bushes; having no choice of which circumstances they are born into. People, like bushes, have potential to heal, and grow healthily, potently, peacefully and at ease. "Healthy" people can see choice and make choice, engage in relationship, nurture, or be nurtured, and can find and enjoy an inner relatedness of their person and integrate this with other people and the world around them. Neuroscience shows how human baby brains become wired-up in the infant years as a result of experience that then informs choice.
Attachment
The early developments for living things are crucial. I enjoy working with families where my work can have far-reaching consequences. Bowlby's attachment theory declares the benefits of secure attachments (Bowlby 1969, 1973 and Stern 1985). Securely attached children are more able to problem solve, communicate, choose and engage in substantial relationships. They are popular and successful in school, which is the foundation for employment success, wealth, secure relating and potential for satisfactory future parenting. This leads to greater choices of where to live, where and how their children will grow. Secure attachment provides good core conditions and needs, from physiological needs up to the possibility of self-actualisation (Maslow – Hierarchy of Needs 1968).
Theories that secure my therapeutic interventions
I aim to provide counselling that is underpinned by Bowlby (1969) and Freudian theories (Freud, 1905, 1940), alongside those of subsequent theorists who followed these texts.
I find Freud's model of the "self" clear, simple and useful. The Id is the chaotic potent energy, the Ego is a form in which the id can be, and the Superego self is the focus, awareness and direction of the whole self. I believe that all that exists in a newborn baby "self" is plenty of Id and only the vaguest hint of the Ego and Superego, which develop as a result of the child's experiences of its world. These experiences – good, bad, loving, lonely, etc have profound effects on the baby's developing self, informing the Ego and Superego.
Freud's oral stage of development sees a baby as "accidentally" finding it's physiological and safety needs met purely by sucking on a mothering teat to gain pleasurable satisfaction; unwittingly gaining food, warmth, shelter, bonding with the feeder and safety. The nature of the child's access to the pleasuring teat informs the developing ego and superego, and therefore the effectiveness of the id. (However, I consider that later Freud shoehorned facts into his Oedipus theory that, for me, discredited his earlier work).
Klein (1921 – 1945) observed how the baby relates to the breast as an entity in its own right, which represents the developing nature of the three parts of the Freudian self, and the conflict that comes out of the pangs of hate and envy that the baby then transfers on to the world in relation to itself. Klein also observed a duelling of behaviour distilled into love/hate, and creative/destructive (a force within physics that can be described as "entropy/dystrophy", and for me is the heartbeat of artist expression).
Fairbairn (1943, 1944) observed the world interfering between child and the things that come with the mother's teat. He saw "dissociation", when things get tough, and "repression", when the "tough" gets internalised (Fairbairn was essentially describing instances of the ego splitting as Freud saw it). Dissociating and repressing may be essential, as I see it, for a child in a dangerous environment, as the baby needs to feed and gain the associated benefits.
Winnicott (1965) noticed how Freud, Klein and Fairbairn sidelined the Mother from their theories and sighted the Mothers' Primary Maternal Preoccupation, the process by which the mother is drawn to the baby and remains mindful of the baby and meets the baby's ongoing needs.
Winnicott (1951) also took note that a child, like the Buddleia bush on the wall, will exist and grow if it gets enough food, enough water, enough shelter, enough love and enough safety/stability.
With these theories acting as ingredients, Bowlby (1969) observed and studied children, and developed his theories of Attachment; still a powerful bedrock for gauging the relationship a child has with its caregivers.
Berne (1964) beamed more light upon the nature of the self as a baby develops through into adulthood, observing that the ego can flip between one of three Ego-states in how an Ego relates to other people. Berne honed the characteristics of the communication from person to person. He illuminated the roles that people take from moment to moment, and more generally in their disposition.
Stern (1985) provided the concept of the Four Domains of Relatedness, which I see as a parallel developmental model to Freud's Oral Stage. Stern moved beyond Bowlby's attachment theory by focusing on how mother and child successfully separate into being their own independent agents whilst remaining interdependently linked.
My therapeutic model of practice
I use these texts and concepts as tools to analyse the development that the client has experienced in my encounter with him/her and to understand what happens between us in the room. I see where growth has been missed or stunted, the quality of the needs met and unmet, the nature of the relationships, and particularly the quality of significant relationships in the client's childhood. I'll present myself to the client as both a catalyst of healing, and a companion in the "real" relationship. The relationship needs to have a quality of truth – it is what it is, each for ourselves. Our relationship needs to have the possibility of being complete by having a beginning, middle and end, with awareness of the needs of the client. I can't necessarily fulfil the client's needs within relationship. For example I can't become the father, brother or son of the client, but in therapy I can become the supportive guide to help the client move into new mindful territory about such relationships. I will look for opportunities to engage in a healing process by supporting the client to enter a new awareness that is meaningful to them.
In practice this means that when I work with a client I will explore the awareness of the quality of attachments as parent and child, other important people and his relationship to me (Bowlby (1969) and Stern (1985). I will explore his relatedness between himself and others by investigating his core self and subjective self (Stern 1985). I will explore his awareness of the needs (Maslow 1968) of his children and how he meets those needs, and how he meets his own needs. I will explore the quality of his "self" (Freud, Stern, Klein, Fairbairn) and how his "self" exists within his conscious and unconscious domains, and to do this I will reference the Map of the Human Psyche by Assagioli (1993). I will explore his phenomenological and unconscious world of hope, fears, demons and high aspirations. I will analyse his tendency of response in relationship (Berne 1964).
I will explore by gentle but challenging enquiry and attune to his experience and feelings, giving him space and time to engage with his desires and fears, his feelings and his thoughts. I will invite him to explore his meaning, feelings, and the traps, pits and dead ends that he may be familiar with finding himself in. I will also invite him to rejoice and enjoy what works well, what inspires him, and his valuable uniqueness.
Integration
My analogy is that integrative therapists are like chefs with a range of foods and ingredients, preparing and serving dish to the client where the ingredients form a whole and complement each other. However, what is on the plate is not static – it is dynamic and changing in response to my own development.
Clarkson's "mixing bowl of Integration" consists of the five relationships of the Working Alliance, the Real Relationship, the Transpersonal Relationship, the Transferential Relationship, and the Reparative Relationship, and within this crucible, "healing is available" (Clarkson 1995).
Clarkson and Erskine (1993) each offer modes of integration. Erskine fortifies Affective Therapy by advocating the pragmatic Behavioural Therapies and Cognitive Therapies as foundations for healing (Erskine, 1993).
My integrative practice values the maxim; "no one method holds all the answers – everything has something to offer". With the individual client in mind I will serve my dish to the client and we will work together to mutually understand what happens between us. This will be what I have to offer. However, I can only include the ingredients that I have at hand, hence I need to be open to my own development within therapy, supervision and training.
There's something I should add about how I arrived at that 2008 dissertation.
I left school with very poor grades. University wasn't an option - not because I'd considered and rejected it, but because the path simply wasn't available to someone with my results. Whatever intellectual capacity I had, the education system hadn't found a way to measure it or develop it.
Life took its own course. Work, family, experience. And eventually, through routes I hadn't anticipated, I found myself studying for a degree. When I completed my BSc in Integrative Counselling at Middlesex University, I was thrilled - not just to have a degree, but specifically to have a Bachelor of Science. That mattered to me. It placed my work within the realm of science, not just the helping professions. It connected me to a tradition of evidence, hypothesis, and rigorous challenge.
I've always been inspired by scepticism - not the cynical kind that dismisses everything, but the constructive kind that forms the concrete base of science. The recognition that our current understanding is provisional. That today's certainty may be tomorrow's abandoned theory. That the willingness to be proven wrong is what separates knowledge from belief.
This matters for how I use AI, and for how I approach YoungFamilyLife generally.
I know I can be like a moth to the light of arrogance - drawn toward the comfortable feeling of thinking I know it all. It's a tendency I have to actively resist. And the best way I've found to resist it is to remind myself that my biggest strength isn't knowing things. It's challenging and being challenged on my own assumptions, my wonky hypotheses, my comfortable certainties.
When I work with Claude, this scepticism is essential. AI can produce confident, fluent prose that's completely wrong. It can reinforce my existing biases by giving them articulate expression. It can make me feel smarter than I am by polishing my half-formed thoughts into something that sounds profound.
The antidote is scepticism. Reading my own AI-assisted output with the same critical eye I'd apply to anyone else's claims. Asking "is this actually true?" rather than "does this sound good?" Being willing to delete polished paragraphs because they're polished nonsense.
The journey from poor school grades to a science degree taught me something about intellectual humility. The path wasn't straight, the destination wasn't guaranteed, and the arrival didn't mean I'd stopped needing to learn. That's the disposition I try to bring to everything on YoungFamilyLife - including this reflection on how it came to exist.
YoungFamilyLife ends 2025 in a different place than I imagined when I registered the company in June.
The original plan - courses launching in autumn 2025 - has been revised. Courses will now launch in autumn 2026, allowing time for the platform to build reputation through its content. This isn't a retreat; it's a recognition that depth before promotion produces better outcomes than rushing to market.
The numbers tell part of the story: 28 essays totalling approximately 196,000 words, spanning psychology, place, systems thinking, professional practice, and personal reflection. This essay itself pushes that total over 200,000 words - a milestone I hadn't anticipated in June. A theoretical trilogy that builds from Freud through Berne to original applied work. A six-part series on why changing people doesn't work. Check-in Awareness Cards providing analytical frameworks for recognising adopted positions.
But numbers don't capture the more important outcome: I now know this works.
The hypothesis in June was "maybe I can create something valuable." The evidence by December is "yes, and it's more substantial than I expected."
What remains is finding the audience. The content exists. The depth is established. The courses are designed. What 2026 requires is connection - helping the families and professionals who would benefit from this material to discover it exists.
I'm still waiting for that audience to find YoungFamilyLife. But I'm no longer wondering whether I have something worth finding.
5 August: Understanding Collective Intelligence - Exploring how groups develop emergent intelligence beyond individual capacity, examining the architecture that enables collective problem-solving.
8 August: No Time for Goodbyes: The Dance of Reciprocity - Examining the developmental importance of farewell rituals and how rushed departures impact children's sense of security and relationship understanding.
12 August: When Your Brain Has a Mind of Its Own - Understanding stress responses, the limbic system's protective mechanisms, and why our brains sometimes override our conscious intentions.
15 August: Play—the Brain's Natural Learning Environment - Exploring how play creates optimal conditions for neural development, skill acquisition, and learning that instruction alone cannot replicate.
20 August: Living Emergence: How Collective Intelligence Shapes Our Everyday Lives - Examining stadium crowds, traffic patterns, and social movements to understand how order emerges from individual actions without central control.
21 August: Bungay for Families: The Definitive Guide - A comprehensive four-part exploration of this Suffolk market town, examining geography, community, services, and what makes Bungay work for families (12,000 words).
27 August: When the Cat Rules the Dog - Exploring confidence through the metaphor of cats and dogs, examining authentic self-assurance versus performance, and what confidence really means in relationships.
28 August: Brothers in Contrasts - Examining Peter and Christopher Hitchens as a case study in how siblings from identical backgrounds can develop radically different worldviews and life trajectories.
30 August: Navigating Truth and Deception - Examining truth-telling in professional safeguarding contexts, exploring the tensions between honesty, protection, and building trust with vulnerable families.
30 August: The Victoria Sponge Problem - Using the deceptively simple Victoria sponge cake as a lens to examine perfectionism, good enough parenting, and the trap of pursuing impossible standards.
31 August: Columbo Investigation - Analysing Lieutenant Columbo's investigative methodology as a model for professional practice, exploring how his apparent bumbling masks sophisticated analytical thinking.
2 September: The Impossible Task of Changing People (Changing People Part 1) - Establishing the complete fictional ecosystem: social worker Angie Thokden, six distinct families (Hakdsons, Pakdens, Jokdens, Brekdens, Copkdens, Thomkdens), a full team of ten professionals with individual personalities, management layers, and two weeks of detailed diary entries that ground the entire series.
2 September: The Mathematics of Resistance (Changing People Part 2) - Threading psychological research through the established world: Kelly Jokden illustrates reactance theory, the Hakdsons demonstrate Self-Determination Theory, while maintaining absolute consistency with Part 1's character details, family dynamics, and professional relationships.
3 September: The Evolutionary Roots of Resistance (Changing People Part 3) - Weaving evolutionary biology through the same families and professionals established in Parts 1-2, maintaining the narrative threads while exploring why human nervous systems evolved to resist transformation rather than embrace it.
4 September: When Helping Hurts: The Professional's Dilemma (Changing People Part 4) - Returning to Angie in her car (the exact opening scene from Part 1) but revealing her moral injury experience. The same world, the same characters, the same moment—viewed through a different lens whilst maintaining every detail established across the previous three parts.
5 September: Influence and Adaptation (Changing People Part 5) - Threading new possibilities through the established ecosystem, examining what becomes achievable when professionals stop trying to change families. Tom still leaves at 5pm exactly, Sarah still drinks her coffee, Donna still counts her retirement days—the world remains consistent whilst the analysis shifts.
5 September: The View from Here (Changing People Part 6) - Concluding the series from inside the system, weaving together all six families, ten professionals, multiple research strands, and theoretical arguments whilst maintaining absolute consistency: the aggressive sitting story, character names, family dynamics, professional relationships—every thread held steady across 58,000 words.
6 September: A Conversation with John Bowlby - An imagined dialogue with attachment theory's founder, exploring his insights on secure base, separation anxiety, and the foundations of healthy development.
8 September: Platform Newsletter September 2025 - Inaugural newsletter introducing YoungFamilyLife's philosophy, recent content, and upcoming developments.
9 September: Want vs Need, Shame vs Guilt: When Precision Matters - Examining why these paired concepts are frequently confused and why precise language matters for both professional practice and family wellbeing.
10 September: Problems Are Problems: When Solutions Help and When They Harm - Exploring when professional interventions genuinely help families and when they inadvertently create additional problems whilst claiming to solve existing ones.
23 September: Hiring, Rehearsing and Performing: Lessons from Nick D'Virgilio's Brain Preparation - Analysing drummer Nick D'Virgilio's approach to complex musical performance as a model for understanding skill development, preparation, and executing under pressure.
25 September: Humility Check-in Card - First in the Check-in Awareness Cards series, providing frameworks for recognising adopted positions and exploring personal responses to challenge and uncertainty.
27 September: Killing, Killers and Cancelling - First Young Thinking essay, examining the ubiquity of killing in nature, human participation in violence both direct and distant, and cancellation as contemporary social death.
14 October: The Feedback Paradox: When Asking Signals Not Listening - Examining how feedback requests can paradoxically demonstrate that listening has already stopped, exploring the dynamics of performative consultation.
3 November: Syntropy and the Tag: The Accidental Prophecy of the Awful Popcorn Movie Hackers - Exploring how the 1995 film Hackers accidentally encoded something true about counterculture, identity, and creative force despite being objectively terrible (5,800 words).
15 November: Freud's Structural Model for Frontline Family Support: Understanding the Unintegrated Legacy of Early Infancy - First essay in the theoretical trilogy, examining Freud's oral stage, Klein's elaborations, and their application to contemporary family support practice (20,000 words).
16 November: Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis: From Freudian Theory to Observable Interaction - Second trilogy essay, demonstrating how Berne evolved Freudian concepts into observable patterns of ego states, transactions, games, and life positions (20,000 words).
18 November: Beyond Compliance: Transactional Analysis and System Proximity in UK Child Protection Meetings - Trilogy culmination applying TA to child protection meetings, introducing the novel "system proximity typology" that categorises families by their familiarity with statutory processes (23,000 words).
19 November: Executive Mobs: The Whirlpool of Professional Groupthink and Societal Looting - Analysing how professional groups can develop mob dynamics, exploring collective behaviours that emerge in senior management teams and executive structures.
Steve Young
YoungFamilyLife Ltd
December 2025
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