Information is power. And children have considerably less information than we do about the world around them.

Consensual Living is a philosophy, or collection of principles, by which families get along together without coercion, addressing everybody’s needs on an equal basis. The basic principles as I understand them are equality, trust and self determination.

A company in the USA produces children’s placebo tablets, cure-alls containing absolutely no active substances, selling in effect the illusion that there is a pill for every kind of distress.

Why do some parents become over-involved with their children’s lives? And what can they do about it? Maybe the first step toward letting go of a vice-like emotional grip on children is to work out what your own needs are.

Trying and failing to get a baby off to sleep at naptime provided another chance to watch my mind in action, ruining another perfectly good 45 minutes of my life.

If we neglect our needs, whether they are for playing sports, or musical instruments, for love, social contact, making things, whatever they may be, the longer we leave them the harder it becomes to break some internal barrier that our organism erects and start fulfilling them again.

One of the Mommy-wars I referred to in a recent post is the sleep war, in which CIO (Crying It Out) advocates sing the praises of leaving a baby or young child to cry until they fall asleep, while anti-CIO mothers think that this is psychologically damaging and offer a variety of alternatives, including the ritual chanting of ‘this too shall pass’.