So what’s this book about?

Throughout my 35 years of practise in nursing, midwifery and early childhood teaching, I witnessed a dramatic increase in parents struggling with the challenge of parenting. In response, I founded Plum Parenting, a one-on-one service to provide support for parents.

In the past 20 years of Plum Parenting, parents, teachers and caregivers increasingly reported that the children were not responding to them (or to others!) even when all the latest theories of emotional empathy and empowerment of child agency — or even ‘back to boot camp’ — were applied. The parents came to me in droves, and in tears. For these parents, life had become a misery of meltdowns.

No job is harder than parenting. It is 24/7 and relentless. Equally, no job is more healing, more mind-blowing and more life-affirming — if we can only crack the code.

This is what I set out to do — to crack the code of what was going wrong.

I studied strands from science, philosophy and the many theories of childhood, and listened to hundreds of stories from the coalface of parenting in my own practice. Suddenly there came a critical breakthrough. I realised how vital it was to see and appreciate the stark difference between the child’s guarded and intolerant defence system — which I call the ‘Guard Dog’ — and the open and tolerant ‘True Child’. As soon as I recognized that there is not one child to raise, but these two very different characters each requiring a very different approach, my interventions became immediately effective.

The key message in this book is that if childhood is not handled the right way it is possible to inadvertently over-empower the Guard Dog, so that instead of protecting the child, it becomes a feral over-protector and hardwires the child for anxiety.

When this happens, the child becomes enslaved to their defence system and its imperative for control, developing patterns of intolerance and high expectations of compliance — often referred to as ‘entitlement’. How a child might manifest this anxiety depends on their unique combination of ‘wiring’, temperament and history, including the pressures of the current situation.

Parents began to spread the word of the huge success of the method I developed out of this foundational understanding. The result has been long waiting lists for many years. They describe the transformation of their children and family life as a massive ‘break through’, ‘game-changing’ and ‘life-changing’.

Breaking Through is the result of years of pleading from my clients, teachers and audiences for ‘the book!’. It will give you step-by-step guidance on how to successfully ‘whisper’ your child’s Guard Dog and settle it into the ‘back seat’ of their psyche where it belongs — on call for real emergencies and no longer treating everyday life as an intolerable catastrophe. When the Guard Dog lets go, the True Child is set free and then becomes accessible to parental guidance, love, encouragement and the joy of learning. Free at last to be a child!

There are many other ‘breakthrough’ moments in this book. You will be shown how to nurture the life of your child and lay the right foundations of security, self-esteem and age-appropriate self-determination — empowering your True Child to become responsive to others and able to tolerate frustration, regulate impulsivity and make an effort to meet the world — even and especially when the going is tough!

There is an emerging and urgent public and professional voice calling for a return to a more natural childhood, with less time on screens and a greater emphasis on play and the development self-reliance in the real world. This presents a double challenge for parents: how to get the kids off the screens in the first place without a war, and then how to empower a healthy childhood without the Guard Dogs hijacking it. Breaking Through will show you the way.