Mum is currently awaiting a placement and in hospital and I’m very apprehensive as to where they will try and put her. I have a 16yr old daughter and it made me take a step back on occasions rather than ongoing into full rant mode with her. Yesterday I begged my daughter to go back to sleep and my sons to get up; watched Moana with one child and Succession with another; poured Calpol for the youngest and wine for the eldest.

Social workers here do not have a great reputation - there are some good, sadly outnumbered by the bad. Who can expect a member of the public to have any expertise on appropriate development theory or nutrition science? The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. And well, we were just two kids, and my family was by no means living in any village, but in a building where families live now too. When it comes to motherly love and motherly anxiety, then, it can be really quite hard to tell the difference.Is it any wonder the Western birthrate has fallen below replacement levels, when the culture of parenthood, and motherhood especially, couldn’t be more designed to induce guilt and even self-loathing? Even gran's sister can't really grasp the issues (and couldnmt when they lived closer) - and since gran moved away from her and hasnt seen her for a while, I think it is the easiest way of tackling it. I’m certainly sympathetic to the argument recently offered by Ashley Frawley that if such a link is established, it’s the fault of the experts not the parents, who have been positively encouraging the latter to think of themselves as de-skilled in the upbringing of their offspring for decades.

Mum also removed all her clothing and she ran her hands through her hair to make it stick up away from her scalp because she could not bear it to be on her neck.

There’s another that tells you about developmental “leaps” and what unusual behaviour to expect when one happens (cue lots of anxious reassurance-seeking between parents: “do you think she might be leaping at the moment? Addressed in green ink on yellowish parchment with a purple seal, they are swiftly confiscated by his grisly aunt and uncle. There’s a lot of things I recognise – at our debute in parenthood there were a lot of opinions from the Silent Generation, on feed intervals, sleep tacktics and what not. Whilst we cannot predict the future for our children, Jodie is a great believer in equipping our children with the tools they need to be able to SHINE* through any storms that they may face.

Her insistence on maintaining self-control, pride, joy, support, humility in the face of their growth is vastly humane and sweet. Surely we can recognise that whilst individuals vary enormously there is also a strong element of ‘horses for courses’ in this world. It sounds like you and your mum could get caught up in a one of those conversations that just spirals down until nobody feels heard. Lorraine is celebrating the release of her book with an online interview with Emma Freud on June 15th at 7. I follow Lorraine Candy in her Podcast about midlife and already appreciated her good humour and tips/comments on the teenager world.

MIL said she thought nothing of it at the time, but as she got older she figured her mother must have thought, well, I have five girls, so if I lose one there’s always a spare! I didn’t even get a copy of the receipt, and they let me take it home with no inspection of my facilities. I mention the former very gently only because sometimes in the early stages people act out of character.