Extraordinary Parenting: the essential guide to parenting and educating at home

As Natalie Wexler asks in her book The Knowledge Gap, ‘What if it turns out that the best way to boost reading comprehension is not to focus on comprehension skills at all but to teach kids, as early as possible, the history and science we’ve been putting off until it’s too late?’

school is the biggest source of stress for young people.

For each breathing-in period, the child needs a breathing-out period, and so a pattern is established; breathing-in tops up the child’s connection with you and fills them up, so that they can then spend time without your full attention as you breathe out.

Far from being superficial, our home environments have the power to create calm or incite conflict, to promote deep play and study, or lead to cries of, ‘I don’t have any toys.’

Think about your dream home environment. Your child’s is probably not very different!

It’s about working on ourselves as humans so that we can live as happily and peacefully with the younger humans that we share our lives with as possible, to everyone’s benefit.

These small actions, repeated lovingly year after year, become part of ‘what we do’ — the moments our children will look back on when grown, and perhaps recreate with their own children.

can help to remember that you’re on the same team as your child; that they don’t want to create more work or stress for you, and that you want to parent as well as you

Creating more predictability through rhythms can help children navigate transitions, because they learn to expect what is coming next so they aren’t caught off-guard. When more rhythm is brought to these points, the whole day starts to flow better, with less conflict and stress all round.