Hello NZSA!

I am thrilled and excited to announce that my book has been accepted by Bateman Books and is due for release in June 2026. The provisional title has been reworked and will be publicised early next year on my Plum Parenting website, and the Plum Parenting facebook and instagram pages. Please visit these sites for updates and there you will find links to a 1-hour podcast interviewing me about my work, which will give a glimpse of what is in the book.

There is right now an ever-increasing call for a childhood based more on whole-child experience in the real world, one that supports creative free play, healthy social interaction and growing independence along with the development of self-regulation and resilience. Jonathon Haidt expresses these concerns in his seminal work: The Anxious Generation.

This idea may be all very well, but how will parents be able to turn things around? How will they manage to take charge of screens, navigate reactive behaviours and facilitate great experiences when their children are already hardwired for dependencies and habitual negative reactions? How do you take a drug away from an addict? How to create positive effective boundaries when so far they haven't worked. My book will show how to safely and positively navigate all these scenarios at all ages. The goal is to lovingly settle down the defence system which I call the 'guard dog', and set the 'true child' free ... to be a child. 

For 35 years I worked as a nurse, midwife and early childhood teacher, then in 2007 I founded a parent mentoring service called Plum Parenting, based in Wellington, serving not only our cool little capital but also parents and teachers throughout the country and worldwide, online. This book is a response to almost 20 years of requests from my clients and those attending my lectures to share with the wider world what they say has been 'life-changing'.

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