My work began in 2007, in a small home filled with my own young children and a growing sense that the early years held stories we weren’t yet telling properly. Nearly two decades on, that sense has only deepened.
My work began in 2007, in a small home filled with my own young children and a growing sense that the early years held stories we weren’t yet telling properly. Since then, I’ve spent nearly two decades alongside families, watching babies become talkers, talkers become explorers, and explorers become school starters. I’ve witnessed the ordinary magic of development and the very real challenges that come with it.
Across all those years, one truth has stayed constant: parents don’t need perfection. They need perspective. When adults understand what their child is working so hard to build, emotionally, socially, and neurologically, something shifts. The worry loosens. The relationship steadies. The home becomes a softer place to land.
Grounded Parenting is my way of offering that steadiness beyond the school gate. These guides and reflections gather the conversations I’ve had with parents for years and place them somewhere they can be returned to in the quiet moments, when a child is finally asleep, when the day has been long, when doubt is loud, and the house is still.
This is the understanding I’ve carried through nearly twenty years of practice: early childhood is not a problem to solve, but a story to witness. And parents deserve to feel supported as they learn to read it.
Alongside my practice, I hold a Master of Education and a Master of Research. I began doctoral studies exploring child-to-adult ratios and their relationship to language development in early years settings. After completing the taught phase and a year of research, I stepped back from the programme. The academic framing I was asked to defend didn’t yet align with the depth and direction of my lived practice, and while that was painful, it was also clarifying.
My work has never been about theory for theory’s sake. It has always been about understanding children in ways that genuinely help families. The research continues, just not within the confines of a formal programme for now. And everything I write reflects that: evidence held with care, translated into something human, practical, and real.
Alongside Grounded Parenting, I am the founder of the Growing Curious Children curriculum and assessment framework, a professional framework for early years settings that formalises the approach I’ve developed over nearly two decades of practice. GCC is built on the same philosophy that runs through all my work: that children are capable, curious, and shaped by the quality of the relationships and environments around them; and that the adults who support them are most effective when they understand what they are seeing.
The GCC framework lives at a different address and speaks to a different audience, but the heart of it is the same. The noticing. The understanding before managing. The deep respect for what children are doing, always, even when it looks like nothing at all.
My childminding setting, Little Puddings, has been part of the Lincolnshire early years landscape since 2007. Over those years, it has held a range of Ofsted grades, including Outstanding, but the heart of the work has remained constant. The practice is as strong now as it was then, if not stronger: deeply relational, unhurried, language-rich, and grounded in the belief that children thrive when they are given time, space, and responsive adults who truly see them.
Little Puddings is also a Communication Friendly Setting, with a long-standing emphasis on outdoor play, loose parts provision, and the kind of everyday interactions that build language, confidence, and connection. I work with children from birth through the early years, and the rhythms of that daily practice shape everything I write.
The vignettes in the guides and articles are drawn from patterns observed across hundreds of families, never from any specific child, but from the accumulated picture of what is typical, what is concerning, and what genuinely changes things.
If nearly twenty years of practice has taught me anything, it is this: when we understand the gear-changes of our own day, honestly, without judgment, our children stop feeling mysterious. We begin to recognise them. And in that recognition, everything softens.
These are responses from parents who have read the guides. Shared with permission, and published as written. Reviews about the free articles are on the articles page.
If you have read a guide or an article and found it useful, a sentence or two makes a real difference to other parents deciding whether to read. Responses are published anonymously unless you ask to be named.