For many families, the countdown to the summer holidays is filled with so much excitement. There are plans to make, suitcases to pack and dreams of days out, holidays abroad and creating magical memories together. Social media quickly fills with happy children on beaches, airport selfies and picture-perfect family adventures. But if you're raising a neurodivergent child, you might be feeling something quite different, I know I was. You might be feeling… anxious. Not because you don't want...

Spoon Theory was originally created to help people understand what it’s like to live with chronic illness. It uses “spoons” as a way of describing energy, with each spoon representing a unit of physical, emotional and cognitive capacity. Everyday tasks like getting dressed, concentrating, coping with noise, managing feelings uses up spoons, and when the spoons are gone, they’re gone. For many neurodivergent children, this metaphor fits really well. Children do not arrive in our settings with...

In many early years settings, self-regulation is often introduced through colourful resources, most notably The Colour Monster and similar materials that link emotions to specific colours. While these tools are usually well-intentioned and visually appealing, they can unintentionally oversimplify something that is deeply personal, complex, and subjective: how emotions are actually experienced. When we teach children that anger is red , sadness is blue , or happiness is yellow , we risk...