Belinda Hopkins on the healing power of Restorative Justice

“Many people equate justice having been done with the administering of a punishment, and in schools and residential child care contexts a similar expectation prevails, or is believed to prevail. The logic is that if somebody does a bad thing then a bad thing needs to be done to them. […] A restorative response, with its focus not on blame, punishment and alienation but on repair and re-connection, encourages a wrongdoer to take responsibility for the harm they have caused, and gives them an opportunity to repair the harm…”

August 15, 2009January 30, 2023Autism

Carol Hagland on Working with Adults with Asperger Syndrome

“Adults with AS seem so often to be regarded as a frustrating puzzle. I have spent much of the last ten years or so teaching and training people to understand and manage the problems that AS can present, and it seemed that this was an area where lots of people, regardless of their level of training, would welcome some help.”

July 15, 2009Adoption and Fostering

Linda Goldman: Children Living with Fear – Recognizing and Healing the Trauma

“Traumatized children tend to re-create their trauma, often experiencing bad dreams, waking fears, and reoccurring flashbacks.. Young children have a very hard time putting these behaviours into any context of safety. Many withdraw and isolate themselves, regress and appear anxious, and develop sleeping and eating disorders as a mask for the deep interpretations of their trauma.”

July 15, 2009Education

Mary Fawcett on Learning Through Child Observation

“The government’s more joined up approach to children’s services now means there is an ever greater need for a multi-professional approach. Though the rhetoric is all about ‘every child matters’, personalisation etc, I feel that prescriptive, goal-driven approaches may have diminished open-minded observation and led to less sensitive understanding.”

July 15, 2009Autism

Albert Cotugno on Group Interventions for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

“We believe that learning about and developing social competency and social interactional skills must occur within the naturalistic environment of peers and groups. However, for children on the spectrum, this must be approached in thoughtful, systematic, effective ways with a variety of variables considered and addressed to be successful.”

June 15, 2009Education

Mike Stein on Quality Matters in Children’s Services

“Crude outcome statistics which are used to condemn the state in blanket fashion fail to recognise the progress made by young people, including major achievements, such as getting back into education after many years, furthering leisure interests and vocational skills, and, often for the first time, developing consistent, positive and trusting relationships with adults. But no outcome boxes to tick!”

June 15, 2009Counselling

Judy Ryde on Being White in the Helping Professions

“I found…that it is extremely difficult for us white people to understand our position in a racial context. Many people I spoke to wondered if ‘white’ meant anything at all and I started by questioning if there was anything to look at. Then gradually the meaning of whiteness in a racial context became apparent, like shapes emerging from a white page. It was both fascinating and salutary.”

June 15, 2009Autism

Rudy Simone on 22 Things a Woman Must Know If She Loves a Man with Asperger’s Syndrome

“He’s going to have so many wonderful qualities (because people with Aspergers do!) that you will fall in love with. He will also seem vulnerable in many ways and because women are caretakers you’re going to have this tendency to be motherly and to sometimes ignore your own needs–this applies to AS women as well because we tend to do the same stuff. Love yourself as much as you love him –that’s the advice my own man gave me.”

April 1, 2009May 8, 2017Mental health

Taijiquan, Qi Gong, and the Cultivation of Health, Happiness and Longevity: An Interview with Michael Acton

“Western Science will no doubt eventually explain much of what Qi Gong is and what it can do. But we don’t have to wait for explanations, we can cultivate the experience now. We can rediscover our innate ability to restore and heal ourselves and rest in mental dimensions that will always remain beyond science. In a world where we are sensorially overloaded and so many of our experiences are tailored, limiting and manipulative we can discover an internal freedom and strength and a sense of real liberation and empowerment and perhaps even spirituality. The methods for this were cultivated thousands of years ago. It has taken a long time for the West to notice them.”

March 15, 2009Autism

Digby Tantam asks Can the World Afford Autistic Spectrum Disorder?

“…neurotypicals are linked together, or rather our brains are, by a kind of wireless network, which I call the interbrain. […] People with autism do not tune in, or not so much–that’s the main argument of the book. Their ‘interbrain connection’ is tenuous. They have ‘low bandwidth’.”