In his recent Reith Lecture, Mark Carney, ex-Governor of the Bank of England, points out the danger that market values, rather than humanistic ones, increasingly permeate our lives. Unfortunately, for some considerable time, such a trend has been insistently evident in the world of the child. Since the late 1980s, Motherlove has morphed into the…
Fans of The Archers – across all generations – will be aware of a developing story line about Alice Carter (née Aldridge), a young married woman who is a heavy drinker but who has recently discovered that she is pregnant. This is a very topical story line with the increase in alcohol consumption across all…
“New brain-building grant paid by Government to women during pregnancy from the 6th month. Children’s physical and mental health improves five-fold; savings are made in prison and hospital costs; Covid-19 is defeated by resilient generation”. Could this ever come true? Mental resilience and healthy bodies are the result of a good start in life, when…
As an adult, eye contact with someone else leads to a connection. Your brainwaves are thrown out from you and go and come back through the other person’s eyes. They harmonise and are in attunement; something clicks; you are in synchrony. However, some people find it hard to make eye-contact, and there are various cultural…
There used to be a time when Mums and their newborn babies stayed in hospital for at least a week, which young parents of today find horrifying or amusing, while they compare notes with their friends about how quickly they got home after giving birth. There is no doubt that the less time spent in…
One could argue that Fashion is the visible expression of change, or progress. We ladies swapped long, cumbersome skirts for shorter divided skirts, or culottes, when our grandmothers took to the bicycle a hundred years ago, and we bobbed our hair to indicate that we had cast off our fusty pre-WW1 ‘crowning glory’ hairstyles. We…