Practices

Two stretches of childhood carry most of this: the first years of school, and the middle years around the move to secondary. Knowing that lets you prepare instead of react.

The early wobble is usually about being apart from home for a long day for the first time. The later one lands when peer opinion becomes the loudest…

A child coming back after weeks away is walking towards a mountain of missed work. Cut that mountain down before the return date, or it will punish them for coming.

Ask the school which pieces genuinely have to be made up and which can be written off, and get the answer in writing. What is left should be small…

The strengthened warning on this class covers misuse, addiction, physical dependence and withdrawal. The part most people miss is that dependence builds with ordinary correct use over weeks, with nobody doing anything wrong.

That distinction needs handling gently, because patients hear dependence and hear addict. Physical dependence is the body settling around something…

These medicines work on a timescale of four to six weeks, not days. Say the number out loud at the start, because someone expecting relief this week will have decided by Friday that it failed.

Something does happen on the first day, but it is only the first step of a change that takes weeks to finish. The useful version of this is a date:…