Developmental Observations

What if the thing you want to change is also the thing your child needs to develop?

Think back to yourself at fifteen. Not your grades. Not whether you got into trouble. Not whether you were easy. What was your relationship with your parents actually like? Could you be around them? Could you talk? And as you got older, were you becoming more yourself — or did being yourself create a bigger problem every year?

By adolescence, you can see what childhood has been producing. A young person who has been developing well increasingly has a life of their own. Their interests matter to them. Their relationships are becoming their own. They are beginning to move towards things they genuinely care about, and the world is gradually becoming something they can enter rather than something they need to hide from. Their parents can give them more freedom because freedom is becoming something they know how to use.

And the relationship changes with it. There is more room to talk. More room to enjoy one another. The exhausting work of carrying the child's life gradually gives way to something parents rarely imagine when their children are small: the pleasure of watching someone you love begin to build a life that is genuinely their own.

A life with direction. A life they want to live. And increasingly, the capacity to do something worthwhile with it.

Now look in the other direction. A teenager shuts down. Or fights back. They have learned that life happens to them, that other people are always trying to control them, and that their parents stand between them and what they want.

One person pushes. The other resists. One worries. The other withdraws. Eventually people call it adolescence. But it did not begin there. Something was developing long before the teenager appeared. That is what makes childhood so important.

At six, a parent can carry an extraordinary amount for a child. At eleven, they can still compensate for a great deal. The child can appear to be growing perfectly well while the parent quietly becomes responsible for an ever larger share of the life that child is supposed to be learning to carry. The problem gets solved. The parent feels successful.

What fails to develop gets managed. And what gets managed can stay hidden for a surprisingly long time.

By adolescence, the demands become too large to hide it. The child wants more freedom. Their relationships become more complicated. Their choices carry greater consequences. There are more things a parent cannot simply organise, prevent or manage away. Suddenly the child who was manageable becomes extremely difficult to manage.

Many parents tell themselves adolescence changed everything. It didn't. Adolescence revealed everything.

This is where I think parenting has become dangerously confused. We spend enormous energy deciding whether a child's behaviour is good or bad, acceptable or unacceptable, worrying or reassuring. But behaviour is only what happened.

The more interesting question is: What is developing here?

I learned to ask that question because I spent years working with children whose behaviour had already been thoroughly explained to the adults around them. They were oppositional. They were disengaged. They were incapable. They didn't care. By the time I met them, the explanations had become part of the environment. So I learned not to begin there.

Consider a child who resists almost everything required of them. Schoolwork. Practice. Chores. Anything imposed from outside creates friction. Their parents are exhausted. They know the child is capable. They've seen it. Sometimes the child can be astonishing when they choose something themselves.

So the obvious question becomes: Why won't they use all that ability? The parent sees a problem.

But look again. This child is not passive. They can generate enormous energy in defence of their attention, their interests and whatever matters to them in that moment.

That doesn't make the behaviour good. It doesn't mean the child should be allowed to avoid everything difficult. It means there is something there worth understanding before you decide what to do with it.

The parent hasn't lowered their expectations. They have raised them. They are no longer asking: How do I make this child easier? They are asking: What could this become at its best? That is the shift.

A Developmental Observation doesn't begin by asking whether you like what you see. It begins by asking where the movement could go. Because children don't develop towards vague ideas about the future. They develop by meeting reality.

So when a child is struggling, the useful question isn't simply: How do I stop this? It is: What capacity might be underneath what you're seeing?

None of those observations tells you what the child will become. They tell you where to look.

Because the same force can produce very different lives depending on where it goes.

The developmental question is not whether the raw material is good. It is whether you can recognise it early enough to see where it could go.

That is why the behaviour that frightens you deserves another look. Not because every difficult behaviour is secretly a gift. Because the behaviour in front of you is not the finished person. It is a person in motion. Sometimes the movement has stopped. Sometimes it has found a dead end. Sometimes the child has discovered a way of surviving reality that works well enough that they have stopped looking for another way. And sometimes the very thing you have been trying to eliminate is evidence of a capacity that has not yet found its proper use.

Your job is not to preserve the behaviour. It is to understand the force inside it well enough to see where it could go. This changes the way you look at your child. You become harder to frighten. You stop treating every difficult moment as evidence of a terrible future. You begin to notice what wakes them up. What they pursue without being asked. What kinds of problems make them more alive. What they defend. What they avoid. What they can do when nobody is organising the experience for them.

And slowly, the picture changes.

This is why I create Developmental Observations.

Each one begins with something that appears to be going wrong. Then we look again.

We ask what the child is actually doing, where their movement has stopped, what they have learned instead of meeting reality, and what capacity might already be present.

Most importantly: if that capacity developed properly, where could it go?

You are not standing at the end of the story, trying to repair whatever has gone wrong. You are standing somewhere near the beginning. And the better you learn to see what is actually developing, the more clearly you can help shape what comes next.

That is a Developmental Observation.