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📍 Monday 14th September | 8:00–9:30pm BST
💻 Live Online via Zoom
If you’re raising a sensitive, deeply feeling or neurodivergent child, you may know the exhaustion of trying so hard, reading the books, adapting, advocating, holding boundaries and still wondering whether you’re getting it right.
What do we do when the parenting playbook simply doesn’t fit the child in front of us?
This is what we’ll be exploring together in our next Parenting Lab: a small, reflective gathering for parents who are longing for something deeper than more advice.
Places are intentionally limited to keep the group intimate and supportive.
👉 Reserve your place here: [Parenting Lab 14th September 2026]
Join Parenting Lab on EventBrite
I’m delighted to share a new podcast conversation I recorded with William Allen, founder of The Highly Sensitive Man Group, and Marcas P. O’Dea, author and HSP Coach, for their Still Waters Podcast, which explores the inner lives of highly sensitive and creative people.
I really loved this conversation. We went deep into the world of highly sensitive children, what they need from us, why they can be so easily misunderstood, and what they might have to teach us as parents and as a wider culture.
We explored:
Why highly sensitive children can so easily be labelled as anxious, defiant, difficult or “too much” and what we may be missing when we focus only on their behaviour
The depth and perceptiveness of sensitive children, and why sensitivity isn’t fragility but a different way of processing the world
How sensitive children can internalise the message that there is something “wrong” with them and what changes when their sensitivity is understood and valued
Why not all highly sensitive children look alike, including the lively, extroverted and strong-willed children who don’t fit our stereotypes of sensitivity
The particular challenges facing highly sensitive boys, and why anger, defiance or becoming the class clown can sometimes protect a much more vulnerable inner world
Why sensitive boys need mentors and models of masculinity who show them that empathy, creativity, emotional depth and perceptiveness are strengths
Why our sensitive children can become extraordinary mirrors, revealing our own triggers, wounds, fears and places still waiting for our attention
What happens when we stop trying to fix our children’s difficult feelings and learn instead to stay with them and why co-regulation comes before self-regulation
Why I increasingly believe that supporting parents and children cannot happen only at the individual level, we need relationship, community and spaces where parents don’t have to carry everything alone
One of the things I came away from the conversation thinking about is how often we approach sensitive children by asking what needs to change, their anxiety, their anger, their defiance and their intensity.
But I’m increasingly interested in a different question:
What becomes possible when a child feels deeply understood?
And perhaps that question applies to us as parents, too.
So much of my work over the years has been with children who somehow don’t quite fit the mould. Deeply feeling, sensitive, anxious, intense, creative, strong-willed children. Children who notice so much, feel deeply, question everything and for whom the usual parenting advice doesn’t always seem to work.
Some of these children have diagnoses and some don’t. Sometimes parents simply have a sense that their child experiences the world differently.
And very often, by the time parents come to me, they have already tried an enormous amount.
This is really the territory that Parenting Labs has grown from.
This isn’t another space where we will tell you how to parent your child, but a space where we can slow down and become curious about what might be happening underneath our children’s behaviour, while also making room for what parenting these incredible and intense children brings up in us.
Because our children don’t need to fit a mould and neither do we.
Matthew and I will be opening this exploration together in our next Parenting Lab: Beyond the Playbook, on Monday 14th September at 8pm UK time.
A small, reflective online gathering for parents longing for something deeper than more information and advice. A space to pause, reflect, share and feel less alone in the complexity of parenting.
Parenting was never meant to be something we carried alone.
We’d love you to join us.
Join Parenting Lab on 14th September
I write the Resonant Parenting Project in between my work as a conscious parenting coach and looking after my eight-year-old daughter Matilda. Any support from readers through liking, sharing or subscribing helps make this work sustainable. Thank you!
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