The parent makes a reasonable request. The teenager ignores it. The parent repeats it. The teenager explodes, or shuts down, or walks away mid-sentence. The parent escalates. The teenager stonewalls. Nothing is resolved. Everyone is exhausted.

The parent, understandably, reads this as defiance. As a deliberate choice. As the child asserting their will against ours.

But here is what Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté want us to understand. What looks like a strong will is almost never a strong will. It is a very weak one.

Counterwill Is Not What We Think It Is

In a peer-oriented child, the counterwill is particularly intense, especially towards parents. There is no surprise here. Their nervous system has already re-oriented its attachment away from the parent and toward the peer group. So when a parent tries to exert influence, the instruction does not land as guidance from a trusted, loved adult. It lands as pressure from someone the child is, neurologically speaking, no longer oriented toward.

It registers as interference. As coercion. And the counterwill fires.

The weaker the will, the more powerful the counterwill. What looks like strength is the defensive reaction of a self that has not yet fully formed.

This is the most important reframe in this section of the book “Hold on to your kids”. We look at our defiant teenager and see someone asserting themselves. What we are actually seeing is someone who does not yet have a self to assert. The opposition is not an expression of will. It is evidence of its absence.

The peer-oriented child cannot do this. Because their sense of self is borrowed from the peer group, not grown from the inside. And a borrowed self is a fragile one. It cannot tolerate anything that might disrupt the peer attachment it depends on for its very existence.

Key Insight:

You cannot teach a child who is not oriented toward you. First restore the relationship. Then the teaching becomes possible.

Why Your Help Feels Like Attack

Once we understand counterwill, something else makes painful sense. Why every attempt to help makes things worse.

You offer to help with the homework. Your teenager says they do not need help. You suggest a gentler approach to a friendship problem. They dismiss it. You remind them about the phone-on rule at dinner. They push back with an intensity that seems completely disproportionate.

Help is only receivable from someone the child is attached to and not in conflict with. From anyone else, it registers as interference.

This is not personal but a structural challenge. The parent-child attachment is the infrastructure through which all parenting influence travels. When that infrastructure has been weakened by peer orientation, the influence has nowhere to go. It bounces back. And the parent, who is trying as hard as they can, finds that the harder they try, the worse it gets.

This is the moment when parents in my practice often say: I feel like nothing I do makes any difference. And they are right. The solution is not a better technique. It is the restoration of the relationship.

The Flight From Feeling

Here is something that is less visible but just as important.

Peer-oriented children do not just resist direction. They also resist feeling.

Neufeld and Maté describe what they call the flight from vulnerability. Because in a peer group, vulnerability is dangerous. Peers are not equipped to hold each other’s pain. They are equally insecure, equally immature, equally unable to offer the unconditional acceptance that vulnerability requires. And so the peer-oriented child learns, at a cellular level, that it is not safe to feel.

They armour up. They become hard, cynical, cool, dismissive. The language of teenage peer culture is almost entirely a language of invulnerability. Nothing is a big deal. Nothing hurts. Nothing matters enough to feel openly.

What we miss, because the armour is so convincing, is what is underneath it. Behind the bravado is a child who is desperately hungry for a safe adult to feel their feelings with. But they cannot access that need. The peer orientation that was supposed to offer them belonging has, instead, cut them off from the very vulnerability that would allow them to grow.

If we do not hold on to our children, the ultimate cost is the loss of their ability to hold on to their truest selves.

And here is the developmental consequence that I find both most sobering and most motivating for parents. Maturation requires frustration to be felt and integrated. A child who cannot feel frustration, disappointment, sadness, or loss, cannot grow through those experiences. They are stuck.

This is what Neufeld means when he talks about children being stuck in immaturity. He is not talking about children who act young sometimes. He is talking about children whose emotional development has been frozen at an early stage because the peer group cannot offer them what they need in order to keep moving forward.

Stuck at the Preschool Stage

I want to be specific about this, because I think it is one of the most clarifying and most compassionate things we can hold about our peer-oriented teenagers.

Between the ages of two and five, children are naturally egocentric, concrete in their thinking, emotionally reactive, and deeply resistant to anything that feels like external control. This is developmentally appropriate at that age. It is not appropriate at fourteen. But it is what we are looking at in many peer-oriented teenagers.

The same child sitting their international school exams, managing a full extracurricular schedule, and navigating a complex social world is, emotionally speaking, operating from the same stage as a preschooler.

• They react rather than reflect.

• They resist rather than negotiate.

• They feel their feelings in the body but cannot name or integrate them.

Sadly however, this is not their choice. They are stuck and haven’t progressed safely to the next stage of childhood development.

Key Insight:

The child who cannot be vulnerable cannot grow. And the child who cannot be vulnerable with parents will seek the illusion of safety in peers. The illusion never delivers. But right now it is all they have.

The Flattening of Culture and the Loss of Vertical Transmission

There is a wider dimension to this that I think is particularly important for families in Hong Kong, and especially for expat families raising children far from their roots.

Culture has always been transmitted vertically. From adult to child, carrying wisdom, values, story, identity, and a sense of where one comes from and what one belongs to. Coming-of-age rituals across every culture in human history have honoured each stage of development as a passage from one adult-guided chapter to the next. The elders held the young. The community witnessed the transition. The child was accompanied.

Peer-oriented culture transmits horizontally. From child to child, carrying fashion and slang and social anxiety and the desperate, exhausting project of managing what other fourteen-year-olds think of you. It carries no wisdom because it has none to offer. It carries no values because it is populated entirely by people who are themselves still forming theirs.

Which means the peer group fills the vacuum with even greater force. And which means that adult connection, specifically the parent-child attachment but also the wider attachment village of teachers and coaches and family friends, is even more essential here than it is anywhere else.

Children do not need more peer time. They need more genuine adult time, with adults who are genuinely present. Not performing presence while checking their phones. Actually present.

The Paradox at the Heart of It

Neufeld offers what he calls the central paradox of development. To foster independence, we must first invite dependence. To promote individuation, we must provide a sense of belonging and unity. To help a child separate, we must assume the responsibility for keeping them close.

We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it.

But the child who has rested in unconditional love, who has been held through their frustrations rather than left to manage them alone, who has been allowed to be vulnerable with a safe adult and found that the relationship survived it, that child does not need toughening. They are already resilient. Not because they were pushed. Because they were held.

The child who has been peer-oriented, who has armoured up to survive in a group that could not hold their feelings, who has suppressed their true self to keep the peace with equally insecure age-mates, that child is not tough. They are defended. And defended is not the same as resilient. Defended is exhausting, and it keeps the feelings they need to grow through locked away where they cannot be processed.

What We Can Do

This article was not written to alarm you but to invite you to take inspired action.

You cannot force a peer-oriented child back into relationship with you. But you can make the relationship feel worth coming back to. You can be the adult who:

• stays warm even when they resist.

• who does not take the counterwill personally.

• who understands that the defiance is not directed at you but is a reflexive defence against a world that has not yet offered them a safe enough place to put it down.

• You can collect before you direct

• You can stop trying to help before you have re-established connection

• You can delight in your child for no reason, and wait, patiently and stubbornly, for them to notice

Firstly however, you can (and must) tend to your own nervous system, so that when they finally do let down the armour, even for a moment, there is a regulated, warm, genuinely present adult waiting for them there. Ready to see them for who they are.

That is the most powerful developmental intervention available. It has no curriculum, no app, and no subscription fee. It is simply a parent who refuses to stop orienting toward their child, even when their child has stopped orienting toward them.

With so much love, Lisel

Two parents, both working in demanding professional roles. A twelve-year-old daughter who, by most measures, is doing well. She has good friends. She is kind. She is curious. She is self-motivated and has hobbies that she enjoys and excels in.

Yet something had shifted. Her parents could feel it, even though they couldn’t label it.

She dismissed ideas from her mum and dad without a second thought, but accepted the exact same idea the moment it came from a friend. She was more hurt by a falling out in her friendship group than by anything that happened at home. She was checking her phone within minutes of waking up and often falling asleep with it. Earlier this year, she was tentative and tried to talk herself out of the lead role of a musical. The stage is where she came most alive. That was the red flag that made her parents realise they needed help.

And her parents, who love her deeply and were trying their absolute best, were not sure what to do.

What they were describing is not a behaviour or a stage of development. It is what happens when a child’s compass begins to point toward her peers rather than her parents. Gordon Neufeld calls it peer orientation, and it is one of the most important things I see in my practice. Especially in expat hubs like Hong Kong where friendships are fluid and there is a constant reinvention of friendship circles, hierarchies and dynamics.

Peer Orientation is not Peer Friendship

Peer orientation is not peer friendship. Friendships are wonderful. Learning to navigate relationships with other children is genuinely important and good.

Peer orientation is different. It is when a child begins to look to her peers not just for fun and company, but for belonging, identity, values, and direction. For the things that, developmentally, she is designed to receive from the adults in her life.

It happens gradually, and it happens in families that are loving and attentive. The conditions of life in Hong Kong, the long working hours, the saturation of peer contact, the phones that keep friendships live around the clock, create the perfect environment for it. This family was not doing anything wrong. They were living the lives that this city asks of most of us.

The Phone, while Not the Problem, is the Amplifier

The phone was not why their daughter had become peer-oriented. But it was making things significantly harder to shift.

Here is the piece that I think parents most need to hear. We did not grow up with friendships that were available twenty-four hours a day. When we came home, we came home. Playdates had to be planned. Phone calls were timebound. Even with the very best of friendships, we all got a natural break from each other. We had space to breathe, to be bored, to come back to ourselves and to our families. Conversations, values and belonging were reinforced at home, more often than not, around the dinner table.

Our children do not have that break unless we build it for them.

The friendships do not leave the school gate anymore. They come home in the pocket. They are present (though not physically) at the dinner table and under the pillow. They greet them first thing in the morning. The peer group’s influence no longer ends when the school day ends, and that is a genuinely new thing to be navigating as a parent.

This does not mean phones are evil or that friendships conducted partly through screens are somehow lesser. It means that the level of peer contact many children now have is something no previous generation of parents has had to think about, and we owe it to our children to think about it now.

For this family, working on phone boundaries was not about punishment or distrust. It was about deliberately creating the conditions under which their daughter could actually come home. Emotionally. Not just physically.

How we worked together to guide her back Home

I want to be specific here, because I find that general advice about connection rarely lands the way a concrete example does.

We did not overhaul their lives. We could not. These were two professionals with demanding jobs, after-school sport and theatre schedules, and a twelve-year-old who was not exactly asking to spend more time with her parents. We worked with what was already there and made it count more.

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✨ One Quote to Carry

“The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does but rather who the parent is to a child.”

Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté • Hold On to Your Kids

Sit with that one. Not who a parent does, but who a parent is. Because the most powerful thing you bring to your child is not a technique or a consequence or a strategy. It is your regulated, present, genuinely interested self.

This weekend, let that be enough. You are already the most important thing in your child’s world, even when it does not feel remotely like it.

☕ One Act of Self-Care

Because a depleted parent cannot be an available one.

Find ten quiet minutes this weekend. Not to plan how to connect with your child better. Not to think through the conflict from this week or the conversation you wish you had handled differently.

Just to remember who you are when nobody needs anything from you.

When did I last feel like myself in my journey as a mother? When was the last time you felt your child truly listened, trusted, and connected with you...

Find ten minutes this weekend. Make something warm to drink. Sit somewhere quiet. And let yourself feel, honestly, whatever comes up when you think about this very heavy question. Remember, it is never too late. You can rebuild that connection today.

Make something warm. Sit somewhere quiet. And come back to yourself first.

❤️ One Action to Spark Connection

Collect before you direct.

Choose one moment this weekend with your child. Before you ask anything of them, before you remind them of anything, before there is any agenda at all:

Find them. Make eye contact. Use their name. Say something that communicates: I am glad you are here. I am glad you are mine.

Do not follow it with a request. Do not let it become the warm-up to a difficult conversation. Just let it be what it is.

“Hey. I just wanted to say I love you. That’s all.”

That is collection. That is your nervous system reaching toward theirs with no agenda except connection. And over time, those moments are what rebuild the gravitational pull that has been quietly loosening.

Small. Consistent. Unconditional. That is how it comes back.

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My child just does not listen to me.

But the moment their friend says the same thing I have been saying for weeks, suddenly it is the most obvious truth in the world.

If that lands somewhere familiar, I want to offer you something. It is not a technique or a reframe, but a simple explanation. What you are describing is almost certainly not a behaviour problem. It is an attachment problem. Understanding the difference changes everything about how you respond.

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“I know she is supposed to want to be with her friends more than with us. I know that is healthy. But nobody told me how much it would actually feel like something. It is further complicated by the transient nature of our own adult friendships in this city we love to call home”

I think that is one of the truest things I have heard in my practice in a while.

We can know something is normal and still feel it in our chest. We can understand the developmental theory and still stand in the doorway watching them go, feeling something that is not quite sadness and not quite pride but lives somewhere between the two.

This week I want to talk about peer orientation. About what is happening when your tween starts leaning out.

What is happening in those years between eight and twelve

Your child is rehearsing who they are. In the presence of other people, away from home, in the messy and sometimes painful laboratory of peer relationships.

They are learning what they value. How they come across. What kind of friend they want to be and what kind they do not. What it feels like to be chosen and what it feels like not to be.

All of that is necessary. All of it, including the hard bits.

And in Hong Kong, where the community is constantly shifting and friendships can feel fragile and impermanent, it is also genuinely harder than it might be elsewhere. Tweens here are doing all of the above while also learning, often early, that the people they love sometimes leave.

That deserves acknowledgement. For them and for you.

The anchor they still need

Here is what I want you to hold onto through all of this.

Peer orientation is healthy. But it does not mean our role in their lives gets smaller. It changes shape.

The most confidently social children are not the ones whose parents stepped back early and let them figure it out. They are the ones who know, without needing to check, that there is somewhere safe to come home to.

So if your tween comes back from a hard social week and finds their way to you, even sideways, even pretending they are not really asking, that is the attachment working. That is the foundation doing exactly what it was built to do.

The project of fitting in and the better one

When I sit with parents whose tweens are struggling socially, the anxiety they describe in their children almost always sounds the same.

I need to be more like them. I need to figure out what they want and become that. I need to fit the shape of the group.

That project is both exhausting and, in the end, unsatisfying. Because the version of themselves they are shrinking to fit never quite feels like home.

What I offer instead, once I have sat with them in the difficulty, is this.

Stop trying to fit into the mould. Start looking for the people who:

share your interests

feel good to be around

play fair

you don’t have to shrink to be around

celebrate you

lift you up

Ask your child what they love talking about. What makes them laugh until they cannot stop. Where they feel most themselves.

And then help them find the places where other people are doing the things they love.

Those friendships, be it at gymnastics, cubs, football, ballet, theatre, when they come, tend to stick. Even in a city like Hong Kong, where everything else shifts too quickly. Friendships and in real life relationships in this busy age require intentionality. Many times that requires us to be inconvenienced to create them.

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One noticeable difference.

The patch of bush by the side of the road, right by the bus stop, had gone wild overnight. We had our first proper summer shower last week and something in that soil just decided it was time. I almost walked past it. But then I looked closer.

Growing up through the thick tangle of weeds, right there by a main road with buses and taxis thundering past, were little tomatoes.

Dozens of them. Small, green, yellow, orange, entirely unbothered by where they had ended up.

Nobody planted them. They came from rotting tomatoes tossed onto the street above. Months ago, probably. Casually discarded. And yet here they were. Persisting. Growing. Bearing fruit. With almost no care at all.

I stood there longer than I meant to.

Matthew 6:26

Those tomatoes did not worry about the road noise or the concrete or the weeds crowding in from every side. They just grew from where they landed.

If you are in the weeds right now, please read that again.

Despite the conditions. Despite the season. Despite where you feel you have ended up.

What season of life are you in right now?

Are you in the weeds?

Are you the rotting tomato that became something nobody expected?

Are you only just beginning to sense that something in you is ready to grow?

Trust it. Trust the slow, unseen work happening beneath the surface. Trust that being discarded, or overlooked, or planted in the wrong-looking place does not disqualify you from bearing fruit.

With so much love, Lisel

Read more on the blog, Bloom Where You Are Planted •www.ourflourishingfamilies.com

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Letting go.

The Child Who Comes Back

I want to start with a scene that I think every parent in Hong Kong will recognise, even if the details are different in their own family.

Your child walks into a room full of people they do not know. Maybe it is a new school. A birthday party. A first day at a new activity. You watch them from the doorway, your heart doing the thing hearts do in those moments, half hope and half something else, something more tender and more complicated than hope.

And then they go. They walk in. They find their footing. They do not look back.

If that scene makes something tighten in your chest rather than simply expand with pride, this post is for you. Because that tightening deserves to be recognised. Not judged. But understood.

What Letting Go Actually Means

Letting go does not mean stepping back and watching from a distance. It does not mean withdrawing your love or your presence or your availability. It does not mean pretending the separation is easy when it is not.

Letting go means holding the door open. It means making yourself reliably available so that they can afford to leave. It means trusting the security you have spent years building, even when every instinct in your body wants to pull them back close.

Eli Harwood puts it beautifully in her book Raising Securely Attached Kids. Our children do not belong to us. Our love belongs to them, and it goes wherever they go. As they grow, our role changes. We move from doing everything for them to being with them, from holding them close to holding space.

Holding space is the hardest kind of parenting. It is invisible. It is quiet. And it asks us to contain, inside ourselves, feelings that belong entirely to us, not to our children.

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The Still Face Experiment

In 1975, developmental psychologist Ed Tronick conducted one of the most important and most replicated studies in attachment research. It is known as the Still Face Experiment, and if you have never seen it, I encourage you to watch it, because it is both deeply uncomfortable and quietly profound.

In the experiment, a mother and her infant interact naturally, warmly, and responsively. The baby is engaged, curious, delighted. Then, on cue, the mother goes still. Completely still. Her face becomes neutral. She stops responding.

The baby notices almost immediately. She tries to re-engage. She points, she vocalises, she smiles harder. When nothing changes, she becomes increasingly distressed. She turns away. She hunches. She begins to break down.

Then the mother re-engages. And within moments, the baby comes back. The repair is swift and complete.

What Tronick found, across decades of research that followed, was that mis-attunement between parent and child is not the exception in healthy relationships. It is the norm. Parents and babies are in sync only about thirty percent of the time. The rest is a continuous cycle of mismatch and repair, disconnection and reconnection.

It is not the absence of rupture that builds secure attachment. It is the consistent, repeated experience of restoration of connection and repair when there has been a rupture.

This is one of the most quietly revolutionary findings in developmental psychology. And I think it is one that every parent, and particularly every parent carrying guilt about not getting it right, deserves to hold.

We have been told, directly and indirectly, that the goal is attunement. Presence. Responsiveness. And those things matter enormously. But the research tells us that even in the most securely attached relationships, they are only happening about a third of the time. The other two-thirds is made of ordinary human imperfection, small moments of missing each other, and the repair that follows.

What This Actually Means for You

You will lose patience. You will say something in frustration that you wish you could take back. You will be on your phone when they are trying to tell you something important. You will misread what they need. You will give advice when they wanted to be heard, or stay quiet when they needed direction.

And I want to be very clear with you about something: none of that is the problem.

The problem, in terms of attachment, is if the rupture is never repaired. If the disconnection becomes the steady state. If the message a child receives, repeatedly and without resolution, is: when I am in distress and I reach for you, nothing changes.

That is what creates insecurity. Not the moments of getting it wrong. The absence of coming back.

Children do not need us to be perfect. They need us to return. And in the returning, they learn something that will serve them for the rest of their lives: that relationships survive difficulty.

I think about this a lot in the context of Hong Kong parenting, where the pressure to perform perfectly is real and relentless. Where the culture of achievement can make even our parenting feel like something to get right, to optimise, to measure. Where the visibility of other families, on school runs and WhatsApp groups and social media, can make our own imperfect moments feel more shameful than they deserve to.

The research is asking us to release that particular burden. Not because imperfection does not matter, but because what matters more is what we do next.

Why Guilt Is Not the Same as Repair

I want to name something I see very often in the families I work with, particularly among high-achieving, deeply loving parents in Hong Kong.

The guilt after a rupture can be enormous. And paradoxically, that guilt sometimes gets in the way of the repair.

When we are flooded with shame about how we handled something, we can become very focused on our own feelings. On managing our distress. On reassuring ourselves that we are not a bad parent. Rather than turning back toward our child and doing the thing that actually helps.

Guilt is self-focused. Repair is child-focused. And while guilt can be the thing that motivates us toward repair, it is not a substitute for it. Feeling terrible about losing your patience does not undo it. Turning back toward your child and connecting does.

This is a distinction I come back to again and again in my practice. Not because guilt is wrong or unnatural. It is a very human response to falling short of what we hoped for ourselves. But because I watch parents spend enormous amounts of energy in the guilt, ruminating and self-critical and heavy with it, and not enough energy in the simple, redemptive act of going back.

Your child does not need your guilt. They need your return.

And there is something important underneath this. When we model repair, when our children watch us notice that we got something wrong and come back to address it, we give them something extraordinary. We give them a template for how relationships work. We show them that it is possible to lose the thread and find it again. That love is not conditional on getting it right. That the people who matter to us can be honest about mistakes and still be trusted.

That is not just good parenting. That is a life skill they will carry into every relationship they ever have.

Pace of Life, Rupture, Repair for Parents in Hong Kong

Parenting here has a particular texture. The city moves fast and expects a great deal. Many of us are doing this far from the extended family that would naturally share the load. The school runs are early, the work days are long, and the social expectations are high.

Under those conditions, losing patience is not a character flaw. It is a fuel reading. It is what happens when the tank is running low and something demands more than we currently have.

And the repair becomes even more important here. Not just for our children, but for us. Because when we go back and connect after a hard moment, we are not just healing the rupture. We are reminding ourselves that we are still the parent we are trying to be. That one difficult moment is not the whole of our relationship. That coming back is always possible.

Repair is not just protective for children. It is regulating for parents. It closes the loop. It allows us to put down the weight of the guilt and pick up the lightness of reconnection.

What a Simple Repair Can Sound Like

The repair does not need to be elaborate. Children are not looking for a performance of remorse. They are looking for a sincerity, acknowledgment, accountability, without excuses.

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One Quote to Inspire

“A child who feels genuinely held can go further out into the world than a child who has been pushed before they were ready. They explore more freely precisely because they know where home is”

One Act of Self Care

Because your needs matter.

Lending the calm you create for yourself
You cannot lend calm you do not have.
Find ten minutes this weekend before the house wakes up, or after it goes quiet. Make something warm to drink. Sit somewhere that feels even slightly like yours.
And ask yourself this one honest question:
“What feeling have I been managing alone this week that deserved to be shared with someone?”
Not to fix, just let yourself notice it. Because the same thing you are asking of your children, to feel their feelings rather than push them away, is the same permission you are allowed to give yourself. The FEELING is the work.

One Action to Spark Connection

Coregulation
Choose one moment this weekend when your child is struggling. When they are frustrated, or upset, or shutting down. Resist the very strong pull to fix it, reframe it, or send them somewhere quiet.
Instead, stay close. Get low. Breathe slowly enough that they can feel it. And say just this:
“I can see this feels really big right now. I am right here. You are not alone in this.”
That is all. You do not need to solve it. You do not need to say the perfect thing. You just need to stay.

That is co-regulation. That is your nervous system reaching across to theirs. That is you, in an ordinary moment on an ordinary weekend, building something in your child that no school, no curriculum, and no amount of pushing will ever be able to give them.

A steady shore. A home base. A nervous system that knows how to come back to calm, because it learned to do it alongside yours.

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They carry this idea that the goal of successful parenting is raising independent children. Children who do not need us too much. Children who regulate themselves, manage their emotions on their own, and eventually launch into the world without looking back. I understand where this idea comes from. Yet,I want to offer you something different. Controversial as it may sound..

“The goal of emotional development is not independence. It is healthy interdependence. And the path there runs through connection and attachment”

What we mean when we say we want to raise “Confident” Kids

When most parents in Hong Kong tell me they want to raise a confident child, I always ask them to describe what that looks like. The answers are almost always the same.

• A child who can walk into a room and feel comfortable in their own skin.

• A child who can ask for help when they need it.

• A child who can feel an uncomfortable emotion without falling apart or shutting down.

• A child who can walk away from friendships and situations which do not feel “right”.

• A child who trusts their own judgment, recovers from setbacks, and knows, somewhere deep inside them, that they are worthy of love.

That is not a description of independence. That is a description of secure attachment.

And here is what the research is absolutely clear about raising confident kids:

Inner security, that quiet settled confidence, is not built by teaching children to need us less. It is built by making sure they know, over and over, that we are reliably there. By being their safe haven they run to, and the secure base they launch from.

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Sara Hooper

COO, Hong Kong China Rugby • LIFT Lunch, Women in Sport, Hong Kong

“What that gave me was resilience, self-discipline, and emotional control far earlier than many of my peers. You learn very quickly that confidence doesn’t come from winning every time; it comes from learning how to lose, reflect, and come back stronger. Those skills have stayed with me throughout my career. In professional environments, I often see people struggle with feedback or high-stakes moments. For those with a sporting background, those situations feel familiar. You’re used to being assessed, held accountable, and operating under pressure”.

LIFT Lunch, Hong Kong Football Club, Rugby for Good

I sat with those words for a long time on the way home. I have been quoting them to my children over and again.

Resilience. Self-discipline. Emotional processing off the court, and emotional control on court. Learning how to lose, reflect, and come back stronger.

Sara was talking about sport. But she was also, without knowing it, describing exactly what the attachment research has been telling us for decades about how children build genuine, lasting confidence.

Confidence does not come from winning every time. It comes from learning how to lose, reflect, and come back stronger.

What Sara Described Is Earned Security

The qualities Sara named, the ability to receive feedback without falling apart, to operate under pressure without shutting down, to be assessed and held accountable and still come back, are not personality traits you are born with. They are capacities that are built. Through experience. Through failure. Through being held in relationships that allow you to feel the full weight of disappointment and then find your footing again.

In sport, those relationships are a team, a coach, a shared commitment to something bigger than any single game. In childhood, those relationships are us. The parents, the caregivers, the steady adults who stay close when things fall apart and do not rush the recovery.

What Sara described is what we call, in the therapy world, earned secure attachment. The deep internal knowledge, built over time and through difficulty, that I can handle hard things. That I can lose and not be lost. That there are people who will receive my struggle without flinching and help me find my way back.

The Connection Between Sport, Failure, and Emotional Coaching

Here is what I find so compelling about Sara’s words. She did not say confidence comes from being protected from failure. She did not say it comes from always winning, always succeeding, always being told you are wonderful. She said it comes from learning how to lose, and from having the capacity to reflect and return.

That capacity, to feel a difficult feeling fully, to sit with disappointment rather than avoid it, and to come back with something new, is exactly what we are building in our children when we practise emotion coaching. When we stay close during the hard moments. When we name the feeling rather than dismiss it. When we validate the struggle rather than rush them past it.

We are not raising children who never lose. We are raising children who know how to lose well. Who have a nervous system that knows how to come back to calm. Who have a relationship with their own inner world that is honest and spacious and not afraid.

That is what Sara learned on the tennis court and it now serves her in the board room running Hong Kong China Rugby. It is what our children are learning, in smaller and quieter ways, at the dinner table, in the car on the way home, in the bedroom doorway when you sit down beside them instead of walking away.

For the Hong Kong Families Reading This

We raise children within a culture that is very focused on winning. On results, rankings, performance. On exploring pathways. The implicit message children receive here, often from a very young age, is that competence is the measure of worth.

Sare’s words are a gentle and powerful correction to that.

The skills that stayed with her throughout her career were not the trophies. They were the losses. The feedback she learned to receive. The pressure she learned to carry. The capacity, built over years of sport and the relationships within it, to come back stronger.

WANT TO GO DEEPER?

This week’s paid post is a long-form exploration of exactly what Sara described: the science of co-regulation, why emotional coaching builds genuine confidence, and why the most resilient children are not the most independent ones but the most securely connected ones.

It includes the four steps of emotion coaching, scripts (including a printable) to use in the hard moments, and a printable card to keep somewhere you will find it when you need it most.

Read the full post here: You Are Not Raising Them to Leave You. You Are Raising Them to Come Back.

And if you ever find yourself at a table with someone who says something that stops you completely, I hope you write it down. The best thinking often comes from the most unexpected places.

With so much warmth, Lisel

One Quote to Inspire

“All parents deserve healing, all children deserve parents who feel healed.”

One Act of Self Care

Because your needs matter.

What did I need as a child?
Find ten minutes this weekend. Make yourself something warm to drink. Sit somewhere quiet. And ask yourself this one question:
“What did I need as a child that I am still waiting for someone to give me?”

Sometimes the most important thing we can do for our children is stop waiting for someone else to tend to our own tender places, and begin tending to them ourselves. That is the work. And it starts with a quiet ten minutes and an honest response to this question.

One Action to Spark Connection

Attunement
Choose one ordinary moment this weekend with your child. A meal together. The car ride home. Bedtime. It does not need to be special.
Put your phone in another room. Sit with them. Look at them, not to check, not to correct, just to see them. Ask one question with no right answer. What was the best part of your week? What has been sitting in your heart lately? What are you excited about right now?
Then listen. Really listen. Not to fix or advise or redirect them to what you want to hear. Just to hear them.

That is attunement. That is a build block towards secure attachment right in the midst of a busy Hong Kong week And it is enough.

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If that sounds familiar, I want you to know something: that is not a flaw in you. That is your attachment system. And once you begin to understand it, everything starts to make a little more sense.

This post is for us parents in Hong Kong, far from our own families and inside a culture of high performance and relentless productivity, this work can feel harder. It is for the mums in Hong Kong who are raising children far from their own families, carrying the invisible weight of expat life, and wondering how to break patterns they never consciously chose. And it is especially for those of you raising third culture kids, who are doing something beautifully complex and sometimes incredibly lonely. But it is also more available than we think. It begins with noticing. With getting curious rather than critical when we react in ways that surprise us.

This week, I want to invite you to sit with one question. Not to solve it. Just to hold it.

Let us start at the beginning.

What John Bowlby Taught Us About How We Love

In the 1950s, British psychiatrist John Bowlby began developing what would become one of the most important theories in developmental psychology: attachment theory.

Bowlby’s central insight was this. Human babies are not born needing only food and warmth. They are born needing connection. The bond between a child and their caregiver is not just emotionally significant. It is a biological survival system. Babies seek proximity to their caregiver because, on a deep evolutionary level, closeness means safety.

When a caregiver is reliably present, warm, and responsive, the child develops what Bowlby called a secure base. They carry an internal sense of safety that allows them to explore the world, take risks, recover from setbacks, and reach out for help when they need it. They know, in their bones, that someone is there.

When that base is unreliable, frightening, or absent, the child adapts. They find ways to manage the gap between what they need and what is available. Those adaptations become their attachment style. And they tend to travel with us, quietly, into adulthood and into parenthood.

“The propensity to make intimate emotional bonds to particular individuals is a basic component of human nature.” John Bowlby

Bowlby’s work was later expanded by psychologist Mary Ainsworth, whose research gave us the framework of attachment styles we still use today. Her famous Strange Situation studies showed us, for the first time, that children’s responses to stress and separation are not random. They are organised around the care they have received. (More to come on Ainsworth’s Strange Situation tests in the coming weeks).

Attunement: The Quiet Heart of Secure Attachment

Attunement is the experience of being felt, understood and responded to.. It is what happens when a parent notices their baby’s distress, leans in, and responds in a way that says: I am here. You are safe. I am not going anywhere. It is a response to a bid for connection.

Think of it as a dance, one leads, the other follows. Usually, dance partners are in sync.

Attunement is not about getting it right every time. Research by Ed Tronick tells us that we need to be attuned to our children only 30% of the time. What matters is not constant attunement, but the pattern of connection, rupture, and repair that follows. The child learns, over and over, that the relationship can hold difficulty and come back to warmth.

In neuroscience, this shows up as limbic resonance. When two people are emotionally connected, the same parts of the brain activate in both of them simultaneously. We are literally wired to feel together. And it is through being felt with, repeatedly, that a child learns that their emotional world is safe and manageable.

Attunement is built through presence and awareness.

The Four Attachment Styles: Which One Feels Familiar?

I want to offer these gently, as maps rather than labels. They are not boxes. They are ways of understanding the strategies we developed, as children, to stay close to the people we needed most.

Secure Attachment

People with a secure attachment style grew up with caregivers who were generally available, responsive, and warm. As adults, they tend to feel worthy of love, trust others reasonably, and reach for connection when they are struggling. They can tolerate closeness without losing themselves, and distance without feeling abandoned. This is the pattern we are hoping to offer our children.

Anxious Attachment

An anxious attachment style develops when care was loving but inconsistent. Sometimes the caregiver was fully present, and sometimes not. The child learns to stay hypervigilant, scanning for signs of disconnection and working hard to keep the caregiver close. As adults and parents, this can look like worry, over-involvement, or a deep hunger for reassurance that never quite feels like enough.

Avoidant Attachment

An avoidant style tends to develop when emotional needs were consistently minimised or ignored. The child learns, early, that needing is not safe. They become self-sufficient as a protective strategy. As adults, this can make intimacy uncomfortable, and emotional conversations feel exposing. In parenting, it can make it genuinely hard to stay present when a child is crying or falling apart.

Disorganised Attachment

This pattern is the most complex, and often the least talked about. It tends to develop when the caregiver was also the source of fear or overwhelming unpredictability. The child is caught in an impossible bind: the person they need for safety is also the person they are frightened of. In adult life, this can show up as contradictory relational patterns, both desperately wanting closeness and finding it terrifying.

For the securely attached among us, it is wonderful and reassuring. However, for many of us reading this, we often exhibit more than one attachment style. We are layered and shaped by many relationships across our lives. The point is not to diagnose yourself. The point is to begin noticing, with curiosity rather than judgment, where your patterns come from and how they show up in your parenting today.

A Word on Co-Regulation

Children cannot regulate their emotions on their own. They just haven’t developed the neural pathways yet. Human regulatory systems are built through being co-regulated by a calm adult, over and over again.

When we stay steady during our child’s storm, breathing quietly, speaking gently, not escalating, we literally lend them our nervous system. Over time, they build their own. This is co-regulation.

But here is the part that matters most for this conversation: we cannot offer a regulated, steady presence if our own nervous system is running on empty. This is an invitation. Tending to yourself is not separate from tending to your child. It is the very same work. Tending to your needs allows you to nurture your child’s needs with confidence and grace.

Why Healing Your Attachment Patterns Changes Everything

If you have speed read this blog no worries. However, if there is one section you should read in slo-mo, this section is it.

Our attachment patterns are not our destiny. They are our history.

Attachment researchers use the term earned security to describe what happens when adults who did not experience secure attachment in childhood develop it over time. Through therapy, reflection, honest and safe relationships, and through the slow and courageous work of making sense of our own stories, we can genuinely shift the patterns we carry.

In my work with families in Hong Kong, I see this time and again. Parents who grew up without secure attachment, who are determined not to pass that forward, and who are doing the quiet, unglamorous, deeply important work of changing the inheritance. This work has the power to change the trajectory of not just our children’s lives but the lives of their children.

It is curiosity. It is being willing to notice when your child triggers something old in you, and instead of pushing through or shutting down, becoming gently interested in what that feeling is about and where it came from.

Your children do not need you to be fully healed. They need to see you beginning the process of healing. That is the inheritance worth passing forward.

Every time you pause before you react. Every time you go back and repair. Every time you say, I am sorry, I got that wrong, you are doing the work. And that work does not just change you. It changes the story your children will carry into their own adult lives.

Attachment Across Cultures: Raising Third Culture Kids in Hong Kong

If you are raising children in Hong Kong, you are doing something that deserves to be named. You are parenting far from your own family, navigating international schools and cultural transitions, building community in a city that often feels like it is always moving. And many of you are raising third culture kids.

Third culture kids are building their identity in that in-between space, between their parent’s home country and the country they are living in, which is both a gift and, at times, a genuine source of grief.

Here is what the research is clear about: the most protective factor for third culture kids is not a stable school, or a consistent cultural identity, or even staying in one country long enough to grow roots. It is a secure attachment to at least one primary caregiver. We are their home base when geography keeps shifting. We are their constant.

And yet expat life can make that harder. The distance from family support. The cycle of goodbyes as friends and colleagues rotate. The loneliness that sometimes hides underneath a very busy social calendar. The pressure, particularly in a city like Hong Kong, to perform capability and hold it all together. All of that affects your nervous system, your capacity, and your presence.

Which means that if you are raising a third culture child in Hong Kong, the most attachment-sensitive, culturally thoughtful, globally-minded thing you can do is also the simplest: take care of yourself. As a foundation to building that secure base to which you and your family unit return to.

You Are Already Doing Something Brave

The fact that you are reading this, asking these questions, and being willing to look honestly at your own patterns: that is not nothing. That is everything.

Secure attachment is not about being a perfect parent. It has never been about that. It is about being present enough, often enough. It is about repairing when you get it wrong. It is about staying curious about your child and about yourself.

That is what your children need most. And it begins, always, with you. Building a secure relationship with yourself, that you and your family keep coming home to.

With so much love and warmth,

Lisel

This blog is for therapists, psychologists, and allied health professionals walking alongside families affected by ADHD. It’s a place to share, reflect, and support one another in our practice. Because when we feel supported and resourced, the families we work with feel it too.

ADHD: Not a moral failing but Neurobiology at work (and play!)

The ADHD brain is, quite literally, wired differently. Research shows us that it tends to have a thinner cerebral cortex, differences in frontal lobe development, and lower levels of key neurotransmitters including dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine.

The frontal lobe, which is the part of the brain responsible for planning, impulse control, emotional regulation and working memory, matures at a slower rate in children with ADHD.

In practical terms, this means a child may be navigating daily life with executive function skills that are one to three years behind those of their peers.

The child who can’t seem to get started on homework, who melts down over small things, who acts before thinking, is not being difficult. It is not inadequate parenting. They are working with a brain that is still catching up.

It is neurology. And that distinction matters enormously, both in the therapy room for us as clinicians and at the kitchen table, as we seek to empower our parent caregivers.

Resources for Clinicians on Non Clinical Interventions:

The following section includes research articles that support significant non-pharmacological interventions such as movement, martial arts, mindfulness, supplementation, sleep for families.

Exercise

Ng et al. (2017): A systematic review of exercise as a management tool for childhood and adolescent ADHD. Found consistent evidence that regular aerobic exercise significantly reduced ADHD symptoms and improved executive functioning. Published in Complementary Therapies in Medicine.

MacIntosh et al. (2014): Studied the impact of a single bout of aerobic exercise on brain perfusion and activation in healthy young adults. Found increased blood flow to key attention-related regions. Published on PLOSOne.

Mindfulness

Zylowska et al. (2008): An 8-week Mindfulness Meditation Training programme for adults and teens with ADHD found 78% of completers reported symptom reductions, 30% achieved clinically significant improvement, with additional gains in anxiety, depression and executive function.

van der Oord et al. (2012): Studied mindfulness training specifically in parents of children with ADHD. Parents reported significant reductions in their own ADHD behaviours, reduced parenting stress, and reduced overreaction to their child’s behaviour.

Mitchel et al. (2013): An 8-week mindfulness group for ADHD found significant improvements in both self-reported and clinician-rated ADHD symptoms, plus executive function gains including emotion regulation.

Movement-Based Interventions

Jensen and Kenny (2004): Boys with ADHD completed a 20-session yoga group. Significant improvements were found on five subscales of the parent rating scale. Boys who continued practising at home showed the greatest executive function gains.

Lakes et al. (2013): Taekwondo was found to significantly improve self-regulation, social skills, classroom behaviour and maths scores in children with ADHD.

Sánchez-López et al. (2013): Compared Judo, Taekwondo and Kung Fu athletes. Kung fu was found to show the greatest improvements in executive function, particularly inhibitory control.

Hernandez-Reif et al. (2001): Thirteen teenagers with ADHD attended Tai Chi twice weekly for five weeks. Teachers rated significant improvements across all measures, sustained at two-week follow-up.

Massage

Khilnani et al. (2003): Children and teens with ADHD received 20-minute massage sessions twice weekly for a month. The massage group showed significant improvements in mood (self-rated) and classroom behaviour (teacher-rated).

Maddigan et al. (2003): 12 weeks of massage therapy with ADHD children found improvements in mood and anger control.

Supplements

Sinn et al. (2008): An ADHD children’s study using three groups (omega-3-6-9 plus multivitamins, omega-3-6-9 only, or neither) for 15 weeks found the omega group showed significantly improved scores on tests of attentional switching. Once the control group also received omegas, their scores improved too.

Hawkey and Nigg (2014): A review confirming that children with ADHD have significantly lower omega-3 fatty acid levels than controls, and that supplementation improves ADHD symptoms.

Mohammadpour et al. (2018): A randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial found Vitamin D supplementation as adjunctive treatment significantly reduced ADHD symptoms in children aged 5–12. Published in Nutritional Neuroscience.

Diet and Food

McCann et al. (2007): Landmark randomised controlled trial of 297 children (3-year-olds and 8-9-year-olds). Both age groups showed significantly increased hyperactivity when given drinks containing artificial food colouring and sodium benzoate versus placebo. Published in The Lancet.

Bouchard et al. (2010): A study of 1,139 children found that 94% had detectable organophosphate (pesticide) levels in urine. Children with above-average levels had double the rate of ADHD compared to those with none.

Stevens et al. (2012): Found that 65–89% of children with suspected food sensitivities reacted to artificial food colouring. Researchers recommended trial elimination diets when standard treatments have not worked.

Sleep

Silvestri et al. (2009): Studied sleep patterns in 55 ADHD children. Found 50% had motor restlessness, 47.6% sleepwalked, 38% had night terrors, and 21.4% snored. Significant co-occurrence of sleep disorders and ADHD.

Urbano et al. (2021): Found a 20-30% comorbidity rate between obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and ADHD, with 95% of OSA patients reporting attentional deficits. Published in Children.

van Andel et al. (2020): Found that low-dose melatonin is helpful in managing Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, which is significantly more common in people with ADHD.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

Ramsay, J. R. (2016): “Turning intentions into actions” explored CBT for adult ADHD with a specific focus on implementation. Highlights the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it, which is so central to the adult ADHD experience. Published in Clinical Case Studies, 15(3), 179-197.

Ramsay, J. R., & Rostain, A. L. (2014): The Adult ADHD Tool Kit: Using CBT to Facilitate Coping Inside and Out. Routledge. A clinically rich and practical guide to delivering CBT for adult ADHD, addressing both internal cognitive patterns and external coping strategies. Highly recommended for clinicians working with adults and parent caregivers.

Safren, S. A. (2006): An important overview of cognitive behavioural approaches to ADHD treatment in adulthood, making the case for CBT as a meaningful adjunct to medication. Published in Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 67.

Sprich, S. E., Knouse, L. E., Cooper-Vince, C., Burbridge, J., & Safren, S. A. (2010): A helpful description and demonstration of CBT for adults with ADHD, offering clinicians a clear picture of how sessions are structured and delivered in practice. Published in Cognitive and Behavioural Practice, 17(1), 9-15.

Books for Clinicians:

Taking Charge of Adult ADHD: Russell A. Barkley PhD

An essential clinical resource for working with adult ADHD. Covers assessment, case conceptualisation and treatment in a rigorous but practical way.

Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy for Adult ADHD: Mary Solanto PhD

The gold-standard CBT manual for ADHD. Evidence-based, manualised, and designed for both individual and group delivery.

Treating ADHD in Children and Adolescents: Russell Barkley and Christine Benton

Comprehensive clinical guide to evidence-based treatment across the lifespan. Covers behavioural interventions, parent training, school accommodations and multimodal approaches.

10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD: Stephanie Moulton Sarkis PhD

Written by the clinician whose research forms the basis of this guide. Practical, accessible and well-suited to recommending to adult patients or parents who are themselves newly understanding their ADHD.

ADHD Nation: Alan Schwarz

A critical, well-researched journalistic account of the ADHD diagnosis and medication landscape. Important context for clinicians navigating conversations about over and under diagnosis.

Books to Empower Families and Caregivers:

The Explosive Child: Ross W. Greene PhD

The first book I recommend most to parents. Greene’s Collaborative Problem Solving approach transforms how you understand difficult behaviour. It adopts a relationship approach to support children and families. Essential for any family navigating ADHD.

ADHD: What Every Parent Needs to Know: Michael I. Reiff MD (AAP)

A clear, compassionate, comprehensive guide from the American Academy of Paediatrics. Covers diagnosis, treatment options, school accommodations and family dynamics without being overwhelming.

Scattered Minds: Gabor Maté MD

A profoundly human, compassionate exploration of ADHD as rooted in early development, attachment and nervous system sensitivity. Maté has ADHD himself, and his personal insights both as an adult navigating life with a diagnosis, a parent and clinician are valuable.

Smart but Stuck: Thomas E. Brown PhD

Focuses on high-functioning individuals whose ADHD has gone unrecognised because their intelligence masks their struggles. Particularly relevant for the high-achieving families I work with in Hong Kong.

The ADHD Workbook for Women: Avery Lane

Practical steps set in CBT and DBT to improve focus, support executive function and manage emotions and overwhelm.

The ADHD Advantage: Dale Archer MD

A strengths-based reframe of ADHD that helps families and children understand the genuine gifts of the ADHD brain alongside the challenges. Important counterbalance to deficit-focused narratives.

How to ADHDL Jessica McCabe

Warm, practical and written by someone who lives with ADHD herself. A great starting point for newly-diagnosed adults and for older teenagers. Companion to the popular How to ADHD YouTube channel.

The Mindfulness Prescription for Adult ADHD: Lidia Zylowska MD

The book behind the 8-week Mindfulness Meditation Training programme cited throughout this guide. Practical, gentle and evidence-based. Works for parents and older children.

Building structures that work for everyone in the family, not just the child with the diagnosis, is at the heart of creating sustainable systems.

Written by Lisel Varley

1. To be more self-aware, noticing, creating space between stimulus and response, choosing a conscious, empowered response…

2. Choosing a response that is right intuitively, and one that is informed by science..

Join me as we read together. I am so excited to know that I will be alongside many of of you as we read together.

• One post each week, four per month on the book we discuss

• Please share your thoughts on the comments for each post

For April, we start with “Raising Securely Attached Kids” by Eli Harwood..

The Heart of the Book

I want to begin with what I believe is the most important thing Eli Harwood says in this book.

Raising securely attached kids is not about being perfect, launching into parenthood as self-actualised individuals or being 100% attuned to our children’s needs.

The core premise of the book highlights the importance of getting curious about our patterns, understanding our attachment patterns, healing our pain, guiding ourselves to secure attachment. It is through this process that we offer not just our kids, but our future generations the gift of secure attachment. Building a secure attachment with our children first begins with building a secure relationship with ourselves.

This book is an invitation to parent from the inside out. To ask not just what does my child need, but what do I still need to tend to in myself so I can show up fully for them? It is one of the most generous things you can do. For your children, yes. But also for yourself.

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT

• How our own early experiences quietly shape the parents we become

• Why our children’s big feelings are invitations to co-regulation, not problems to solve

• How self-regulation grows through connection, not correction

• Why repair matters so much more than perfection

• How secure attachment evolves through the various stages of our children’s lives- infancy, toddlerhood, adolescence, teenagers and beyond…

Grab a copy and read along. Just make a start, a few pages a day…

Click here for link to the book.

"Parents who are faced with the development of children must constantly live up to a challenge. They MUST develop WITH their children" Erik Erikson

I look forward to turning pages together. Come turn the first page with me.

With warmth,

Lisel

PS: If anything feels heavy, and you wish to have a safe, warm, confidential discussion, please reach out to me.

I want to follow up with something practical. Not a long list. Just three things, three quiet shifts in how you think about sleep — that the research consistently points to as the most powerful levers available to you.

You may have heard versions of these before. I hope saying them again, simply, gives them somewhere to land.

Secret 1: Consistency matters more than you think

Going to bed and waking up at the same time each day is the single most effective thing you can do for your sleep quality. Your body runs on an internal clock, and that clock functions best when it has something reliable to work with.

Varying your sleep and wake times by even an hour or two across the week disrupts your circadian rhythm in ways that compound quietly over time. A consistent schedule is not rigid or boring. It is the foundation everything else is built on.

Pick a wake time you can hold most days. Work backwards from there. That simple.

Secret 2: Quantity is the gateway to quality

We talk about sleep quality as if it is something separate from the number of hours we get. It is not. Quality sleep, the deep, restorative kind, requires sufficient quantity to occur at all.

For most women and mums in Hong Kong, that means offering yourself eight to eight and a half hours of rest. Not necessarily eight hours of perfect unconsciousness, rest counts too. But the window needs to exist before the quality can happen inside it.

You cannot condense good sleep into six hours and expect your body to deliver what it would have done in eight.

I know that for mothers of young children or newborns, this can feel almost cruel to suggest. If that is where you are, please hear this as something to hold for later, direction to move toward, not a standard to judge yourself by now. 

Your sleep is being disrupted by necessity, not neglect. There is a significant difference.

For everyone else: the hours are not optional. This means, giving up that all too attractive “one more episode” of Netflix or “one final scroll” to prioritise something more potent, sleep (the secret to physical, emotional and cognitive health)

Secret 3: Earlier is deeper

Here is something that surprises most people: your best quality deep sleep and REM sleep do not occur in equal measure throughout the night. They happen predominantly in the earlier hours, before midnight, and in the first half of your sleep window.

This means that the hours you sleep before midnight are, biologically speaking, more restorative than the same number of hours begun at 1am. Not because of the clock on the wall, but because of how your sleep cycles are structured and when your body releases the hormones that drive deep sleep.

Regardless of whether you consider yourself a night owl, offering yourself the chance to be in bed by 10pm gives your body access to the most nourishing part of the sleep cycle. Not every night. But as often as you can.

The late scroll, the one more episode, the quiet hour that finally feels like yours, I understand the pull of all of it. But this is what it is quietly costing you.

Consistency. Quantity. Earliness. These three things, held gently and imperfectly, will do more for your sleep than almost any supplement or gadget ever could.

If you missed the full sleep post, you can find it here: It goes deeper into what sleep deprivation is actually doing to your body, your mood, and your relationships — and why rest is not a reward for finishing everything on your list.

And if the exhaustion has settled into something that feels heavier than tiredness — something that no amount of earlier bedtimes quite reaches — I would love to support you.

Some holidays we travel. Some others we stay. And every single term break, the same question surfaces by day two or three:

How do I hold this together without losing myself in the process?

I have written before about what allows me to keep my sanity when we travel as a family. But I keep getting asked whether the same things apply when there is no trip, no hotel, no change of scene. When the “holidays” happen right here in Hong Kong, in your own home, with the full stretch of unstructured days and apartment living in front of you.

The answer is yes. Every single one of them applies. If anything, they matter more.

Read on to understand what my non-negotiables look like on the road and what they look like at home. Because wherever your family lands these school holidays, the scaffolding is the same.

Please subscribe to read on, including one phrase that will stop a meltdown before it even has a chance to brew.

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