The word “practice” to refer to my writing process or output wasn’t one I used until I got more involved in the funded arts world outside of writing. Theatre folk might refer to their “practice”, arts funding forms might ask you to define your “creative practice”, but stand-up comedians (in whose field I learned some of my earliest performance craft) certainly didn’t. It still sounded a bit pretentious to me, even at the point when I did a “practice-based” PhD (in stand- up performance) from 2014-8. Possibly a literal part of me used to think of practice in the sense of “Keep trying until you get adept at it”, instead of “A thing you do/an action you undertake”. And I’ve thought “Well, I’m already good at writing, thanks”. But I have been thinking about my writing practice recently. About what it might be to have something I write regularly – on a schedule. Whether I feel like it or not, and whether somebody has commissioned me, paid me and given me a deadline or not.

I’ve been involved in meditation practice very regularly for eighteen months you see. (It doesn’t feel pretentious to refer to that as a practice). I can feel how what my brain can do now has gradually become deeper, wider and more focused. Incrementally, gradually. Last year I went on a week long retreat and the monk teaching it (Who I’ve heard referred to with awe by fellow meditators as “A serious practitioner”) shocked me on the first day by saying that what we would be doing would be hard work, and often boring. “Eh?” I thought “Shouldn’t retreats sell themselves as joyous fountains of rejuvenation?”. Well, no, not in this case. Certainly not where he might blank-faced start a session by saying “Everything is suffering”. But- as a person with a fidgety mind, there is something very joyous in finding yourself by session fifteen on day five, sitting absolutely still with your mind under something like at least partial control. I went again this year and although there were some dodgy sessions where my head dipped repeatedly in near-sleep and some where every bit of me resisted and/or thought about everything except that session’s topic (as is normal), I could feel the benefits of my continuing regular practice. And I wondered about what would happen if I applied that regularity of “I’m just turning up, no matter what, committedly, quietly, regularly to my writing. I’ve known for a while that I want to write more about Neurodiversity, because every time I share a post about it (usually on Facebook, since I drifted out of any vague regularity with this blog during the tumult and trauma of the pandemic when narrativising felt impossible) people will tell me it’s helpful to have their experiences articulated and contextualised by someone else.

And that brings me to the third practice I’m doing. Being neurodivergent. I’m a practicing neurodivergent person. Maybe that is more in the sense of trying it out. Seeing what works and what doesn’t. But also, in the sense of – acting on it as part of my identity and being. Which sometimes means actively noticing who I am (as opposed to who society tells us people of the predominant neurotypes should be). But beyond that it can mean accepting who I am. (For example – knowing that I prefer quiet spaces to loud ones). Then – harder still- acting on it. Eating in the quiet space. Sometimes- further- asserting it- saying that I’d like a quiet space to eat in. Some fellow neurodivergents (who might be autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, have acquired neurodivergence or conditions like dyslexia, OCD, dementia) talk about “Unmasking” (particularly autistic people, who, like me, might have been diagnosed only in adulthood and spent a lifetime repressing their sensory and communication differences in order to fit in). I am certainly consciously experimenting with that, even six years after my autism diagnosis. I don’t have full control over how my brain-body is wired. But I like how, in this instance the word “practice” makes my particular way of being in the world sound more conscious. Something that is enacted by being done repeatedly over time.

And part of that, for me, I’ve decided, is to write and share about it. Regularly, gradually, incrementally. A practice of doing what writing can do best- which is to make oneself and the world up every day. But I’ve decided to do it via the newsletter platform Substack so I can incorporate it into my professional practice. It is free to subscribe to my weekly (or every ten days-ly, for which there doesn’t seem to be a word) newsletter. Eventually I might ask if some subscribers would want to support my practice (I can’t get enough of that word now I’m using it!) but there will always be some free content because there is so much- excuse me but- pathologising bollocks out there about autism and ADHD and around neurodiversity and I very much want to contribute to sharing good sources and helpful experiences and paradigms. So…please do sign up, join me over there and share with anyone else who might find it useful and valuable. The first two posts have been about the eight types of energy (social/emotional/mental etc) and the challenge of conserving them. And about the “spiky profile” many neurodivergent folk have which leads us to be asked “How come you can do THAT but you can’t do THAT?” and the subsequent shame and confusion. Hopefully see you over there. https://katewriter.substack.com

I loved playing Betty Boothroyd in my show about Northern English women “Where There’s Muck There’s Bras”. Feeling that strength and power in her voice, the wink and the wisdom of her. I write about her in the resulting book as one of the “Battling BBs”- the redoubtable Northern women politicians who embodied a public, capable, strategic facet of the Northern matriarch stereotype (The others being Barbara Castle-nee Betts- and Bessie Braddock). I was sad to hear she’s died today, aged ninety three.

She still stands out to many as the best parliamentary Speaker of the modern era. She saw her role as being a servant of the House of Commons and was the first Speaker to be elected by MPs from both her own party and the opposition, which indicates how well she was regarded as someone who would do the job fairly and with authority (and with unprecedented applause from MPs when her election was announced). She made ‘I speak to serve’ her motto as Speaker because, she said, ‘I think being from Yorkshire – we speak directly. No nonsense.’ (‘No nonsense’ is clearly not the speaking style of many of her colleagues in the House of Commons. Not naming any names, but she has said she wouldn’t trust Boris Johnson ‘to run a bath’.) When she ran for the position in 1992, she knew it was important to win by a large majority, and she did. She said she told herself during the campaign to ‘Just go for gold Betty, go for gold’. (I will offer some tips later on how to get an inner monologue like Betty Boothroyd’s). In accepting the position, she said she had wanted to be picked for what she was, not for what she was born – a woman, a child of working-class textile worker parents, born in a terraced house in Dewsbury in 1929, who would never have been expected to rise to one of the most important offices in the land. She said her proudest day as speaker was when Nelson Mandela came to address the Commons as president of South Africa in 1996. They walked down the steps to Westminster Hall hand in hand, after he expressed some fear about the steepness of the descent. They were both politicians who knew something about the steepness of the ascent to power too.

Her mum took her to political meetings as a girl, where she would hear the likes of Bessie Braddock and Barbara Castle speak; her hero was Labour leader Clement Attlee. Part of Betty’s drive came from wanting to change the conditions in which her mum, a weaver, had developed emphysema from her work in the mills. Betty failed the eleven-plus and her dad wanted her to get a steady job in the town hall. She wanted something more than that, however; after going to Dewsbury Technical College to learn typing, French and bookkeeping, she had a brief unusual interlude with the Tiller Girls dance troupe. Her time high-kicking on the stage always loomed large in later writing about her, but she was keen to play it down, saying, ‘For something like three months I was a dancer. If you paid any attention to the media, you’d think I’d been a dancer for thirty years.’

Her main focus (back to her youthful passion against injustice) became politics and she picked up work as a secretary to Labour MPs, including Barbara Castle (Betty described her as a ‘true friend and mentor’ after she died). This experience of the political fray then inspired her to travel to America to work for congressmen, with just a return ticket and £200 in her pocket. She ended up helping out on John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and attending his inauguration, which she said was ‘like a fairyland’. She certainly had to keep that Yorkshire grit handy, though, when it came to making her own career in politics as it took her FIVE goes at standing for election; she was on the verge of giving up when she was finally elected as the member for West Bromwich in 1973. Her later election as Speaker meant all the more to her because of how difficult it had been to become an MP in the first place. In an early recognition of her ability to assert her authority in male-dominated environments, she was appointed as a Labour whip a year later.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

She never married or had children, and she devoted herself to her job, saying that she was a loner but never lonely. She famously took up paragliding in her sixties while on holiday in Cyprus. She had given it up by her eighties though, saying it had become boring: ‘I’ve done it a lot of times and when you are swinging over the coastline you have seen it all before. There’s no one to talk to, no sweets to suck and no ice cream. Put me down please!’ Her career in politics continued into her nineties in the House of Lords, with one of her speeches on Brexit going viral and featuring as much of her no-nonsense Yorkshire directness as ever.

I did say I’d give some tips on how to do an internal monologue like Betty. I think calling yourself Betty would definitely help. As would a deep voice (she said she got hers on smoking a packet of cigarettes a day – obviously I don’t recommend that . . . ) and flat Yorkshire vowels. Be encouraging but to the point. Advocate resilience and ambition. She said when she’d sometimes get a scared feeling in the pit of her stomach looking at all the men she had to go and speak in front of, or the ceremonial duties she had to conduct, she’d say, ‘Go on, Betty. Put some Polyfilla on, get out there and do the job’. Exactly.

Commissioned by the Great North Run for it’s 40th anniversary and featured in it’s BBC1 coverage of the race.

This Run Is For You 

The doorstep clappers 

the calm, the flappers,

the delivery drivers,

the solitude thrivers, 

the sourdough makers,

the banana bread bakers,

those who kept their distance

and those who went too far,

those who built some Lego,

their strength, relationships, a bar,

those who saw their whole lives collapse,

those who healed, those relapsed 

This run,

this run is for you

The hand holders, doctors, nurses,

indefatigable carers,

the new dog owners, the lost aloners,

the duvet coat wearers,

the toilet roll hoarders,

the new wild swimmers and paddle boarders,

the first time Zoomers,

the “You’re on mute”rs 

the repairers of bodies and computers,

the unsung NHS and supermarket staff,

the ones who said you’ve got to laugh,

the ones who thought it was like flu,

the ones who did not make it through

This run,

this run is for you.

The folk who built cairns on Whitley Bay beach,

the folk who travelled deserted streets to teach,

the shouters at the Daily Briefing,

those who let their sadness out

those who kept their grief in

the food bank givers and receivers,

the conspiracy theorists, the news believers.

the box-set bingers,

the stoics, whingers,

the D.I.Y dyers, the self-cutting fringers,

this run, 

this run is for you.

The ventilated, the medicated, the vaccinated,

the pickers and the packers,

the marshals, ushers, queue makers,

undertakers, volunteer jabbers,

the radio presenters who kept us company 

through the endless night,

my 84 year old step mum Rosemary 

who went when the time was right

my 44 year old friend Lisa 

who was taken far too soon 

those who stared at empty skies, 

quiet roads, their phone,

their love, the moon

The pebble-painters, rainbow displayers,

daily walkers, Animal Crossing players,

home-schoolers with all those endless worksheets,

emulators of Captain Tom’s endurance feats,

the pavement cyclists, the huffing joggers,

the involuntarily celibate, the illicit snoggers,

the rule benders,

the rule-keepers, the weird dreamers, 

the restless sleepers,

the “I’m just holding in a scream” ers,

the shielding, stuck,the quarantiners,

The ones who thought that this would pass

the ones who felt it was forever,

those miles, those miles, those endless miles,

we got through this together,

this run,

this run is for you,

I interviewed her in her flat in Dalgety Bay, a month before she died. I asked if she thought there was going to be more recognition of the value of autistic people even if the label is disputed. She said:

“We’ll continue to find that autistic people are the people who are less swayed by the pressures of hypocrisy, and that will mean that autistic people will go on having a significant contribution to make because it’s essential to have a society in which there are people who are willing to be productive irritants and undermine hypocritical nonsense…

& we’re going to be respected better…Look I’m an optimist but it seems to me, if anything would have been a learning experience, it’s been the last eighteen months. A big learning experience. People have learned how powerless they are on the whole. They see they’re powerless from below with these billions of tiny viruses leaping all over them and powerless from above with governments that don’t pay any attention to their needs but make a lot of money for their cronies. I feel fairly sure that many people have had epiphanies and it will change their future thinking permanently…& I’m also absolutely sure that many others haven’t”

When I thanked her for being an elder among activists and advocates she said:

“Why I’m dying happy is because I had a mission. Which I was conscious of from quite early on. About justice and fairness and living in a fair world. I haven’t really ever had a career, I’ve had a mission. And I think I’ve accomplished my mission basically. Thanks to loads of other people obviously. But I’ve reached a point where I think, wow, these things are finally happening and I kept pushing that boulder up the hill and it finally did roll down the other side. And I hope that there are a lot of people around who are going to take it on. And that seems to be what’s happening.”

and when I asked what advice she might have for those following her she said:

“Pragmatically I do have some words of advice -its really important to make an effort to believe that your enemy, the person you are seeing as opposing everything -that you probably have quite substantial areas of overlap and if you can appeal to them on that basis you may after a while work on their minds and they will start seeing things differently. I’ve seen that happen a lot including with a leading behaviourist who’s eventually shifted round . You’ve just got to keep on planting the thoughts. “

I wrote a poem to read at her wonderful Zoom memorial service in which her ashes were catapulted into the Firth of Forth in coconut shells. The first two lines were from a poem Dinah wrote as a girl. The title is a type of fungus (ish) species that Joan McDonald said at the memorial service, she was delighted to discover existed-given her pioneering work on the monotropic theory of autism.

Monotropa Uniflora

Cut a flower it does not bleed,

the sap withdraws

but the seed flowers again,

we will not lose these words of yours

the ideas you have shared and shown,

your lifelong mission

reaped and sown.

You recognised fellow foragers,

their urge to seek justice, equality,

the fierce desire to be right

the ability to hyper-focus,

withstand obstacles and fight.

You were hopeful new ideas,

worlds and ways of being

could emerge from these truth tellers,

their insight and clear seeing.

You reminded us to be open to persuading opponents

of our point of view,

a mission passed on,

we still have an essence of you.

Your interests carry like spores

through the air

in fragments, in buds,

via mycelia-like networks

they are still there.

Larkin said our almost-instinct is almost-true;

what remains of us is love.

But you also knew

energy is only transformed, never gone

so when we remember your words

or act as you might do,

you, in all your power and passion

live on.

Anybody else get worried

watching people on telly 

standing too close together

they ask.

People want an explanation

of how quickly being socially distant

became their new lens.

We’re wired to notice

what is dangerous 

and therefore important.

I don’t have a new instant overlay

for the world though, now spiky virus cells

circulate like planets

I was always clumsy and elliptical,

unsure of the correct orbits

how close was too close,

how far too far.

I fix instead 

on another left glove on a branch

singular as a vernal star.

Nostalgic for everything,

even rubbish feels like excavated evidence

of the pastimes 

of a former civilisation

remnants of us waiting

or abandoned like one of those villages

flooded to make a reservoir.

We are being smoothed,

swirled, carded, caught up

despite ourselves.

As if we could control

what the elements shape

or resist making relics

out of our need to escape.

I responded to Colin Potsig’s photographs of his lockdown walks with poems inspired also by my own.

Stump

Like a punch from behind,

a tooth breaking off at its bloody root

leaving you with a shocking black gap

like waking up at your own snore

gasping for air

the upending of the world

when you put your foot

on a step that isn’t there.

It’s alright to tell us this had been

foreseen for years 

in plans, models, rehearsals

that’s not how we were struck,

that’s not what froze our core

like the siren of the alarm clock,

a white bomb glare.

So tell us again 

about what always grows back

about slender shoots growing 

from blasted stumps,

green fishing rods into the future,

tender rebuttals to the torn out page

that used to be tomorrow.

Here is destruction we can bear to look at,

here is hope we can borrow. 

One of the most extraordinary ordinary women I know has died and she won’t have a funeral. Rosemary Reynard was my stepmum. Which is a title which covers over the story of how actually, I’m one of twins that her husband fathered when he had an affair with his secretary, my Mum (it was the seventies, what can I say). Rosemary loved pub meals out, doing the Yorkshire Post crossword, routine, Marks and Spencers, cleaning, neat numbers in rows, turning plugs off at night, her family, saying “kid” at the end of sentences, two glasses of sherry before tea, and me.

She first heard about my existence when her husband had briefly left her for my Mum while I was an embryo. The week in a rented flat didn’t go well, and he went back to her. The next Rosemary heard of me was when she was on her wedding anniversary trip to Jersey and I was being born, alongside my brother; “There’s two of them”.

Then she and Norman went round to my Nan’s house to offer to bring me and my brother up. My Nan and my Mum gave them short shrift. There was a gap for a while, she brought up her much-loved son Andrew, worked part time doing the books in a petrol station, laid the table every night for the meals she made of “chicken in the oven” and meat and potato pie and chicken and salad and braised beef and enjoyed being part of her own, and her husband’s extended family life, though was one of the quieter members.

Move ahead seventeen years and a letter arrived from me, saying I thought her husband might be my Dad. “It’s like a book” she said. And “There must be no more secrets” he said. We all met for a Sunday dinner in a pub and liked each other straight away. I would go round to their house and play rounds of gin rummy and eat chicken in the oven and learn the order of tea, starting with Sherry for her and “Cinzano and lemonade in a long glass?” for me and always ending with taking the lace table cloth up and the green undersheet and helping dry the pots.

We visited Norman in hospital together and when he died two months after I met him she said I should have been in the front row at the funeral “with us”.

She wanted to make sure I knew I had a home, a “base” when I was university. I was living in a bedsit full of mould at the time and home and safety and cosiness in a way I’d never known was “milky coffee” on the pink settee before bed after a bubble bath in her spotless green bathroom.

Sometimes we wrangled over words because she wanted me to say “home” and “love” and I couldn’t for a long time. But there was home and love. And sometimes her loneliness and need for company was something I had to find a distance from, and underneath it was something I needed, that would anchor me in a way I never had been.

She loved me visiting and hated me going. She hated any change or going. We went for pub meals on Sundays, we had milky coffees, I helped with the odd Yorkshire Post crossword clue. She went to my graduation and took me up to my journalism course every day. She was the honoured guest at my wedding and listened to my poems on the radio and I’d ring her afterwards and she’d tell me I talked too fast.

After her heart attack in 2011, when I stayed at her house for a few days and rang my husband so he could talk me through how to make her omelettes, she slowly lost the independence she loved. The driving, the going out, the sameness. The past two or three years of her vascular dementia have been difficult and then more difficult. She was still herself but often not there. “I feel sort of yonderley” she said. “She always remembered your name though” said her neighbour John who did so much to care from her “Even in hospital at the end”.

When I saw her in hospital on March 11th, I thought it might be the last time. She reached out for my hand in the telly room and we sat like that for a while. “Your nails are a mess” she said, looking at my chipped green sparklies. I couldn’t spring her out of the ward no matter how much she begged and I just had to hope that she would feel better with cleanliness and routine again in a care home.

She wasn’t on her own at the end- care workers and paramedics were there. I hope somebody held her hand. This ordinary woman who loved exceptionally.

Floor

Her neighbour says when he found her on the bedroom floor
she thought she was in the playground in Baildon
and her Mum was coming to fetch her,
that I should try getting her to talk about the past

I had been trying to stay
in the ever-shorter present
where an apartment in Mallorca still is,
sunrise over the sea
on Christmas Day,
one of the years we went away
so we didn’t have to not belong
in a room of people with the same eyes.

There’s a photo on the telly stand of
our slide down into an Austrian salt mine,
the two of us laughing
as we sped down the polished wooden rail,
feet in the air like toddlers.

I have been avoiding knowing the Sunday
when me and her and my father
met for the first time,
has gone.

That day she said “I could write a book”
because of the seventeen years
I had only been imagined
and she rewrote every other story I’d been in

about the illegitimate baby,
the standoffish girl,
the Runaway in the paper,
the Troubled Teen,
the Black Sheep, the Scapegoat
too clever for her own good

to tell the one about Norman’s daughter
she just clicked with straightaway
who he was over the moon to meet,
the first story of me
that felt right.

But that story has disappeared
along with her pillion rides up Baildon hills
on Norman’s motorbike
when she was seventeen

and dancing in his arms to a big band
in the hall near the Alhambra

and the ashes she scattered in the daffodils
while I stood by one grey February day.

I can keep them though,
along with an image of a playground
where a dark moor is rising into the sky
and a girl is reaching out her arms
waiting for her Mother to take her home.

I know “strange” times is popular, but I prefer “weird” times.

I went back in the sea today. Glittery panda hat, neoprene gloves and socks, swimming costume, and swam out and back across Cullercoats Bay. I walked in slowly, lulled by my warm feet. I splashed water up onto my chin and shoulders.  I hugged my arms across my chest and lowered myself in.  Then the cold hit my chest as if it was heat, as I stretched my arms out into a breast stroke. The sun was making a golden trail along the surface of the waves. The stone arms of the harbour wall held me as I crossed between them, but I could look out and see the expanse of blue and white ahead of me. Freedom, it felt like.

It was only when somebody else said it that I realised I’d been in trauma “fight or flight” mode the last couple of days of the New World of Weirdness. My strongest urge was to go walking and swimming and camping in Scotland and not encounter a soul. I wanted to be with people but I also wanted to be on my own. I feared abandonment, but wanted to run. Boring old traumas resurfacing. I also had grief. The grief I’ve been sitting in (not always consciously) since ending my marriage in September. And moving away from my home and dog. And my Step Mum passing into the stage of dementia where she barely recognises me. And other stuff I’ll write about one day.

There has not only been grief and loneliness; there has been love. And sometimes joy and exploration. But grief has become a Screensaver. And now it seemed the whole world was joining me in it. In the sense of not being able to picture a future ahead. The terror and possible liberation of that.

But swimming in the cold, cold sea again reminded me that we can acclimatise to anything- and quicker than we think. I could bear 15 minutes in the maybe 8 degrees centigrade of the North Sea in March because I’ve been swimming in cold water through last summer and autumn and a couple of times in January. My body remembers and it doesn’t take me into the shivers of cold water shock. If I keep going in the sea a couple of times a week from now, I’ll gradually build up the time my body can stay in without my hands turning to knives. Minute by minute. I’ll even begin to think it’s kind of warm.

And it made me think about how this crisis will become “the new normal” sooner than we think. We’ll get used to staying in, planning our shopping, managing on less or scrabbling to find out about what support might enable us to stay afloat. We’ll be used to emptier streets and not “popping out” and only one thing on the news and the cancellations.

There can be a downside. For anyone who has ever swum in trauma, it is a state we can ping back to too easily, even when there’s no need. I am acclimatised to that, and to loneliness, to a degree. But I can also sit with some of the strange solaces of isolation, sadness and slowness. The unthinkable can be thought, and become okay or more than okay. The freedom of cold water without feeling the shock every time…

Also, a recognition that private troubles are always entwined with public issues and that a world which ceaselessly pursues economic growth at the cost of human and ecological wellbeing is not one to be welcomed, indeed sometimes to be resisted often by people working together to uphold common values of kindness, fairness and love either; by changing society or finding alternative ways to do things. Although I’ve fought my own battles for acceptance, I haven’t fought them as a parent, which involves being far more subject to value systems I may not share than I usually have to experience as an adult. I was trying to think how I might then give tips to the parent of an autistic child, or to an autistic person who just didn’t share these aspects of my values. Try to do it from closer to their position. I realised it would not go well…

1. Agree to all demands that they should appear the same as “everybody else”.
2. To this end, pursue therapies and treatments which have not been adapted for autistic people
3. Or pursue therapies and treatments which are part of a business model aiming to make money from the desire of the parents of autistic child to have behaviours which are as normal as possible.
4. Interpret signs of distress as defiance, rather than as communication about something in their environment which is upsetting and overloading them and ignore it, or stop them showing signs of distress. 
5. Do not attend to different ways of communicating with your child- make them communicate only your way. Do not worry too much about what’s going on inside their mind and heart, why would you need to know about that?
6. Force them to spend time in environments they say they find difficult- noisy, bright places for example. Make them eat foods they don’t like.
7. Train them in making eye contact with people even if they say it hurts or makes it harder for them to think.
8. Control their body movements so that they look the same as other people- do not allow them to display the self-stimulating behaviours that would allow them to regulate their own bodily input. Use mockery as a way to make sure your disapproval is reinforced.  
9. Don’t try to find out why they do certain things. Best just to assume it’s either why you would do them or why most people do them.
10. Don’t bother enlightening them about the reasons for the social rules that many people follow even if they express bafflement. Ignore “Why?” questions and say “Just because”.
11. Be aware that research shows this eventually will lead to increased mental health problems and distress and suicide rates- make sure any further necessary therapeutic interventions as a result are not autism-adapted. 
12. Do not be guided in the things they find interesting, that spark their joy or passion. Force them away from learning about those things. Guide them towards work you would like them to do. Ignore any ideas they have about pursuing careers you don’t know anything about, or don’t think will make sufficient money, or approve of. 
13. Remind them that the diagnostic criteria show they lack the same feelings and abilities as other people, so that they will feel motivated to change themselves. 
14. Discourage them from connecting with other autistic people; why would they want to be with other people like them? That’s not how most people in the world are. 
15. Tell other people you are grieving for the normal child you should have had- let your child know this is how you feel. Do not seek counselling for any of your complicated feelings, that would be a weakness. 
16. Find a school that shares your values about how children should appear to be just like everyone else.
17. If they say they’re happy spending time on their own, disbelieve them and force them to spend social time with you or other children. If this tires them out, tell them they are “lazy”. 
18. Either do not let them develop any independence because you believe they’re so fragile they will not cope with failure or risk, or do not give them any support whilst they try out new things because they have to learn that nobody will help them. Do not attempt a balance of support and scaffolding.

No, I’m not sure I’d be the right person to be able to give those “tips”…