A living library for parents
The Parent Book.
Therapist-written guidance on the questions parents bring us most.
A library that grows as parents bring new questions, written by the therapists of Kensington Square Therapy in London. A way to sit beside you while you support your child. Yours in full from the day you join.
Written by qualified therapists registered with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy BACP and the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society NCPS.
What this is
We do not believe there is a definitive manual for raising children, and this library does not pretend to be one. It is therapeutically informed writing from a therapy practice, made to support you in supporting your child, never to fix either of you.
What it holds is a growing library of chapters on the questions parents actually ask: the friendships that shift, the evenings that stop working, the worry that has started making decisions for your child. Organised around the thing you are facing, and written the way we talk with parents in the therapy room.
The therapists who write it work with children, young people and parents every week, much of it in and alongside London’s independent schools: the prep years, the eleven-plus, the move to secondary, the sixth form, and the particular weather that comes with all of it. That is where a good deal of this writing comes from, and it is why the chapters know what a Year 5 autumn feels like from the inside. None of it is only for those families. The questions arrive in much the same shape in every household, and so do the answers.
The chapters are not how-to guides, and they are not lists of five things to try tonight. They are written more like letters: long enough to make a thing land, short enough to read in a sitting, practical where something practical will help, and honest about the longer view. And because no single library is all the help there is, every chapter signposts the wider network of support around you and your child, whatever their age, from the NHS to the organisations that know their field best.
“Our job is not to be the authority on your child. It is to think alongside the parent who is.”
From the editor’s letter
Quick TipsFor right now
Quick tip · 1 min
When the Worry Will Not Settle
The anxious child rarely arrives wearing the word for what she is carrying.
She arrives with a stomach ache on a Sunday evening, a sudden refusal of the activity she loved last term, the small persistent question at the bedroom door that returns even when answered.
Quick tip · 2 min
The Tantrum Over the Broken Banana
A small body screaming about the wrong-shape banana is not being difficult.
By five past five on a Wednesday, the three-year-old is on the kitchen floor screaming about a banana the parent has broken in half by mistake.
Quick tip · 2 min
When the Lid Has Flipped
Her prefrontal cortex is not yet wired for the load you ask of it.
A young child’s brain, faced with a feeling larger than its capacity to process it, does something specific. The thinking part goes briefly offline; the part responsible for fight, flight, and overwhelm takes the wheel.
Choose where to startBegin with what tonight looks like
Open the chapter that’s most on your mind today.
A developmental atlas for parents whose child is worried in a way that has started to make decisions for them.
A chapter for parents whose evenings have stopped working.
A chapter for parents whose teenager has gone quiet.
A chapter for parents whose children keep finding new ways to fall out.
A chapter for parents whose child has started dreading school.
A chapter for parents whose child has lost something, or someone, that was there last week.
A chapter for parents whose child cannot fail at anything.
A chapter for parents whose child has just come undone.
Beyond tonight
The wider library.
The topics parents return to most. All open from the day you join, and the library keeps growing.
ADHD Anxiety Attachment Autism Behaviour Bereavement Body image Bullying Child development Co-parenting Co-regulation Difficult conversations Eating disorders Emotional regulation Family stress Friendships Gaming Gender identity Identity Low mood Neurodiversity Online safety Parent wellbeing Parenting strategy Perfectionism Safeguarding School stress Screen time Self-esteem Separation and divorce Sexuality Sibling conflict Sleep Social media Transitions Trauma
A chapter, in fullRead before you decide
Anxiety, by Age.
A developmental atlas for parents whose child is worried in a way that has started to make decisions for them.
Anxiety is, in one sense, the same thing all the way through childhood. A signal that the body has decided something is dangerous, and a body that does not yet have the experience or the language to put the signal back down again. What changes between four and eighteen is not the engine. It is what the engine is firing at, and what the child has to drive while it is firing.
That is what makes anxiety so disorienting for parents. The four-year-old who will not be put down is not, by any obvious sign, the same problem as the fifteen-year-old who will not get on the bus. They look entirely different. The cause is entirely different. The strategies that helped at four can stop helping at ten.
WatchingFor the school run and the kitchen
Podcast · 40 min
Children’s sleep and the modern world
The Therapy Edit
Podcast · 32 min
How to raise resilient children
Greater Good · Berkeley
Film · 20 min
The Power of Vulnerability
Brené Brown · TED
Brené Brown’s most-watched TED talk, from TEDxHouston 2010, and the cleanest single account we know of why vulnerability, including in parenting, is part of strength.
Film · 21 min
Listening to Shame
Brené Brown · TED
The companion talk to The Power of Vulnerability, given at TED 2012, on the distinction between guilt and shame and on why shame is the wound most often left untreated.
From the practiceA letter
Written the way we talk with parents, as therapists.
The Parent Book is the publication of Kensington Square Therapy, a small therapy practice in London. We have been working with children, adolescents and the parents around them since 2010, and the questions we are asked tend to be the same questions, year after year, even when each family arrives with a story that is entirely its own.
We try to write the way we speak with parents in the therapy room: plainly, with respect for the fact that you know your child better than anyone, and with respect for the fact that this work is hard, lonely-making at times, and rarely a straight line.
The library is not finished, and it is not meant to be. New chapters land as they are ready, and the back catalogue stays here for you to come back to. If there is something you would like written about, please tell us. Many of the chapters that will land next began as a single email from a parent telling us what they wished someone had written down.
S.M.
Sam McManus · Kensington Square Therapy
The subscriptionOne decision, once a year
One subscription. The whole library, from the day you join.
£129a year
Every chapter, and everything that arrives after you join. New chapters land through the year and stay on your shelf. Annual only. No tiers, no app, nothing to manage, and one quiet email when something new is published, never otherwise.
Subscribe for the yearAbout the price of a shelf of good hardbacks, for a library that keeps growing.
Beyond the libraryWhen you want to talk it through
Some questions want a conversation.
A parent consultation is a private conversation with a therapist at the practice, about your child. You do not need your child to be in therapy to ask, and one conversation is often enough.
About parent consultationsFor schoolsIn tandem, never instead