family – Find Joy in the Middle

When violence becomes the language of childhood.

August 18, 2026 jameshempsall

I was travelling on a train recently when I found myself sitting close to a young boy, perhaps five years old. For about 30 minutes he talked almost continuously, not about school, friends, football, dinosaurs, superheroes or adventuring in the woods, but about destroying things.

He described blowing things up, exploding buildings, wrecking vehicles, smashing and killing. There was no context, no story, no apparent game, just a stream of imagined destruction that seemed to fascinate him. His parents barely responded and other passengers hardly noticed, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Today, the Children’s Commissioner has published a report examining children referred to the Prevent programme. One of its most striking findings is that around seven in 10 children referred do not fit traditional definitions of extremist ideology. Instead, many display a worrying fixation with violence, weapons, mass casualty attacks and harmful online content. The report argues that our systems struggle to respond to these children because they do not fit neatly into existing categories of radicalisation.

As I read the report, my mind returned to that little boy on the train, not because I believe he was a clear and present danger, he was five years old, but because I found myself wondering when it was that violence became such a normal language of childhood.

Of course, this is not entirely new. I grew up watching cowboys and Indians films. We played war games. Toy guns appeared every Christmas. Many of us pointed plastic revolvers at our friends before we were old enough to understand what a real gun could do.

It would be easy, and wrong, to pretend that previous generations were somehow innocent. Children have always explored power, risk and conflict through play. Stories have always contained villains. Boys in particular have often been encouraged to test boundaries through rough-and-tumble play, competition and confrontation.

Yet something feels different. The violence of my childhood was usually embedded within a story. However simplistic and problematic those narratives may have been, there was at least a framework.

Today’s children inhabit a digital world where violence is often detached from meaning. Online platforms can serve up an endless stream of fights, humiliation, cruelty, real-world killings, extreme pornography and videos designed purely to shock. The Children’s Commissioner describes children becoming “fixated on violence” after exposure to harmful online content. Violence is no longer a scene in a film; it is content, and content never ends. That should force us to ask difficult questions about the messages children receive.

Too often, boys are still encouraged to destroy while girls are encouraged to create. A boy knocking down a tower of bricks is laughed at; a girl building one is praised. Boys are given weapons while girls are given crafts. Boys are expected to conquer while girls are expected to nurture. These are caricatures, of course, and modern parenting and education is more nuanced than this. Yet the underlying messages remain surprisingly powerful. We continue to socialise boys towards domination, aggression and risk, even as we express concern about male violence later in life.

Then we seem surprised when some boys become fascinated by power expressed through destruction. The uncomfortable truth is that violence is not a fringe interest in our culture; it sits at the centre of much of our entertainment, media and public discourse. We celebrate military victories. We cheer cinematic revenge. We consume true-crime documentaries at extraordinary rates. We replay footage of attacks and atrocities across rolling news channels. We talk constantly about conflict, threat and enemies. The blame does not solely lie at the feet of social media.

Children are not separate from this culture; they absorb it. The Children’s Commissioner’s report should not simply prompt a discussion about Prevent. It should prompt a discussion about childhood itself.

What stories are children hearing? What images are they seeing? What behaviours are being rewarded? What alternatives are we offering? Because if we want children to create, collaborate, empathise and care, we have to build a culture that values those things as highly as it values competition, conquest and destruction.

The little boy on the train was not the problem. He may simply have been reflecting the world around him. That is what children do. They absorb our values, our anxieties, our obsessions and our dreams. They hold a mirror up to the culture we have created.

And perhaps that is the most uncomfortable question raised by today’s report: not simply what is happening to children, but what are children are learning from us?

It’s so funny, how we don’t call anymore.

August 12, 2026 jameshempsall

It was my birthday recently. There were cards on the window sill, thoughtful texts arriving throughout the day, WhatsApp messages from friends I haven’t seen for years, LinkedIn notifications from professional contacts and the familiar stream of digital kindness that reminds us we are remembered. I was genuinely grateful for every one of them.

Yet among all those messages, there was just one telephone call. Something that caused me to paraphrase Cliff Richard.

This isn’t a complaint. I didn’t feel unloved or overlooked. Quite the opposite. The messages were warm, generous and heartfelt. But the imbalance struck me as an observation worth pondering.

Once upon a time, birthdays involved sitting near the telephone, as it would ring continuously. The call itself was never simply about saying “Happy Birthday”. It was the opening line of a much longer conversation. The birthday greeting soon drifted into other territory. How are things really? Have you heard from so-and-so lately? What happened with that project you were worried about? How are the children? Before long, twenty or thirty minutes had passed. Sometimes longer. The conversation wandered and meandered, discovering things neither person had intended to discuss. There was no agenda and no objective other than human connection. The unexpected happened.

Today, the message arrives instead. A quick “Happy Birthday, James”, perhaps accompanied by an emoji or a thumbs-up, and the exchange is complete. The sentiment is still sincere and the affection is still real, but the experience feels different. Less expansive. More transactional. A thoughtful gesture, certainly, but often a completed task rather than the beginning of a conversation.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that we have never been more connected to our phones. We carry them everywhere, rarely letting them out of our sight. We sleep beside them, check them before getting out of bed and glance at them hundreds of times every day. Yet we seem increasingly reluctant to use them for the very purpose they were originally designed for: talking to another human being.

I notice this phenomenon everywhere. People frequently send a message asking whether they can call. I’ve often wondered what response they are expecting. Increasingly, asking permission to make a phone call has become a social ritual, almost an acknowledgement that an unsolicited conversation feels intrusive in a way it never used to.

I see it in the workplace too. Some younger colleagues visibly tense when the office phone rings. The ringing itself appears to create anxiety. Who could it be? What do they want? Why didn’t they send a message first? To many people, a ringing telephone is no longer an invitation but an interruption, a risk rather than an opportunity.

Then there are the callers who politely ask whether I can talk after I have answered the phone – another ritual I feel. I always find myself smiling at that moment. Well, yes, that’s why I chose to pick up, I have that sort of agency. Yet the question reveals something about the way our culture has changed. We have become accustomed to scheduling and managing communication so carefully that even a spontaneous conversation can feel unusual.

This is not intended as criticism. Every generation develops its own communication norms. Text messaging solves genuine problems. It is efficient, convenient, fast-paced, and respectful of people’s time. It allows us to respond when we are ready rather than forcing an immediate interaction. For busy lives, that flexibility matters.

But I do wonder what we lose when conversation becomes increasingly filtered, managed and controlled. A text message delivers information, but a phone call reveals mood. A WhatsApp message conveys words, while a conversation communicates hesitation, laughter, uncertainty, excitement and emotion. We hear the pause before somebody answers. We notice when their voice sounds tired. We recognise enthusiasm that would never fit inside an emoji. We discover things we didn’t know to ask.

Perhaps this is one reason why loneliness continues to feature so prominently in public conversations despite our endless digital connectedness. We have become remarkably effective at communication, but have we weakened conversation? The distinction matters. Communication is the exchange of information. Conversation is the exchange of humanity.

In Find Joy in the Middle, I explore the importance of living in the spaces between life’s milestones. The middle is where relationships deepen, where understanding grows and where meaning often emerges unexpectedly. It struck me on my birthday that phone conversations inhabit a similar kind of middle. A text message takes us directly to the destination, whereas a conversation allows us to wander through the landscape. Often it is in that wandering that joy is found.

I don’t know whether the decline of voice calls is a temporary cultural shift or a permanent change in how we relate to one another. Perhaps future generations will find our nostalgia for telephone conversations as quaint as handwritten letters. Maybe we can ask AI bots to talk to our friends whilst we are busy doing something (I don’t know what) that’s a better use of our time. But I do know this: the one person who called me on my birthday didn’t simply wish me a happy birthday. We talked, laughed and caught up. We discovered things neither of us knew when the call began. Long after many of the messages had disappeared beneath newer notifications, that conversation stayed with me.

Maybe that’s what all this means.

Not that messaging is wrong. Not that technology has failed us. Not that we should abandon convenience for nostalgia. Rather, that amidst all the pings, alerts, notifications and unread messages, there remains something uniquely powerful about hearing another human voice unexpectedly reach across the distance and ask, “How are you?”

And perhaps, every now and then, that question deserves more than a text.

From lockdown to now: Five years of looking back and moving forward.

March 21, 2025 jameshempsall

Our worlds changed on 23 March 2020. We were united by a sense of uncertainty, feelings of anxiety, and of confusion around what was to come. We gathered eyes and mouths agape, in front of TV screens as we were told to stay at home. The outside world fell silent, roads and skies emptied, non-essential shops closed, workplaces ceased operations with some being asked to work at home or be ‘furloughed’ (a new word for most of us), and keyworkers kept our essential services going.

Home was a reassuring sanctuary, if you were lucky, surrounded by loving family members. A time to pause, reflect, look after our basic needs for safety and nourishment. For many it was a trap that intensified disadvantage, deepened dysfunctional relationships, and a exacerbated their lack of opportunity. For our youngest children, their worlds became so much smaller. Some benefitted, some did not. As lockdown(s) continued, we predicted families would feel the effects in terms of parent relationship pressures, domestic abuse, economic burdens, and children’s development would be compromised or delayed. It gives none of us any pleasure to say we were right.

In early years, we started to hear from keyworker parents who needed our support so they could go to work, we delivered for them. Parents not able to use our services started to appreciate in new ways the work we do, and the shared partnership we have in supporting their children’s development and learning. Providers, like all businesses, were juggling with the new realities, the economics, and the need for short- to long-term planning, and supporting their own workforce. Local authorities were contacting us for help in navigating the complexities of Government guidance, financial packages, and the processes needed for business change, so the best possible support could be offered to the whole sector. We were only too pleased to do what we could, it was something core to our mission.

Like many others, online meetings were something of a grey area for us. But we soon got to grips with the technology (after many clumsy attempts). We started to connect as a team to make sense of what was happening on a day-to-day basis. We began meeting with individual local authority early years leads, for mutual support, sense checking, and information sharing. This is a time we look back on with great fondness and friendship. We were in it together. These exchanges formed the basis of our national support programme ‘Finding Your Way Through’ a structured strategy framework, and a set of actions, approaches and resources we developed and freely gave to the sector. Then came the idea to offer a weekly/fortnightly online session for local authority leads for peer support, wellbeing, and information sharing. We called them Coffee Breaks, essentially because we were asking everyone to stop, put the kettle on, and come together with the community for an hour of mutual support, understanding, and collaboration. What a moment that was, a movement began, and Coffee Breaks became that national space for both unstructured and focused discussion, problem solving, resource sharing, and a safe space for emotional safety. Five years on, and they continue, for all the same objectives, and they are a pleasure for us to facilitate and provide for our colleagues.

The lessons learned, from lockdown to the present day are many. It has become clearer for many who have a stake in our sector that we play an essential role in supporting parents in caring for their children, building their development and joy for learning, and their economic opportunities. Early years is an essential cog in a large machine that delivers for families across multiple (not single or artificially allocated) outcomes. Without it, and the impacts are clear. We have been identifying the increases in children’s developmental delays, speech and language, and SEND and have been adapting approaches to best help their recovery. However, we know these will continue for many, and risk affecting their school-lives and beyond.

The past five years have also reminded us of the power of togetherness, our unswerving commitment to the sector, our empathy and affinity with parents and children, and not forgetting our resilience. That said, there are fragilities that continue despite the ambitions, recognition, and increased spend in the sector. The need for support, challenge, and community in the sector remains vital. This needs to include all types of setting or school, group-based or home based, and reaching all practitioners to fully deliver our impacts confidently, healthily, and joyfully for better futures.

Let’s think again about school readiness.

March 3, 2025 jameshempsall

I had a really awful time at school. I was far from ready. I was unsocialised, anxious, and sensitive. As a summer born white working-class boy I had already been dealt a difficult hand of cards. Being at home with mum had not helped me to be school ready for lots of reasons. Back then, pre-school groups were not readily available in our community, and as a stay-at-home mum, my mother mostly kept me at home, and we had a small family. I remember attending a pre-school group, once or twice. I was four years old, and I can still describe the experience in vivid detail, some fifty years later, as it was so traumatising and confusing for me. It did nothing to help me. Neither did starting one school for a year before being moved to another for the next. Making friends was hard, I was different, the culture and curriculum was ill-matched to my learning style and preferences, and that fuelled the fire of the bullying I experienced throughout primary and secondary. I left as soon as was able, with a meagre handful of qualifications, but with determination to find a world that was a better fit for me.

That’s why I am certain one of our important roles in early years and one of our key moral purposes is to prepare children for all aspects of school. We should be embracing ‘school readiness’ as a mission and goal for all the children we work with. But instead, too many of us are resisting this. We argue the nuances and distinctions of the term ‘school readiness’. We should focus on activity on outcomes and impacts instead. I have written about this topic for years. I’ve been quoted too: “If school readiness means we support children to develop their key skills in communication, speaking, listening and questioning, social and emotional well-being, and physical development, then count me in. If it is about producing learning robots trained to comply with a rigid and inflexible education system, then I am less keen on the idea.” (cited in The complete companion to teaching and leading practice in the early years. Jarvis P et al 2016). I still like what I said then, and that was 10 years ago.

Despite us still having a fragile construction of multiple offers and entitlements to juggle, often attached to single-minded policy objectives, we have a great foundation upon which to build. Children rely on us to hold it all together and reconcile its creases that I truly hope will be ironed out one day very soon. We all have to be the glue in our various roles and interactions that help children build the resilience to feel safe and to engage, and to develop and use the skills to communicate and connect with the world around them, of which school is a very big and important part indeed. Everyone needs to know that and understand ‘school readiness’ in its widest sense to avoid any misconceptions and mistakes.

This blog was first published on http://www.cypnow.co.uk