Essays on developmental psychology, education, and the algorithmic conditions of growing up. New writing roughly every fortnight; a longer book on the same subject is also underway.
Latest · April 2026
A return, five years on, to a question I could not properly answer at my PhD viva: if privacy is fundamentally about the formation of the self in relation to others, what does it mean when the population most affected — adolescents — is the population in active formation?
2026
Children's most disruptive behaviours — the meltdowns, the refusals, the aggression — are usually not failures of self-control. They are nervous systems doing exactly what nervous systems are designed to do when a child does not feel safe. Reframing behaviour as a safety signal changes how we respond, and what we change.
2025
Most adult conversations about keeping children safe end up being about restriction. But the developmental concept of safety is not primarily about removal of risk; it is about the consistent presence of conditions under which a young person can grow. This essay sketches what those conditions are, and why the politics of children's safety keeps misreading them.
What happens to a young person's sense of self when much of their daily experience is shaped by systems that learn from them in real time? This essay sketches an early answer: identity formation does not stop, but it changes shape, becoming more responsive to what the system rewards and less anchored in slow, internal coherence.
A return, five years on, to a question I could not properly answer at my PhD viva: if privacy is fundamentally about the formation of the self in relation to others, what does it mean when the population most affected — adolescents — is the population in active formation?
Children's most disruptive behaviours — the meltdowns, the refusals, the aggression — are usually not failures of self-control. They are nervous systems doing exactly what nervous systems are designed to do when a child does not feel safe. Reframing behaviour as a safety signal changes how we respond, and what we change.
Most adult conversations about keeping children safe end up being about restriction. But the developmental concept of safety is not primarily about removal of risk; it is about the consistent presence of conditions under which a young person can grow. This essay sketches what those conditions are, and why the politics of children's safety keeps misreading them.
What happens to a young person's sense of self when much of their daily experience is shaped by systems that learn from them in real time? This essay sketches an early answer: identity formation does not stop, but it changes shape, becoming more responsive to what the system rewards and less anchored in slow, internal coherence.