Hello and welcome to the Slow Home Podcast. This is the podcast all about slow living in a fast world.

Welcome. I am Brooke McCallory. Thank you for joining me. And I am Ben McCallory and welcome to episode

167 where you speak to the wonderful Helen Haywood. I do. So Helen has written a number of books, but just earlier this year, just in May, she's

released a book called A Slow Childhood.

And that's essentially why I wanted to talk to her, because it's a beautiful book.

She writes, a lot of it is memoir, so it's not, you know, a how-to parenting style book.

Yeah, picking it up, it looks like a how-to book, but it actually isn't.

No, so each chapter where she talks about a particular part of parenting,

she will end with tips or hints, not necessarily like a step-by-step how-to.

And she fully admits in the beginning of the book

that not everything is going to work for everyone at all times.

So it's a really invitational, accessible kind of look at what giving her own children,

who are now like 17 and 20, a slow childhood meant.

And she's honest.

That's great.

Really honest about the fact that she had prioritised a slow childhood for the kids

and she talks about what that actually looks like because it can look very different for

different people and why in the end she discovered that it was actually incompatible with

her initial career trajectory

that she had decided on for herself.

Okay.

Not and that might sound like a real downer, but you know that I talk a lot about the fact

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