Book Extract: My heroes were on the walls

Nov 10, 2021 | ,

This is the second in a series of extracts from my book Listen To Your Footsteps, a collection of reflections and essays on fatherhood, identity, loss, creativity, etc WATCHING A documentary about Muhammad Ali, I was struck by how big an impact he had on me when I was a child. I was eight years old when he lost to Larry Holmes, and I have memories of watching the fight with my father. I has heartbroken because, even at that young age, I could see that Ali was at the end of his career. I read a copy of an early biography of his as a young teenager and, by then, had watched a lot of his...

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How to manage uncertainty with children

May 8, 2020 |

As parents, we have all had that moment when our child repeats something we said in the privacy of our homes in front of the person we said it about. Hopefully, when this happened, it didn’t create too awkward a situation. The simple reality is that our children learn about the world and life through our deeds and our words, though rarely the words we speak to them directly. Our values become their values. Our principles become their principles. This means that racism and sexism and all the other negative -isms are learned from us. No child is born automatically racist. And, when you see a...

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VISA Seeks To Redefine The Future of Payment

Sep 1, 2016 | ,

By the time my daughter was 2 years old, she knew what YouTube was. She was born into a household with an iPad. My son was her conduit into the world of technology. While I spend quite a bit of time trying to keep with technological developments to ensure that I can both monitor and protect them, my children were born into a world where things like mobile phones, laptops, wi-fi, etc are commonplace. I often have conversations with them about how we took pictures with cameras that used film or how cellphones only became pervasive when I was in my twenties. They are fascinated by ATMs and how...

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I Quit My Job For My Children

Jun 18, 2016 | ,

It’s an ordinary Monday, in that blurry space between autumn and winter, when the sun seems to beat a hasty retreat into alternate hemispheres. I am sitting on a beat-up plastic chair watching a boy - my son - go through non-stop drills at football practice, his orange football boots reflecting the fading sun’s rays. Twice a week, most weeks, I sit watching my son at football practice. This particular Monday, when he is done, we hop into the car, rush through to pick up his younger sister from kindergarten and head through to swimming lessons. And, at home, I sit with him as he does his...

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Indian Family Who Lost Custody Of Children

Jan 27, 2012 | ,

I don't usually stray from the specific subjects I explore on my blog, when I actually do post, but felt the need to put this out. Last week, on my Tumblr blog, I reblogged a post about an Indian family in Norway who were said to have had their children removed by that country' child services because they were "feeding them with their hands and sleeping in the same bed as them." I also signed a petition and put up the links on my Facebook page. Having children, my greatest fear is them being taken away from me or hurt in any possible way so I felt compelled to do the above. In signing this...

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Nickelodeon Turns 30

Feb 22, 2010 |

With a toddler in my house, what is shown on television is extremely important. Over the last two and a half years, I’ve been figuring out how it all works, what the best channels are, programmes, etc. I have always been fascinated by the psychology that goes into creating children’s programming. In his book, the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell gives us a peek into how Sesame Street was created and the amount of creativity, research and testing that went into producing Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues. It is not about merely finding something that is perceived to be funny or educational for...

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