Sue Palmer Talk
"Toxic Childhood"
Monday, March 23rd 7.30pm
Forest Row Village Hall
SOME REVIEWS FOR TOXIC CHILDHOOD
Excellent book… practical, sensible and eminently attainable advice on on how to detoxify childhood.
Deborah Orr, The Independent
A super child-rearing manual, founded in science, bolstered by much reading, a lot of interviews and a long career in education.
Times Educational Supplement
Essential reading for all those who work with children. It has fascinating and sometimes startling revelations about the damaging influences on the young within our society and offers some practical and very readable ideas and recommendations for all those who endeavour to give children the very best we can.
Gervase Phinn, author
Sue Palmer’s Toxic Childhood is extensively researched, fluently written and easily read. It is a guidebook for parents, grandparents and all who care about present and future generations, as well as being an academic work in its own right.
Tribune
SUE'S BIOGRAPHY
Sue Palmer, a former primary headteacher, is an independent writer and consultant on primary education, notably literacy. She has written over 200 books, TV programmes and software packages for children and teachers, and acted as an independent consultant to the DfES, National Literacy Trust, Basic Skills Agency, numerous educational publishers and the BBC. She is well known to teachers around the UK for her inservice courses and articles in the educational press, especially the TES and Child Education, in which she has a regular column. Her ‘skeleton books’ for teaching cross-curricular writing are used in over 10,000 UK schools. In 2004, she collaborated with Early Years specialist Ros Bayley to produce Foundations of Literacy, which has just gone into a third edition.
Sue’s best-selling book Toxic Childhood: how modern life is damaging our children… and what we can do about it [Orion 2006] was her first for a more general audience, and helped spark a national debate about the nature of contemporary childhood. It was followed by a ‘self-help’ book for parents, Detoxing Childhood, and 21st Century Boys: how modern life can drive them off the rails, and how we can get them back on track, for publication in 2009.
Since researching Toxic Childhood she has become actively involved in many campaigns relating to children’s well-being and mental health. With Dr Richard House she was co-author of two open letters to the Daily Telegraph, bringing together hundreds of experts on childhood to raise awareness of the issues. She is regularly consulted by action groups and politicians, has spoken at conferences around the world, and was named among the top twenty most influential people in British education in the Evening Standard’s 2008 Influentials list.
Sue is a patron of the English Speaking Board, the Scottish Pre-School Play Association and the Children’s Football Alliance. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Trustee and Fellow of the English Association, and Chair of the Scottish Play Policy Forum. In March 2009, she becomes President of the Montessori Association Internationale UK.
