Oliver Riddett

What are you seeing? One of the simplest ideas within The Archetype Approach is to create a little more space between what happened and what we decide it means. A child keeps saying no. Another watches from the edge. Someone repeatedly interrupts a game. Someone else wants to organise everybody. Before we decide what that behaviour means, what did we actually see? I thought this could be a place to bring real moments from practice and look at them together. If you have a child, behaviour or interaction that you keep thinking about, share it here and we can explore: what was directly observable; what different interpretations might be possible; what human capacity may be showing itself; whether anything appears to be becoming rigid or out of balance; what the adult, relationships or environment may be contributing; what kind of balancing experience might help. There doesn’t have to be a correct answer. The aim is simply to look again.

One of the simplest ideas within The Archetype Approach is to create a little more space between what happened and what we decide it means.

Helen, thank you so much for such a generous introduction. What you’ve written really captures what I hope the Archetype Approach can offer. It isn’t meant to give practitioners another system for categorising children, and it certainly isn’t a quick fix for behaviour. It’s really an invitation to slow down a little, look again, and ask whether there might be more happening beneath what we first see. The Jungian roots are there in the background, but the practical heart of it is very simple: children show us recurring human capacities in different ways, and our job is not to force those capacities into something more convenient, but to understand them, help them stay flexible, and support balance when a child becomes stuck. What I’m most interested in is the space between an event and our interpretation of it. The child who resists, withdraws, interrupts, takes over, watches from the edge or seems to have “too much” of something can look very different when we stop asking only, “How do we stop this?” and start asking, “What might this be showing us?” I’m really pleased there’s now a space here on the FSF where we can explore that together. I’d love people to bring real observations, questions, disagreements and examples from practice. The Approach is much more useful when it stays in conversation with real children than when it becomes something fixed on a page. And thank you again, Helen, for being so open to the work and for helping create a place for that conversation to continue.