The Secure Start® Podcast

Ordinary Life, Extraordinary Care - A Recap of 2025 on The Secure Start Podcast

• Colby Pearce

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This is a recap of the first 33 episodes of The Secure Start Podcast, all released in 2025.  It has been an incredible honour to host them and I am looking forward to 2026!

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Disclaimer:

Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce.

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SPEAKER_30:

One right person really brings about a change.

SPEAKER_10:

And children grow in the love of someone.

SPEAKER_18:

They've had time stolen from them. The time to be a child, to be well grounded and rooted. And we're there to help give them some of that time back.

SPEAKER_32:

People used to say to me at the start, well, you know, what are you aiming for with these things? And I would say an ordinary life. Because an ordinary life is the great aspiration for children who've experienced trauma.

SPEAKER_14:

But I'm delighted to say it's a language that we use now, a language of love and acceptance and belief in the potential of children, and that we don't need to be embarrassed about using that language, which 30, 40 years ago, it's not you were shunned for using that language.

SPEAKER_15:

If I have to talk about motivation that has drived me to be in that field, is first that someone has believed in me.

SPEAKER_16:

She wanted to be very clear that the relationships that she experienced at the Mulberry Bush, she believes are the only reason that she is today able to be a mother. And she very much models the sorts of care and love, care, and concern that she has for her children on the experiences she had with the staff team at the Marbury Bush.

SPEAKER_18:

Hence we always talk about you come to the Mulbury Bush School to learn to live with yourself and other people.

SPEAKER_19:

I often use gardening as an example that part of what we're doing is emotional gardeners, that we're trying to create conditions to enable our these plants to grow, these children to grow. The conditions that we create are vitally important. Once we've got those conditions right, growth will occur.

SPEAKER_30:

I said, how would you understand a child's trauma or the need if there are hundreds of them together? If there are smaller numbers, then you can do individual care for each and every child.

SPEAKER_26:

One of the things I've come to understand is that you know, um often the intensity of the work that people do and the strength of emotion associated with that work can disrupt people's capacity to think. So what I hope that I can offer is a safe, consistent frame in which we can make sense of the work.

SPEAKER_09:

So Jamie's dad, to be a better parent, he would have to have looked at his own stuff. And that's a very, very difficult thing to do. We would have to have looked at his relationship with his dad, what his attachment injuries were, where his contained shame is, what what does his contained shame tell him about him? So it's so much easier to say, well, actually everything was fine for me. It's this thing over here, it's this phone device, it's this app, it's what people are watching, my kids are watching. That's really the problem. When it's it's not, it's it's actually our stuff and it's what we are bringing into our dynamics with our children. But that's a very hard, it's a very big ask to ask people to do that, even though I think we should.

SPEAKER_04:

It's very, very difficult to think about behaviour as communication if you don't have the time and space to think about how you communicate your own distress when you're distressed.

SPEAKER_10:

There's a really deep responsibility that I'm a conduit for the young people who can't tell their story to those who don't know their story.

SPEAKER_34:

I like a whole agency approach because culture flows downhill, and very often programs, workforce development programs are run by middle managers. And middle managers can't coach and empower and work with and be the confidant for more senior managers.

SPEAKER_12:

And in an effective organization, the way I describe it is anxiety feeds up through the system, and what should be coming back down is containment, is that for me is the key of how therapeutic practice really works, is the stuff that you would do with a child actually happens through the whole organization.

SPEAKER_21:

An essential quality of leadership is to align the team to that primary task.

SPEAKER_32:

Uh, and that requires really strong leadership and what I call relentless kindness towards children.

SPEAKER_13:

We are going to care for the staff equally as much as we do the children. But if people think from informed care and be responsive is easy, it's not. The be able to love a lesson, the beauty do it, so it's creating as a loving experience for the staff and a direct experience for the children. Things are more economic and really because people need to go to the think of individuals to be broken and think of it, and that is it's really a function, it's very difficult.

SPEAKER_20:

It's really difficult. At that time, psychoanalysis was functional. It was the way you thought.

SPEAKER_18:

I don't feel held in the adult mind. And because I can't feel I'm in their mind, I produce behaviors continually to be on their mind.

SPEAKER_00:

And this in this way, I think we are not giving all the answers, we are just giving a way of thinking about the work and a way of reflecting about the work and the needs of the girls.

SPEAKER_31:

In all the different projects or perspectives that we have here working in our more that we are more responsible for the project, but we are very connected, and of course, we have to be that way.

SPEAKER_01:

Most of the times in other organizations there are the apartments, autonomous apartments. Then we have here a level in the middle that is the pre-autonomous. And what we evaluate this is a good practice because it is an autonomy, but inside the house.

SPEAKER_09:

Um we uh changed a little bit and we would like to promote uh health relationships uh with them.

SPEAKER_05:

I really do believe that residential care homes may be the best um opportunity to life change of some goals in some situation.

SPEAKER_07:

Those people spoke really highly of their time in residential care. They felt that they belonged to someone, that there was someone who cared for them, someone who loved them, someone who would protect them, someone who liked them. And I just don't think the research bears out that residential care is as bad as what everyone makes it out to be.

SPEAKER_08:

Um, working in a place that is kind of the receptacle of last resort, um I have been attentive to evidence to the contrary. Good, high-quality residential childcare is the is the best choice for a very small number of children in very specific circumstances. I think the multiple placements is one of the most damaging things that care systems do to children and young people.

SPEAKER_24:

When the second family placement has failed, where is the conversation that says maybe we should be trying something different rather than carrying on and trying another three or four or five? You know, you'd like to think that residential care would be used earlier and more purposefully to do the work in order to allow young people to move into family-type settings successfully.

SPEAKER_17:

I think the issue is a matter of finding uh a fit between a particular child, that child's history, and an environment that's going to work for that child. The last resort notion uh came from a belief that uh residential care was inherently bad for children. But if you if you ask a large number of alumni of residential care about their experiences, and they tell you they had good experiences and they never would have preferred foster care, you gotta give some attention to that.

SPEAKER_21:

What does a good outcome look like after a residential experience? Well, you would want those children in adulthood to be able to enjoy being in the world and to succeed in whatever form they choose to succeed.

SPEAKER_29:

And the thing that I would certainly say is the vulnerabilities offline result in far more vulnerabilities online.

SPEAKER_11:

And uh the probation uh officer that I was uh shadowing on a voluntary basis uh said, Look, Graeme, if you want to understand how people get to be like this, i.e., in prison and and uh coming out often very institutionalized and and struggling, uh then it would be worth my uh while learning about children.

SPEAKER_33:

So I just think anyone who's working with young people has the opportunity to provide therapeutic moments without being a therapist. We don't know what experiences these young people have had over the weekend or that morning before they come into our classroom, but we know what experiences we can give them before they leave for the day.

Robbie:

We really I think need to be thinking about not just one good adult, but trying to find connections for people to many good adults. Being cared about is more important than being cared for in many ways, I think, in the eyes of many of the young people.

SPEAKER_06:

It was essentially a combination of several people noticing me, supporting me, believing in me. And one of my biggest um messages is to parents you know, say sorry, we all mess up sometimes. Let's have more informal conversations. Yes, absolutely say sorry to your children, recognise the mistakes that you made, acknowledge them, take accountability and grow. And that's what I've done, and it's you know it's working okay.

SPEAKER_16:

But there is something about modelling the sorts of relationships that can be achieved and and those experiences that can be had so that even if it's not possible to have those at home, the children can develop a sense of what might be possible.

SPEAKER_25:

So the balance of how you talk to foster carers or potential foster carers when they're interested is really, really important. If I were talking to somebody that wanted to go into it, I would ask them what they were worried about first.

Kouise:

I wanted to be, consciously or subconsciously, the the the the very adult that I dreamed I'd had. And what that was was somebody who smiled when they saw me. That simple. Not look like they were gonna eat me or beat me, but just someone who was warmth because a child would tell you it's all in their face. That's all I wanted. It wasn't about money, it wasn't about material things, it was about that feeling that you were with an adult that looked at you with kindness in their eyes because it was in their heart. And children read that instantly.

SPEAKER_22:

But we now know that with three or four, similarly, with three or four simple interventions, we could dramatically reduce um child trauma, child maltreatment, risk of trauma.

SPEAKER_29:

I would say that the one thing that we could do that would really, really, really have a massive influence on child protection is to um eliminate poverty.

SPEAKER_22:

We must be the last generation of to see violence against children, maltreatment and trauma as being insurmountable social problems.

SPEAKER_04:

We have to stop thinking about children coming out of care, and that's the end of service.

SPEAKER_15:

I have experience, you have the resources, let's go together.

SPEAKER_08:

The world needs people who care about these kids and are finding their passion for how they can make a difference in their lives.

SPEAKER_23:

Children are being abused by their parents. They don't really stop loving their parents, they stop loving themselves. Um and we really see parents as an integral part of their identity and their healing process. We care for the parents so they can care for their children.

SPEAKER_05:

And most of the times these families, these parents, didn't have the fair conditions to develop, to um um to to develop their competences, to develop their um their dreams, and uh we thought that they deserve um uh have that fair conditions to flourish.

SPEAKER_02:

I think I think I always knew this, but I know it far more powerfully now, is that the decisions that we make, the desi the the things that we write, the recommend recommendations that we make about families have long-lasting impact. So therefore, think very, very carefully about what you write, what you decide.

SPEAKER_20:

And uh I played piano and uh I played his piano. I thought I was good. I played Willie Holtz piano.

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Colby Pearce

Host