And what she taught me about raising a child who doesn’t yet know they’re safe
Written by Fiona McKellar, the Wild Child Parent Coach.
She crawled under the table, moved onto all fours, and growled at me.
Not metaphorically. A real growl. Low and steady, the way a dog warns you when you’ve got too close to something precious. Her brows furrowed, face flushed, body shifting so I was always in her eyeline. And that’s where she stayed for most of our first two weeks together.
We’ll call her Sophie.
Sophie was fierce, bright-eyed, and beautifully wild. She was also absolutely not a fan of me. She already had a teacher; she made that very clear, and I was not needed. That teacher had left to have a baby, which stung Sophie in ways that went far deeper than classroom disruption. Because Sophie’s own story was very far removed from the one that the baby was about to step into.
When I’d share these tales – the growling, lashing out, the under-table vigil, the way she tracked my every move without ever coming close – people would respond with some version of I don’t know how you cope with that.
But I always had a different question.
I wonder what it’s like to be Sophie right now.
Trust is a risk
To have said goodbye to the one adult in your day you’d decided to trust, and feel something close to jealousy for a baby not yet born. To carry the weight of everything happening at home, in a body that hasn’t yet learned how to put it down. To want, desperately, to trust this new person in front of you. But to have learned, the hard way, that trust is a risk not everyone deserves.
To watch your classmates fall easily into laughter and play, and not quite understand why your own body won’t let you do the same.
I don’t know how much of this Sophie could have named at the time. But I kept it at the front of my mind every single day. Not how do I get her to behave, but how do I let her know she’s safe here.
The answers came slowly. Sophie needed to sit where she could see the whole room. She needed the same song every morning, the ritual of it, the predictability, the simple comfort of knowing what was coming next. She needed to know what was happening and to have a hand in planning it. She needed her soft blanket nearby, not because she was a baby, but because her body needed something steady to hold onto.
None of it was dramatic. All of it mattered enormously.
By the end of that term, she ran to me. Wrapped her arms around me. Home was still chaotic. But we had become her calm.
Keeping children like Sophie safe
Over the years, I met many Sophies. Children living in turmoil, or navigating new families, trying to work out who they were in the middle of everything that had happened to them. The journeys were always entirely unique. But the common threads were the same.
Safety first. Always safety first. Not as a concept but as a felt experience, built slowly, through repetition and reliability and a thousand tiny moments of I said I would, and I did.
Rituals and routines that act as anchors. The same song. The same seat. The same order of things. Predictability isn’t boring to a child whose world has felt anything but. It’s oxygen.
A lot less talking than you feel like you want to do. The urge to explain, reassure, negotiate, to fill the silence with words, is enormous. Resist it. Presence speaks louder.
Tiny details that make a huge difference. The smell of the room. The brightness of the lights. The noise level. The people nearby. Learning what supports their nervous system and quietly removing what doesn’t, without making it a thing.
Space. Silence. And so much patience, not the gritted teeth kind, but the kind that comes from genuinely believing that they will get there.
Because they will.
Parenting a wild child
If you are parenting a child like Sophie, I want to offer you something.
There will be moments, many of them, where your attention shifts. Where it stops being I wonder what it’s like for them and becomes I cannot do this anymore. Where you’re not thinking about their nervous system because yours is screaming, and that’s okay. It means your oxygen mask has just fallen off.
Step outside. Breathe. Call someone who gets it. Remind yourself that you are safe. And when you’re ready, come back and show them what it looks like to calm your own storm. Because they will learn this from watching you. Not by listening to you.
The work of raising a child who is learning to trust is long, and slow, and not linear. There will be terms that feel like no progress at all. And then one day, out of nowhere, they will run to you.
It is worth it. They are worth it.
And so, very much, are you.
Fiona McKellar is The Wild Child Parent Coach, a former Head Teacher with 19 years in education, now supporting families through big feelings, tricky behaviours and connection-based parenting. Follow her on Instagram and Facebook.
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