I’m Yvonne, and young children and how they think, feel and learn has always fascinated me.

As a medical student, I chose a joint degree in experimental psychology, with a focus on child development, cycling round university for my dissertation project with a huge video camera and tripod (it was the early 90’s) studying how three year olds learn through action, which in this case involved a lot of spilling of orange squash!

After med school, I went on to qualify in paediatrics and then audiological medicine, working for more than 10 years with children with hearing loss, communication difficulties, and learning and physical disabilities. They taught me so much about how wide the gap can be between what a child knows and feels, and what they have the words for. I learned how communicating with young children takes a special sort of ‘tuning in’ to how they view the world, which changes so quickly as they grow.

The second half of my career I moved into commissioning national data programmes for NHS healthcare improvement, still all about people, learning and change, if a somewhat older age group!

Meanwhile, we had two daughters and we rode that parenting rollercoaster firsthand, with all its joys and challenges. Stories and imagination were a very big part of our family life, and as the girls got bigger I started to write picture book stories of my own, that somehow always came down to figuring out feelings and conflicts. So when I met the Embers team (through making a very dry animated film for the NHS about data and the law!) I knew I wanted to join. What could be better than stories purposefully created and digitally shared, to help young children and their families decode the mystery of feelings and behaviour??

Time moves on and we are now ‘empty nesters’ as our two daughters, now in their early twenties, have left home. I live in West London with my husband (an NHS paediatrician) and a house full of junk our kids have left behind because they might need it all one day....