REC PARENTING - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Alejandro started his career in politics. Later on, he turned his attention to motorsport and ran a successful GP2 team in Formula 1's main support series. Alejandro saw a gap in the market for a new sustainable form of motor racing, which inspired him to build two electric championships from scratch: Formula E and Extreme E. While still involved in both car racing championships, he has recently launched the E1 series, a new electric racing boat championship.
Job Titles:
- Person Centred Counsellor
Beth is a Person Centred Counsellor with 6+ years of qualified experience. She has experience in helping clients with different issues/situations including stress and anxiety, relationship issues, family conflicts, & coping with grief and loss. Beth believes in providing you with non-judgemental, unbiased support and believe in treating everyone with respect, sensitivity, and compassion. She will allow you to steer our conversation and make your own decisions alongside her gentle support and facilitation. Beth aims to help you with any doubts regarding your parenting and would like to be a support system in place to facilitate your growth in confidence and offer reassurance. Taking the first step to sign up for therapy can take courage - Beth will do her best to help you grow and move forward with any current issues regarding yourself and your children.
Job Titles:
- Registered BACP Counsellor
Debra is a registered BACP counsellor. She specialises in women's issues and trauma. She has worked with drug and alcohol misuse for 7 years. She has experience on issues such as domestic abuse, bullying, low self esteem, anxiety, depression, relationship issues, and food issues amongst others. Debra works with different types of therapy, depending on her client's issues. She is essentially a humanistic counsellor, using person centred modality as well as existential and gestalt. Debra also incorporates cognitive behavioural therapy, solution focused therapy, dialectical behaviour therapy and creative techniques.
Ana is a child psychologist, lecturer, researcher, author, and speaker. Born and raised in Madrid, Ana moved to London in her early 20s where she completed a BSc in Psychology (The Open University), an MSc in Applied Child Psychology, and a PhD in Developmental Psychology (Kingston University). She then took on different positions as a lecturer and a researcher at the University of Surrey and the University of Winchester. Her main areas of research are parenting, family relations, and children's socioemotional development. Her work has been published in different scientific journals as well as in the popular press and she has presented at national and international conferences. As part of her research activities, she has visited many, many schools and families, giving her a very good understanding of the challenges that families and schools face.
Ana is passionate about supporting parents and children. She believes that by supporting parents, we will be helping to raise well-balanced, kind, and resilient children, who are the future of our society. This is why after experiencing first-hand how parents struggle to find support and reliable advice when they have issues or doubts, she founded REC Parenting, an online platform offering parents reliable, expert, and confident information. All in one place with no judgement and no agenda. She is married and has four teenage boys.
Dr Bettina Hohnen works as a Clinical Psychologist with children, parents and communities to help strengthen relationships between adults and young people, by translating rapidly developing neuroscience into practical and actionable strategies. She believes that relationships are at the heart of wellbeing. Her academic achievements include two doctorates and she is a senior teaching fellow at UCL, lecturing widely at graduate and post-graduate level. Read her books (The Incredible Teenage Brain: everything you need to know to unlock a teen's potential, 2019 and How to Have Incredible Conversations With Your Child, 2021) to understand how to create an environment that balances the need to protect young people and provide fertile ground for growth and development. Bettina is the mother of two children, now in their early twenties.
Dr Bettina Hohnen believes that relationships are at the heart of wellbeing.
Job Titles:
- Chartered Clinical Psychologist
Chartered clinical psychologist Dr Caroline Boyd has over 10 years' experience working in the NHS and mental health settings, and she supports parents from pregnancy to childbirth and beyond. Caroline is the author of Mindful New Mum, and her published research explores mothers' experiences of intrusive thoughts about their babies. Caroline is an Ambassador for UK perinatal mental health charity, PANDAS, and her work has been featured in You magazine, Grazia, and BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour.
Caroline specialises in supporting parents around anger and anxiety in her independent psychology practice, Parent Therapy Hub. She shares psychology ideas on Instagram and in the media to help parents feel more connected - to themselves and their children - and less alone.
Dr Caspar Addyman is a developmental psychologist interested in learning, laughter and behaviour change. He is mostly interested in babies and what makes them happy. For many years he was the director of the Baby Laughter Project at Goldsmiths University examining why babies laugh and why laughter is important for their cognitive and emotional development.
Caspar is the author of ‘The laughing baby: The extraordinary science behind what makes babies happy'.
I am an Associate Professor in Developmental Psychology at Kingston University London and a chartered Psychologist (CPsychol).
Dr Jeanne Shinskey is a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway University and Director of the Royal Holloway Baby Lab. She is a developmental psychologist and examines how babies learn.
Dr Lindsay Malloy received her PhD in psychology and social behaviour from the University of California, Irvine.
Dr Paula Corcoran is an academic in the Psychology Department at City, University of London. She previously worked in drug and alcohol services for over ten years supporting young people and adults who live with drug and alcohol addiction. She has been in a full time academic post for the past thirteen years. Current ongoing research projects focus on addiction recovery and what is meant by ‘recovery'. She is also the proud parent of a teenage child.
She qualified from the British Association of Psychotherapists and worked for many years at the University College Hospital (UCH), London, helping children and their families understand and cope with illness, surgery and chronic disease. During her time at UCH, she was involved in the training of paediatricians, nurses and radiology staff, helping to improve communication with their young patients.
She also has extensive experience in NHS Child and Family Psychological Services, schools, special needs provision and in private practice working with wide range of child and adolescent difficulties. These include anxiety, depression, psychosomatic and eating disorders, as well as children with learning difficulties. Rachel has a special interest in helping kids with everyday worries, and also works extensively with children with social communication problems.
During her time in the USA, she qualified as a Movement Therapist at Hahnemann Medical University, Philadelphia, (M.A. Creative Arts in Therapy) which focused on using non-verbal and creative therapies in child and adult psychiatry. She was part of the innovative team at the Laban Centre London, extensively lecturing and supervising trainees, and helping to establish the first accredited Master's degree course in Movement Therapy in Europe in 1985.
Rachel is an accomplished radio broadcaster for the BBC in the UK since 2001 and also had a popular weekly radio show ‘Kids In Mind' on World Radio Switzerland for many years.
Her unique approach of understanding the child whilst offering simple and practical ideas to try has helped and supported numerous parents and carers around the world.
Job Titles:
- Consultant in Orthodontics at Guy
Dr Sarah Good is a Consultant in Orthodontics at Guy's and St Thoma's Hospital and lectures on the London Postgraduate Orthodontic Teaching Programme. She is a member of the British Orthodontic Society.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Psychologist and Writer
Dr Tara Porter is a Clinical Psychologist and writer. She has worked in the UK public healthNHS for 25 years, mainly in child and adolescent mental health. Now she works privately, writes and speaks about mental health.
Dr Virginia Lam is a social and developmental psychologist focused on examining children's bilingual development. She is the coauthor of the textbook "Developmental Psychology" with two editions and an Italian edition, published by Pearson. Virginia is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Roehampton London.
Dr Ayten Bilgin's research is in the area of developmental psychopathology particularly focusing on the following topics: early regulatory problems (excessive crying, sleeping or feeding problems), preterm birth (i.e., birth before 37 weeks of pregnancy), infant-parent attachment, and parenting.
Ayten uses large-scale longitudinal data to investigate whether and how early regulatory problems have an impact on the development of mental health problems. In addition, she is interested in understanding the long-term outcomes of being born preterm, specifically regarding social relationship skills, well-being, and emotional and behavioral problems.
Dr. Ayten Bilgin is a lecturer at the University of Essex.
Dr Ayten Bilgin's research is in the area of developmental psychopathology particularly focusing on the following topics: early regulatory problems, preterm birth, infant-parent attachment, and parenting.
Job Titles:
- Founder and Head of Sheen Montessori Nursery
A Chemistry graduate from Imperial College in London, Fiona held several senior marketing roles at Coca Cola and GlaxoSmithKline before a change in direction beckoned. She graduated from the Montessori Centre International (MCI) and committed to a new career direction as a leader in Montessori teaching. Fiona is the founder and head of Sheen Montessori Nursery in London since 2010.
Job Titles:
- Professor in Psychology at the University of Surrey
Harriet Tenenbaum is Professor in Psychology at the University of Surrey. She is an expert on children's and adolescents' social and emotional development. She received a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has received funding from the Leverhulme Foundation, the British Academy, NICHD, and the EU. Presently, she is an investigator of the Marie-Curie funded ITN, G-Versity examining gender diversity. She is the co-editor of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.
Heleen is an experienced parenting counsellor as well as an organisational psychologist. She understands the complexity and challenges of working parents. Working currently as a therapeutic coach in private practice, her specialisations include; bullying, anxiety, emotional development, resilience, parenting through the teenage years and post-separation parenting. Heleen has a strong belief in early-intervention approaches and psycho-education with the aim to be solution-focused in her work.
Heleen is the mother of three teenage boys.
Heleen is an organisational psychologist as well as an experienced parenting counsellor. Heleen worked as a counsellor (face-to-face, virtually and in groups) as well as a telephone crisis counsellor for parents and families.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Infancy and Sleep Centre at Durham University
- Professor Emeritus and Director of the UK Observatory for the Promotion of Non - Violence
Professor Helen Ball is the Director of the Infancy and Sleep Centre at Durham University. She examines infant and parent-child infant sleep and pioneers the translation of academic research on infant sleep into evidence for use by parents an healthcare staff.
She serves as an Associate Editor of the journal Sleep Health, and is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Human Lactation. She is Chair of the Lullaby Trust Scientific Committee and a Board Member or the International Society for the Study and Prevention of Infant Deaths (ISPID). In 2013 Helen received an award for Outstanding Impact in Society from the Economic and Social Research Council and in 2018 she was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for her research and outreach on parent-infant sleep.
Helen is a Professor Emeritus and Director of the UK Observatory for the Promotion of Non-Violence at the University of Surrey. Her research focused on bullying in schools, universities, and the work place. She is an expert in strategies to counteract school bullying, including peer support as an effective intervention that empowers children and young people to take action themselves to help other young people who are experiencing social and emotional difficulties. Her widely-used training manual Peer Support in Action, influenced practice across the UK.
Jo is a MBACP qualified counsellor with 12 years of experience. She has extensive experience working with adults, young people and children on issues such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, suicide, addition and learning disabilities. Jo's goal is to support their clients so they can achieve their goals.
Kasia is a qualified and BACP accredited integrative counsellor with teaching background. Her teaching qualifications and experience equipped her with a comprehensive knowledge of child development and the learning process. Since 2010 Kasia has worked therapeutically with adults, children and young people in school, voluntary settings and most recently, online. In her practice, she draws on theories taken from different modalities and integrate them into a coherent framework. Kasia believes that the focus of integration is the therapeutic relationship and person-centred concepts referring to the quality of the relationship. However, she also values and uses theories and strategies from other counselling modalities such as psychodynamic, CBT, solution focused and creative therapies. Kasia's work is also informed by insight from attachment theory, polyvagal theory and trauma research. Kasia also has a lot of experience of supporting parents, carers and teachers regarding children's emotional, social and behavioural difficulties as well as challenges related to neurodiversity and special educational needs.
Kim is a qualified counsellor since 1994. She originally trained at the London School of Counselling and Psychotherapy. She is registered with the BACP and is listed on their approved register. Kim also holds certificates in child care and autism awareness. She has extensive experience working with children, young adults, and couples in various settings. She specialises in anxiety, stress and anger management, and depression, as well as in bereavement and loss, self-esteem issues, separation and divorce, domestic violence, and remaining childhood issues and traumas. Kim works generally in a person centered manner, which is the belief that we can all find the answers and solutions to our problems from within ourselves when offered a safe and trusting environment to explore them. She also draws from other theories and includes a combination of tools and exercises in her therapy to aid in self growth, understanding, and develop awareness.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
Lawrence is a multi-award winning TV producer who has made programming, launched channels and sports franchises in over 50 countries. His career has taken in senior roles at the BBC, IMG and Endemol. He now runs his own successful business Aurora Media, which he sold to the All3 Media Group in 2018.
Lorraine is a MBACP and NCS accredited counsellor. She has experience working with families and teenagers, in online and face to face settings. She has experience dealing with crisis situations.
She knows how hard it is choose the right therapist, and so she provides a calm, safe and non-judgmental space for her clients to explore whatever is on their minds, listening and helping them to initiate change.
She encourages clients to view issues from a different perspective, gaining more awareness into their own feelings, thoughts and behaviours. She supports her clients to help them manage their relationships in a healthier and balanced manner.
Lucy is a psychotherapist, art therapist, ecotherapist, photographer and nature lover who lives and works in the High Peak of Derbyshire. Lucy works in a person-centred way with parents who have lived experience of childhood trauma or neglect, who are parenting a neurodivergent child or are neurodivergent themselves, and who are struggling with other issues of illness, bereavement and/or disability. Lucy is able to help you navigate all kinds of complex parenting challenges, sensitively and safely. Please ask about using optional art and ecotherapy techniques in your sessions if you would like to.
Lucy is a psychotherapist, art therapist, ecotherapist, photographer and nature lover who lives and works in the High Peak of Derbyshire. Lucy is able to help you navigate all kinds of complex parenting challenges, sensitively and safely.
Paige is a Strategic Operations professional with over 20 years' experience in operations management, strategic execution, business development and communications. She has helped launch several start-ups across continents and built and led highly diverse teams. Born in Dallas, Texas, Paige received a BA in International Affairs from George Washington University in Washington, DC and an EMBA in International Management from the University of Geneva in Switzerland. She is the proud mother of three children.
Randa Barnes is a person centred counsellor who has been in practice for over twelve years counselling experience in various settings such as children, adults, couples, ethnic minorities, university students, refugees and asylum seekers. Her great passion is bringing healing to people who have been through a traumatic/stressful experience. She tries to help clients reframe their perceptions of themselves, and strengthen their relationships so that they can know themselves as peaceful and complete whole. The counselling journey is such that not a single approach is effective for every individual. Randa has been trained in a range of modalities including integrative approach, Family Therapy, and CBT. She also have a diploma in counselling children and young people. Her educational background consists of a bachelors in English Language & Literature, a master's degree in Philosophy, a Diploma in Advanced Therapeutic Skills and an Intermediate Level in Family Therapy. Randa enjoys spending time with her family, travelling, meeting people and volunteering.
Rosie is a licensed counsellor for both children and adults in the UK. She has many years of counselling and teaching experience. Rosie has experience in helping people with stress, anxiety, relationship issues, family conflicts, trauma and abuse. She also supports children struggling with anxiety in academic studies. Rosie believes in treating everyone with respect, sensitivity, and compassion. As an experienced teacher, with roles in educational leadership and as an additional needs teacher, Rosie has the experience and skills to support both parents and children with the aim to empower them in their life's journey.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Advisory Board
- Private Equity Investor and Asset Manager
Simon is a private equity investor and asset manager with over 20 years international investing and operating experience across a wide range of sectors and business stages.
Sophie Ricard, MsEd, NT, is a registered child nutritionist helping kids to thrive at school.