Two years ago today, I was lying under my desk, covered in glass, convinced I was about to die as a monstrous black cloud roared across my garden at 100mph, blasting branches and bricks into the air like a massive explosion. I’d barely had time to think Wizard of Oz before the tornado ripped through 150 homes in Kensal Rise, Northwest London, rendering 50 of them uninhabitable in just 2 seconds.

As I lay there, the windows exploded and glass showered down like rain as the roof lifted. Neighbours’ homes lost entire walls. But, miraculously, nobody was killed or even seriously injured. And, remarkably, what happened in those few terrifying moments has since turned out to have been an unexpected force for good.

Our street, where we’ve now lived for four yars since leaving smarter Holland Park in search of more space and a bigger garden, has always been a community.

At Halloween we hold a competition for the best-decorated house; the children play in one another’s homes, and some of us share school runs. But the ‘twister’ took things to a different level. I was struck by how people who might never have spoken before offered one another tea, clothing and beds. I also felt incredibly grateful to be alive – gaining particular strength from knowing that, had I stood for just two seconds more at my window, I would have been speared with flying glass and would probably now be blind or dead.

My intellectual grasp of the fragility of human existence was replaced with a deeper, visceral understanding of its transience. My attitude to life changed over the next few days: I realised that things were beyond my control and that there was no point worrying. If your time’s up, it’s up.

In such a context, losing some of our possessions seemed irrelevant; and anyway, our insurers were helpful. Our old Vi-Spring bed, used as a trampoline by the children, was replaced with a fabulous new one, and lacerated furniture was updated with new alternatives. Even our house is now improved – as we were in the throes of repair work, we decided to add a loft room. And I’d recommend a tornado to anyone who feels it’s time they rethought their colour scheme.

By September 2007 most of the residents had moved back in and we held a street party to celebrate. There were decorations hung across the road, trestle tables down the middle, and a dish from every home reflecting residents’ nationalities – from 1,000-year-old Chinese eggs to Jamaican chicken. Children played football alongside the street’s sax and keyboard players, who normally perform at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho. And the firemen who had come to our rescue on the day were invited back.

I met psychotherapists, writers and actors, a costume designer and a food stylist; nuclear families, single parents and two lesbians with their daughter. I’d always suspected that our street was interesting, a place of bohemian inclinations, books and pianos, yet I had still yearned for the stucco splendour of Holland Park. Ironically, it took being blasted out of my property to make me feel at home.

This year, our neighbour Sally Wilton (who in 2006 sold her event venues business for £21 million) opened the Pinkham Lighthouse – a community venue and 80-seater digital cinema – in an Edwardian theatre just around the corner. All profits go to an eco-village in South Africa. Opening the cinema was, Sally said, inspired by the tornado: it made her reassess her values. I went to a movie the other night, and half the street was there. We even help choose the films.

The camaraderie has continued. One of our neighbours is now teaching my husband Arabic; another is using me as a guinea pig for her training as a life coach, yet another offers babysitting. We’ve eaten in five different homes, there’s a street book club and a new sense of generosity. ‘If anyone wants a red geranium or pink rose plant, help yourself from my front garden,’ read a neighbour’s recent e-mail to residents. Of course it hasn’t all been good: even now I have recurring night terrors when, half asleep and heart racing, I think that if I get out of bed and put my foot on the floor, the house will explode. But despite this, my overwhelming sense is of the tornado having been a good thing.

Yes every cloud – even such a devastating one – has a silver lining.

Ann Maxwell had heeded one particular teacher’s comment in a school report, it’s doubtful that she would have headed the VIP guest list at No 11 Downing Street for the presentation of the 2008 Clarins Most Dynamisante Woman of the Year award last week. ‘If Ann doesn’t lower her sights, it may inhibit her achievements in life,’ her report read. Happily, for many thousands of children – including her own son Muir – Ann, 45, is not one to lower those sights.

Why rally your friends round for a modest fundraising cake sale when you can organise a dazzling charity ball that brings in £1.1m – as last year’s Muir Maxwell Trust Masked Opera Ball did? Why settle for boxes of chocolates and foot spas for your raffle when you can rustle up a £25,000 diamond solitaire and a bespoke Alfa Romeo Brera for your prize draw? And, most importantly, why be content with providing 700 epilepsy alarms, offering peace of mind to sleep-deprived parents, when you can devote much of your waking life to working towards a cure for childhood epilepsy, which afflicts 70,000 children in the UK alone?

What really shaped Ann’s destiny wasn’t a teacher’s barb, but the birth of Muir, now 11 (Ann has two other sons, 14-year-old Connor and nine-year-old Rory). When Muir was four months old, he suffered a seizure one night while sleeping in his parents’ bed at their home in Edinburgh. ‘With a tiny baby, seizures are quite subtle. But I knew something was wrong,’ says Ann. Whisking her son to the A& E department, she was reassured to be told it was probably the side-effects of a fever (Muir had been given some vaccinations earlier in the day).

‘But a month later, Muir was miserable and unwell. My maternal instinct told me something really was wrong.’ En route to hospital, he had another seizure – though this, too, had passed by the time she arrived, hysterical, on the hospital’s doorstep.

It was several months before doctors put Muir on anti-epilepsy medication, during which time he’d suffered one seizure so severe that his parents almost lost him. ‘It’s called status epilepticus,’ says Ann – basically, a fit that doesn’t stop (in this terrifying case, for more than two hours).

Cumulatively, these seizures affected Muir’s brain and, eventually, he was diagnosed with a rare genetic form of epilepsy called Dravet Syndrome.

Muir will never be able to hold a pen properly or to read. His speech is affected and, as his motor skills are also affected, he can’t learn to sign either. By the time he’s a teenager, Muir may be in a wheelchair. But he is clearly adored by everyone who knows him (who have no problems working out what he is trying to communicate). ‘Muir is one of the happiest children I know. Hugely affectionate. Totally beautiful, with a wonderful demeanour. The inspiration to all of us,’ says Ann.

Desperate for information about childhood epilepsy, Ann found a local charity which ran a special playgroup that she was told Muir could join. The day before his first visit, Ann was told the group had been disbanded as there wasn’t enough in the kitty to pay for the group leader.

So when Ann got a call from a fellow mother of an epileptic child, inviting her to a fundraising fashion show, she went along.

Not long after, Ann bought three tables for friends at a ball for this local epilepsy charity, which raised £50,000. But Ann had her own vision – and her sights, as that teacher identified, were set high. When the ball’s organiser declared she wasn’t up for a repeat performance, Ann stepped in. ‘I pledged to give the charity £50,000 out of what we raised, with the rest going to establish the Muir Maxwell Trust.’ Whereupon, Ann brazenly announced her intention to stage ‘the most glamorous event that Edinburgh had ever seen’. Ticket prices were an unprecedented £150 a head. Prize-draw tickets were a staggering £100, but it paid off, raising £40,000 from the raffle alone.

The first ball netted over £200,000, and since then the annual Muir Maxwell Trust extravaganza has become one of the most successful events in the charity calendar, raising more than £3.5m since it was launched five years ago. High-profile supporters include Christopher Biggins – who chose the MMT to benefit from £25,000 he scooped on a celebrity episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire – Natasha Kaplinsky, Joan Collins and Lorraine Chase.

Ann’s secret is that, cleverly, she has tapped into the generosity of affluent friends and contacts in the financial world (she’s a former financial planner and husband Jonny works in private equity). ‘They saw what we went through with Muir, and have been incredibly supportive,’ she says. ‘Often, they were on the receiving end of e-mails from me, sent at 1am, telling them that I just couldn’t cope any more – so they understand how devastating this condition can be for families.’ What eventually offered Ann and Jonny peace of mind while caring for Muir was a simple epilepsy alarm; placed beneath the sheets on which a child sleeps, it is sensitive to movement and alerts parents to a seizure.

(Night-time seizures can be extremely dangerous and there is a risk of Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy – Sudep – which can be avoided if the child is placed in the correct position to breathe.) ‘Sleep deprivation is a recognised form of torture,’ Ann says, ‘but it’s something parents of epileptic children can endure for years. Parents sleep with the child in their bed, or in their child’s room, or simply take turns to get up in the night every half an hour to check on them.’ The monitor Ann and Jonny bought was a type used in hospitals, ..

adapted for home use. One of the key activities of the Muir Maxwell Trust is to provide these monitors to families. More than 700 families have benefited so far, with a further 250 monitors a year now being distributed. The letters from parents say it all: ‘The monitor has allowed us to put some normality back in our lives, giving us the confidence to allow our daughter to sleep in her own room – and giving us a rest.’ Or, ‘The monitor has been brilliant. As a parent, I feel much better and I am able to sleep.’

But no way was Ann going to stop there. So another part of the Trust’s work has been funding an £80,000 DNA sequencer machine, which is leased to the NHS, to help with early identification of genetic epilepsy. It has also funded two ‘video telemetry’ units to assist with diagnosis, helping doctors to identify the drugs or other treatments which may prove most effective in a specific child’s case, eliminating a lot of trial and error. ‘There are many different forms of childhood epilepsy,’ Ann says.

‘They each respond differently to different drugs or diets.’ So the Muir Maxwell Trust also sponsors two ketogenic diet clinics: a little like the Atkins diet, with a focus on protein, a ketogenic diet can help to control symptoms in some children. But that’s not all. Oh, no. Eventually, as Ann proclaims, her goal is nothing less than ‘to find a cure for paediatric epilepsy’. And her son’s epilepsy isn’t the only challenge that has faced Ann Maxwell on her path to becoming the Clarins Most Dynamisante Woman of the Year. Because she herself is suffering from an incurable – albeit currently slow-growing – cancerous brain tumour, diagnosed in 2005.

‘One side of my face went numb,’ she recalls. ‘I mentioned it to my dentist, who didn’t dismiss it but said I might have something pressing on a facial nerve.’ With her annual ball looming, Ann scheduled an appointment with her doctor for the Monday after the party was over. Subsequently booked in for an MRI scan, Ann felt like a fraud: ‘I couldn’t believe they were fast-tracking me when there were obviously far needier people.’ Otherwise well, she was so convinced the numbness was down to a virus that she squeezed the appointment to hear her diagnosis between two other important commitments – but instead, found herself being ushered to another hospital department to see a consultant neurologist.

‘Nobody mentioned the word “tumour” to me. So I texted my husband – who was in California – to say they’d found a growth, and promptly turned my phone off.’ Frantic, Jonny Maxwell jumped on a plane to be with his wife, who later underwent two operations to ‘untangle’ the tumour, which had macraméd itself around the cranial nerve. ‘Eighty per cent of the tumour was removed in two operations, during one of which they removed my inner ear – so I am now deaf in that ear,’ says Ann, in the most extraordinarily matter-of-fact way. ‘I faced death twice, because the operations were so complicated.

I put my affairs in order, talked to my children – because I had to face the possibility that I might not see them grow up. But because of that, now every day is precious, a bonus. I don’t have a fear of death – and I certainly have an appreciation of life that I never had before.’ Nevertheless, as the lynchpin of the trust founded in her son’s name, and with a question mark over her health, Ann is fully aware of the need to secure the charity’s future.

And so the generous £30,000 Clarins award money will underwrite two years’ salary for a full-time fundraiser, ‘with the aim of turning that into at least £160,000 for the purchase of epilepsy alarms,’ says Ann. Friends insist that Ann Maxwell is a one-off, irreplaceable – yet Ann is convinced that ‘there’s somebody with as much dynamism who can inject his or her own energy into this project, and drive it forward’. As much dynamism as this year’s Clarins Most Dynamisante Woman of the Year? It’s a tough call. But as her teachers, friends, family and colleagues know: when Ann Maxwell sets her sights on a goal, who’d dare to doubt her? To make a donation or to find out more, log on to muirmaxwelltrust.com or call 0131 273 5255

OUR OTHER DYNAMIC CLARINS FINALISTS

LOUISE MASSAMBA’S Merseyside Refugee & Asylum Seekers Pre and Post Natal Support Group (MRANG) cares for women, children and pregnant minors, championing their cause with social services, the medical community and immigration authorities — and providing a day centre in a local church hall.

SUE HAYWARD, who founded Working for the Children of Watamu after a holiday to Kenya in 2003, has built three schools for 700 children, with a library of 15,000 books (shipped from the UK), and a computer room. Next on Sue’s agenda: Happy House, for children orphaned by malaria, Aids and other diseases.

KAREN HILLYER joined the Erb’s Palsy Group in 1991 after her son was born with the condition. The condition is caused at birth and results in a lack of movement, growth and feeling in one arm. Through the education of midwives, the group, which Karen now chairs, has helped to reduce the incidence of Erb’s Palsy dramatically.

AMY HATHAWAY decided to devote her life to working with children in Africa after watching the Ethiopian famine unfold on the TV news as a child. Today, 28-year-old Amy runs Forever Angels Baby Home in Tanzania, an orphanage for 40 infants (many of whose families have died of Aids).

HEATHER LAST, an occupational therapist, founded the Pace Centre in Aylesbury in 1990 to offer life-changing conductive education to children aged from three months to 11 years with physical disabilities, such as cerebral palsy.

JO BAKER-WATSON set up Megan Baker House which offers free conductive education to children, as well as counselling and support to parents and carers. It was set up in memory of her daughter after Jo and her husband David saw how the technique helped Megan during her short but precious life.

I’m sitting at a kitchen table in West London’s Notting Hill talking to the two parenting gurus of the moment. Their children – a total of eight between them – are at school, but there are bikes and scooters in the hallway, two fish tanks on a worktop, and the fridge is covered in magnetic letters, like a hundred thousand other family kitchens around the UK. It’s the home of Karen Doherty, and this table is where she and Georgia Coleridge have spent the past five years writing their book Seven Secrets of Successful Parenting.

Karen, 44, and Georgia, 42, became friends through their offspring. ‘We met in the communal garden that our houses both backed on to,’ explains Karen, who has Californian surfer-girl good looks, matching accent and Juicy Couture tracksuit. ‘Our children would run in and out of each other’s houses,’ adds Georgia, more bohemian in her spotty dress and with the face (in the words of her husband) of a prettier Cherie Blair.

Karen is the partner of Peter Doherty, a financier, and mother of three girls and a boy, aged eight, nine, 11 and 13. Georgia is married to Nicholas Coleridge, writer and managing director of Condé Nast, publisher of glossy magazines such as Vogue and Glamour. They have three boys and a girl, aged nine, 12, 15 and 16.

Despite being the kind of groomed, confident women who make mothering look easy, both admit to having felt paralysed with fear when they first became parents, and being tested to the limit by their own children’s antics. ‘My youngest son was the naughtiest in his nursery class,’ says Georgia. ‘He got up to endless mischief with Karen’s son, who was his best friend. And two of I’m our daughters were also partners in crime – at the age of five they escaped on to the street through the garden fence.’ Karen, who is forthright and witty, has an MPhil in management from Oxford and was a producer and journalist for American television before she became a full-time mother. Georgia, an Oxford graduate in politics, philosophy and economics, is children’s book editor of the Daily Mail, a reviewer and a spiritual healer. Tiptop academic, journalistic and caring credentials on both sides – but the idea for their book stemmed from their complete lack of confidence at the thought of bringing up children.

‘When I had my first baby,’ says Karen, ‘I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to cope. I’d never changed a nappy, and I was worried that I’d make mistakes and ruin my relationship with her. But then I saw how well a friend of mine dealt with her son when he was rude to his great-grandmother. If I’d behaved that badly as a kid, I’d have been slapped across the face and reminded for months of my insolence,’ she says. ‘So my friend’s sympathetic approach was a revelation. I realised how much I needed to learn, so I started reading lots of parenting books and signed up for classes.’ Georgia remembers feeling a similar sense of panic and bewilderment. ‘I had intended to be Julie Andrews up a mountain with a guitar and permanently happy children,’ she recalls. ‘So it was a terrible shock when mine argued with me, fought with each other and didn’t do what they were told. Whenever there was any sign of trouble, either I panicked and froze or lost my temper.’ They both attribute their lack of instinctive parenting skills to difficult aspects of their own childhoods.

Karen was raised in California by her father James Weinberg, then a Hollywood lawyer, and mother Patricia, then a nurse turned housewife. Her parents divorced 25 years ago. ‘My mother hated having her authority challenged,’ she explains. ‘Her dogmatic approach worked with my younger brother and sister, but I stood up to her, and she didn’t like it. To her [she’d been brought up by a Christian fundamentalist father] I was the devil child, the root of all evil in the house. She screamed and shouted and meted out physical punishments that would be considered child abuse these days – like hitting me so hard with a wooden spoon that it broke. She just didn’t know how to deal with me.’ Georgia, the elder of two daughters born to George Metcalfe, then a businessman, now a life coach, and his wife Elizabeth, who did charity work, was raised in Fulham, West London, amid gerbils, dachshunds and her mother’s home-made tapestry cushions. ‘My mother would be nice…then even nicer…then when being nice didn’t get through, she’d lose her temper volcanically,’ Georgia recalls.

‘My parents divorced when I was eight and I became like…’ She pauses. ‘Do you remember the boy in The Snow Queen? When the queen’s mirror .. ‘When I had my first baby, I was terrified that I’d make mistakes and wouldn’t be able to cope’ breaks, a shard goes into the little boy’s heart and he can no longer feel proper emotion. I’d been a sunny child until then but I coped badly with the underlying tensions and sadness, and my mother pretending it was all OK. I was fine at school [she won a scholarship to St Paul’s, the top London girls’ school] but at home I froze up and wouldn’t connect with my mother at all. ‘She had had a very difficult childhood too,’ Georgia adds. ‘Her own mother ran off when she was two, and her parents fought a vicious custody battle over her for 16 years. So she’d had poor parenting herself, yet she did her best as a single mother to look after us and hold everything together. But she was suffering, I was suffering and it was all just too painful. When things were at their worst, there was no money because my father’s business had folded and my mother was struggling to keep us all afloat. She couldn’t physically even kiss us goodnight – she just couldn’t touch us because life was too much for her.’ Interestingly, both Georgia and Karen had better relationships with their fathers than their mothers. ‘I told my father everything,’ says Karen.

‘He was the one who helped me sort out boyfriend troubles and took me to buy my first bra. To him I was an angel and he always saw the best in me. He never shouted at me or hit me, and I responded much better to his style of parenting – very gentle, very thoughtful. When I did misbehave, he’d sort it out sympathetically.’ And Georgia? ‘My father was just so cuddly and affectionate, I’ve always got on with him,’ she says. ‘I am so grateful that my mother didn’t repeat the pattern from her own childhood, and fight him for custody. It was a lifeline seeing him at weekends.’ So for both Karen and Georgia, most of their ‘mothering’ came from their fathers. ‘But let’s put this in perspective,’ says Karen. ‘Neither of us had idyllic childhoods, but nor were they terrible. There are plenty of people far worse off.’ And despite their troubled experiences, both of them have gone on to have large families of their own. ‘My relationship with my mother didn’t put me off having children,’ says Karen.

‘And luckily my temperament is very like my father’s. When each baby was born I loved them so passionately I just kept on getting broody. But I knew I’d reached my limit after having four children in five years.’ For Georgia, raised as one of five children from the age of 12 (both her parents remarried so she acquired two half-sisters and a half-brother), large families ? seem normal. ‘I love the different characters and relationships you get in big families,’ she says. Yet both women felt they couldn’t cope with the reality of a sprawling family without additional help. ‘I hired a nanny for a time, because I couldn’t manage a baby, two toddlers and a five-year-old on my own,’ explains Karen, who has no extended family nearby, having moved to the UK 20 years ago when she met her husband and won a place at Oxford. Georgia adds, ‘I had a wonderful lady to help me out. And I was lucky because when Alexander [her oldest child] was born, I went back to the office part time.

Then, as I had more babies, I found I could do large chunks of my job in the middle of the night when the children were asleep. But,’ she adds, ‘I kept thinking, if it’s tough for me, how incredibly hard it must be for other people. Like most parents, I’ve been tired for years and years. That’s why I wanted to find solutions that work for everyone.’ Georgia’s four children are all now at boarding school. Isn’t this surprising in a parenting guru? ‘Yes, I’m frightened people will say, “How can she write about parenting when her own children board?” But the two youngest have only just started, so for 16 years I’ve had children at home full time,’ explains Georgia. ‘I mourned each of my children for a year before they went to school. My husband says boarding days were the happiest of his life, so they wanted to go too. It was a hard decision, but a good one. They love boarding and my relationships with them are still very strong. The only thing we’ve lost,’ she continues, ‘is the fight over homework. I spend tons of time with them in the holidays, see them most weekends, and speak to them up to three times a day. I’m still very physical with them. Even Alexander, my 16-year-old, will sit on my knee and hug me, although he’s taller than me now.’ What, though, makes the duo think they can tell the rest of us how to parent? ‘We can’t,’ responds Georgia. ‘And we don’t want to. I’ve thrown lots of bossy, patronising books, the sort that tell you there’s only one way to do it, in the dustbin.’

Instead, they collected anecdotes and solutions from all sorts of parents – at the school gates, in grocery queues, at parenting classes, even in sandpits. ‘Most of our stories came from mothers,’ says Karen, ‘but as we both had such great fathers we tried to get lots of input from men too.’ Both of them think their own husbands do a fantastic job. ‘Nicholas is a great father,’ enthuses Georgia. ‘He’s very affectionate, cooks them breakfast and stands on the side of a hockey pitch in horizontal rain. He took Alexander and Freddie to Egypt, on his own, when they were five and six. I’m not sure what was more exciting for them – seeing the pyramids, or being allowed Coca-Cola!’ ‘I couldn’t have had so many children if Pete wasn’t such a good father,’ agrees Karen. ‘When they were babies he did endless night shifts, and as they got older he’d take them swimming and cycling. Now he’s always around in the evenings to help with homework, and at the weekends he’s on pancake duty.’ Karen and Georgia’s book distils their findings into seven parenting types and a collection of simple, accessible, easily remembered emotional tools for dealing with everything from getting your child to clean his teeth or turn off the television to picky eaters and bullying.

The idea is that you don’t have to be one sort of parent all the time – you can adapt different approaches to deal with different situations. It’s about finding a style that feels comfortable for you, and works with your children. If your child is persistently naughty, picky about his food or being bullied, for example, you will need to try more than one approach. ‘The more options you’ve got, the easier it is,’ says Karen, ‘but we’re not here to tell you which type of parent to be.’ And which type are they? ‘I’m good on the friendly stuff,’ says Georgia. ‘Like my father I’m a naturally Tuned-In and Cheerleader Parent [see box, above]. But I’ve had to learn ? how to be more authoritative, more of a Commando type, and it has helped a lot.’ ‘I’m naturally a Pause Parent,’ says Karen. ‘When my children started fighting, my mind went blank and often I didn’t know the best thing to do or say. But I found that saying nothing is a lot better than shouting, and once everyone has calmed down, it’s easier to sort things out. I also take after my father as a Tuned-In and Cheerleader Parent.

But I could become more Sorted. It’s a miracle when my children all end up at school with the correct kit on the right day.’ Writing the book has also helped them to resolve childhood issues and their relationships with their own mothers. Georgia had lunch earlier this month with both her parents, in a restaurant in Westminster. ‘By some fluke, Mrs Thatcher was upstairs,’ says Georgia, ‘so everyone was up there gawping and we had the ground floor to ourselves. We spoke about things that we’d avoided for 35 years and had to keep wiping away the tears. My relationship with my mother had been like a raw egg – neither of us had dared tap too hard on the shell in case we found all sorts of raw, runny, scary emotion inside. Now for the first time we were able to tap the egg and talk directly.’ Karen and her mother have also had a reconciliation. ‘I refused to talk to her for years in my teens,’ she says. ‘There was such a wall between us. But we’ve been able to get beyond that now.

She says she regrets all the years we lost. Touchingly, she also says I’m the best parent she’s ever seen and she’s now using our techniques with her grandchildren.’ Their relationship improved when Karen’s children were born. ‘My mother came and helped me, as her mother had helped her. It was the first thing she’d done for me in decades, and I saw a calm, more compassionate side of her.’ There will be no stopping the born-again parents now. They’ve been doing public speaking engagements, have just launched a parenting website, (KarenAndGeorgia.com) intend to run parenting classes and are bringing out a book on siblings next year. ‘The connection with our mothers wasn’t what we’d have wanted and we’ve both tried hard to give our children what we missed,’ concludes Karen. ‘It’s taken a hell of a long time to figure it out and make it simple so it works. Now we just want to help others too.’ And they will. Seven Secrets of Successful Parenting by Karen Doherty and Georgia Coleridge will be published tomorrow by Bantam, price £12.99. To order a copy with free p&p, call the YOU Bookshop on 0845 606 4204 or go to you-bookshop.co.uk

Seven ways to successful parenting

Karen and Georgia have identified seven parenting types, each with their own unique approach to family life. If you have children, you will almost certainly identify with one or more of them, but what can you learn from the other parenting styles?

PAUSE PARENTS give themselves time to think. They stay calm and quiet and don’t overreact in a crisis. If their child is arguing, whingeing or shouting, they realise it doesn’t help to get wound up and sucked into the drama. They know that once everyone has simmered down, everything will become clear. Then they can pick up the pieces, solve the problem, and maybe even stop the same scene playing itself out again in the future.

CHEERLEADER PARENTS focus on their child’s good points and are great at motivating with praise. It’s not that they don’t care if their child misbehaves; they stay positive because they know it gets results and that bad behaviour tends to shrivel up from lack of attention. Often saying something kind is all it takes.

TUNED-IN PARENTS understand the feelings behind their child’s behaviour and try to work out why he is behaving as he is. When their child is behaving badly or being defiant, they assume there’s a good reason for it, even if they don’t know exactly what it is. So before telling him off, they listen. They are brilliant at breaking deadlocks by helping their child deal with difficult feelings.

PHYSICAL PARENTS realise that there don’t always have to be deep psychological reasons for bad behaviour; sometimes children get ratty because they are exhausted, cooped up for too long in front of the television or juddering with sugar. They know that if their child feels well she will usually behave well — that she will be far less grumpy if she isn’t full of junk food, has a run round the park and gets a good night’s sleep. They also know a hug can work miracles.

SORTED PARENTS stay one step ahead of their child. Getting themselves and their children organised removes a whole layer of stress. If children know in advance when the television is going to be switched off or who is going to get the window seat in the car, they are far less likely to argue about it. Being a sorted parent is about seizing the upper hand and refusing to be a victim of fluctuating circumstances.

COMMANDO PARENTS have no-nonsense authority and are good at being in charge. They get things done without shouting, nagging or being bossy and everyone knows where they stand with them. ‘The juice is spilt, we need a cloth’ works much better than ‘You’re so naughty — clean up that mess now!’ LAID-BACK PARENTS manage to chill out and encourage their child to do things himself, rather than controlling every aspect of his life. They trust their children’s judgment and encourage them to develop their independence. Asking a child for solutions gets his brain working and helps him to feel more confident.