Written the week she turned six.

This is a letter to my daughter. I’m publishing it because there are thousands of families living something like this right now, and when we were one of them I couldn’t find anybody saying it out loud. It’s our story, but almost none of it is unique to us. That’s rather the point.

Before you start. This is a personal account of domestic abuse, coercive control, and the effect of family court proceedings on a child. If any of it brings up difficult feelings, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247, free, 24 hours. Samaritans is 116 123, day or night.

If you’re living something similar right now, you may want the other half of this instead. When Protection Is Framed as Parental Alienation is the factual record: what happened, in order, with the dates, the links, and the practical things I wish somebody had told me in year one.

My little girl

You may never read this. I hope one day you will, when you are old enough to want it, and old enough to decide for yourself what you think of all of it.

But I am writing it now, while it is close enough to be accurate.

I am writing it because the strength you have shown is part of the reason I share our story at all.

I had you and your brothers. Even in the darkest moments, I had smiles waiting for me and a reason to keep going.

Some people have nobody. They are living what I lived, believing there will never be an end and watching their child change while every attempt to protect that child is questioned.

You are now six years old. You cannot understand all of this yet, and you should not have to. But you have the strength of a million sixteen-year-olds and a voice that cannot and will not be silenced.

You speak about what is right and wrong without checking first whether you are allowed. You say no clearly, including to adults. You notice when people’s actions do not match their words.

One day, I hope you will understand that I did everything within my power to protect you.

I did not always succeed. That is the hardest truth I will ever have to give you.

But I never stopped trying.

You started this, and you were four

There is something you do not know.

One winter evening, when you were four, I came home from a court hearing feeling so empty that I could barely feel anything at all. I had sat in a room listening to myself being described as someone nobody who knows me would recognise. I had been accused of turning you against your father. My attempts to explain why I was worried about you had been reframed as hostility, obstruction and alienation.

I came home unable to explain any of it.

That same evening, you told me I was the best at looking after people.

You had been drawing and were upset because you did not think you were good enough. I told you that you were brilliant at lots of things and that, with everything else, we simply kept trying our best.

You looked at me and said it straight back: “You’re the best at looking after people.”

You had no idea what those words meant to me.

I built the first version of this website that week. Not because I had answers. I had none. I built it because you had handed me the only sentence I had left to work with, and I needed somewhere to place the truth when nowhere else seemed willing to hold it.

That is where all of this began. You started it entirely by accident.

You were four years old.

Four Julys

Your birthday is at the end of July, and July is where so much of our story has happened. Four birthdays. Four Julys. Every one involving a tent.

The July you turned three, I sat on wet grass at the edge of a campsite. There were eleven children and six adults there, all people who loved us, yet I had never felt more trapped.

That was the moment I understood I would have to leave to protect us all. In November, I left with you, your brothers and a shopping bag.

The July you turned four, I discovered that leaving had not ended the abuse. It had only changed its shape. It was the summer I stopped functioning.

Somehow, it was also the summer of one of the happiest weeks we have ever known.

A woman I had never met, who ran a caravan park, offered us what she called her garden shed. It was not a shed. It was safety.

You explored fields and walked miles on legs far too small for the distances you demanded of them. You played with goats and chickens. We watched the sun go down beside a pond. We stood in the river. You talked constantly and sang rock songs with complete commitment.

For a little while, nobody could reach us.

At a point when I could not bear to be inside my own four walls, a stranger gave us somewhere to breathe. She owed us nothing. That kindness is one of the reasons this blog began again. I wanted to create something that might offer another person what she gave us: a place to feel less alone.

The July you turned five is the one I would take back, if I could take back only one.

You had become frightened of cars. You had started stuttering. Before one visit, you took a marker pen and wrote your name on your leg so that “Daddy doesn’t forget it’s my name.”

You were four years old when you decided you had to do that.

That summer you became petrified I was going to die, and from that point onwards, i have pinky promised I wouldn’t leave you.

That summer, I asked what you wanted for your birthday. Anything at all. You thought about it and said: “You, in a box.”

Not a toy. Not a party. Me, inside a box, somewhere nobody could take me away from you.

I could not give you that. So I put us in the car and drove until we were in another country. We spent your fifth birthday at Disneyland Paris.

In the photographs, it looks like a treat. It was four days during which nobody could reach us, and I would have driven twice as far for that silence.

The July you turned six was last week.

There was cake, noise, far too many people and an outfit nobody chose but you. You found a patch of trees that belonged to fairies and spent the afternoon immersed in the magic of a fairy woods.

There was no stutter. You did not watch my face before laughing to check whether you were allowed.

It was simply a birthday. Nothing else was hiding inside it.

What was happening while you weren’t looking

You did not see the rest of it, and that was deliberate. It took me, your brothers and a great deal of silence to keep it from you.

Your brothers should never have had to carry any of it. They carried more than any teenager should, while often being treated by the system as though what they had witnessed and experienced did not count because they were not the children formally named in the proceedings.

But children live in families, not legal compartments. What happens to one child affects the others. Siblings see the fear, absorb the tension and try to protect one another. They carry the decisions made about a family even when the paperwork calls them “non-subject children.”

Your brothers held far too much of this so that you would not have to.

You did not see the meetings, statements, reports or paperwork. You did not see the rooms full of adults making decisions about your life. You did not see me being told one thing and later discovering another.

You did not see short, supervised meetings being treated as though they could answer every question about what happened when nobody was watching. Supervised contact can show what happens during supervised contact. It cannot automatically establish what happens during long periods of sole care, behind closed doors, when a child is distressed, and no independent adult is present.

You did not see the year in which I stopped being able to feel anything. You did not see how often a calm presentation seemed to carry more authority than a distressed account.

But composure does not prove honesty, and distress does not prove unreliability. Trauma does not arrive in a neat chronology, spoken calmly at the correct time to the correct professional.

A person struggling to tell the story may still be telling the truth.

The detailed record exists elsewhere. It contains the dates, reports and events in order. If you ever want the whole story when you are old enough, it will be available to you.

This letter is not that record. This is for you.

But I need you to understand the shape of what happened, because the shape is what matters.

The abuse did not end when I left. It changed instruments.

When the house was no longer available, it moved to the telephone. When the telephone was blocked, it moved into the court system. When one proceeding ended, it found another route. When access to me became harder, the pressure moved through you.

From the outside, it could be made to look like a collection of unrelated incidents. From inside, it was one continuous pattern searching for whichever door remained open.

The email account I made for you

After you came home frightened and told me that, during contact, you had been told I would be “dead,” I created an email account for you.

I began writing down the things you said, exactly as you said them. I recorded the dates, the questions you asked, the fears you brought home and the changes I saw in you.

I did not do it because I wanted you to relive any of it. I never questioned you until you gave me the answers I feared, and I never wanted to make you responsible for proving what was happening.

I wrote because I was terrified that one day you would ask what I knew, what I did and why I had not protected you. I wanted you to have an account written while it was happening, not a story reconstructed years later.

I wanted you to know that I heard you. That I believed you. That I tried.

Nobody listened.

Nobody properly considered what I documented. Nobody gathered the reports, the changes in your behaviour and the words you were using and looked at them as a whole.

I kept writing anyway.

I could report what you said. I could record the stutter, the nightmares, the fear of the car and the way you became a different child before and after contact. I could send emails, raise concerns and ask the people with the power to protect you to recognise the pattern.

But I could not make them listen. I could not stop you from being returned to a situation I believed was unsafe.

All I could do was wait for you to come home and pick up the pieces.

I comforted you after the nightmares. I reassured you when you became frightened that I would disappear. I helped you find language for feelings no child your age should have needed to understand.

Then I wrote it all down again.

Those records did not change what happened. They did not make anybody act. They did not protect you in the way I desperately needed them to.

But they still exist.

They stand ready as a digital trail. Not created for a court case years later, but written as it happened, carrying your words and your voice through time.

One day, if you choose to read it, you will see that I noticed every change. I remembered what you said. I took you seriously. I reported it repeatedly. I did everything within the limited power I had.

The record will not show a mother who remained silent. It will show a mother begging people to listen. It will show a little girl trying to explain what she was experiencing using the only words she had. It will show that I knew what might be coming and tried to prevent it.

And it will show that, although I could not always stop you from being hurt, I was there every time you came home, believing you, gathering the broken pieces and helping you feel safe enough to become yourself again.

When protection is called alienation

I want you to understand what happened when the phrase “parental alienation” entered our lives.

It is a powerful allegation. Once it is made, a parent’s attempt to protect a child can be interpreted as an attempt to prevent a relationship. Reporting a concern can be called hostility. A child’s distress can be blamed on influence. The more urgently a parent tries to explain the danger, the more unreasonable that parent may appear.

The allegation can change the question being asked.

Instead of asking, why is this child frightened?, people begin asking, who taught this child to be frightened? Instead of examining the behaviour being reported, they examine the parent reporting it.

In our case, an independent assessment found no evidence that I had turned you against your father. But by then the accusation had already altered the way my concerns were heard.

That is why this language must never be thrown around casually.

Parental alienation is a serious allegation. A child should not be manipulated into rejecting a loving parent. Children should not be placed in the middle of adult conflict, recruited to one side or made responsible for choosing between the people they love.

But concerns about alienation must never become a shortcut around safeguarding. A child’s fear must not automatically be attributed to the safer parent simply because accepting the child’s account would require adults to confront a more difficult possibility.

Supporting a relationship and safeguarding a child are not opposing responsibilities. Relationships should be supported when they are safe. Safety must come first.

A frightened child should not have to become more frightened before adults will believe her.

Nobody told you. You noticed.

Not one of us spoke badly about your father to you. Not me. Not your brothers, although they had reasons to be angry. Not your grandparents. Not anyone.

We got you ready. We helped you pack. We told you that you would have a lovely time. We wanted you to have the freedom to love him without carrying our experiences of him.

That meant you worked things out for yourself.

I have wondered many times whether we got that right. I still believe you deserved the chance to form your own opinion and reach your own understanding. But I know what discovering things alone cost you. For that, I am sorry.

You noticed who listened when you spoke and who merely waited for you to finish. You noticed who was pleased to see you and who appeared to be performing pleasure. You noticed which adults meant what they said and which said one thing but did another.

You noticed that certain places made your body go quiet. You became silent in a way you never were at home. You stopped asking for things. You began editing yourself before walking through a door, choosing a duller version of what you liked because you had learned it would be received more easily.

Nobody taught you to do that.

Small children read a room far better than adults sometimes understand. They may not have the language to explain what they know, so it emerges sideways, in stutters, nightmares, fear, silence and sudden changes in behaviour.

Then, when you found the words, you used them. You said you did not feel safe. You said it clearly, to adults, more than once.

That was you. Not me.

I need that written down because somebody may one day suggest that your thoughts were placed in your mind by another person.

They were not. You noticed. You understood. And you spoke.

None of it was your fault

Not one single part of this was your fault.

You were four. You had no responsibility for the choices adults made around you. Nothing happened because you were difficult; you were not. Nothing happened because you failed to try; you tried far harder than any four-year-old should ever have needed to.

You were a child standing inside decisions made by adults.

If, when you are older, you ever wonder whether you could have been quieter, easier or more like the person somebody wanted you to be, come back to this:

There was nothing wrong with you. There never was.

If you want to ask questions, read the files or contact your father or his family one day, I will help you. I will never make you feel disloyal for wanting to understand your own history. It belongs to you.

I kept the door open for his family because their relationship with you was not mine to take away. Whatever choices you make when you are older will be yours.

You deserve the truth from me, given in portions small enough for you to carry.

You also tell people, proudly and very matter-of-factly, that you do not have a dad. I correct you every time because it is factually true that you do, and because I never want you to carry shame that does not belong to you.

I will admit that it hurts every time. You say it lightly, and I am the one who has to hand the truth back to you.

I will keep doing it anyway.

And I never want this experience to teach you that men are bad. This was not about men. It was about the choices of one person.

Your brothers are among the gentlest people I know. You are surrounded by boys and men who turn up, protect without controlling and love without requiring you to become smaller.

Do not let one person teach you the wrong lesson about half the world.

What I cannot forgive

There are things I may never forgive.

I will not forgive the people who knew there was a risk and supported placing you in it anyway. I will not forgive those who ignored years of behaviour because recognising the pattern would have required them to question decisions already made. I will not forgive those who knew you had been put at risk again and still treated that information as less important than preserving the appearance of cooperation.

And I do not forgive a system that allowed an allegation about me to carry more weight than the child standing in front of it.

The purpose of safeguarding is to prevent harm, not merely to document it afterwards. A serious outcome being prevented does not mean the danger was imaginary. Sometimes it means somebody intervened in time.

In our case, warnings existed. Reports existed. A pattern existed. Yet the practical burden of protection remained with me.

I had to recognise each new concern, preserve the evidence, find the correct person, as I watched history repeat..

Orders, policies and procedures are not protection if the person already living in fear must enforce them alone.

My anger about that belongs to me, not to you. I do not want you to inherit it. You may form your own understanding of everyone involved. You may reach conclusions different from mine.

But I will not teach you that forgiveness is the price of healing.

Some things are wrong. Naming them as wrong does not make a person bitter. Sometimes it simply means she has stopped pretending.

I can build a peaceful life without pretending that what happened to you was acceptable.

What you gave me without knowing

You gave me strength every day without knowing you were doing it. You did not know what your brothers and I were carrying. Keeping that weight from you was the job.

I cannot be your father, and I have stopped trying to fill every space left behind. But I can do everything a parent is supposed to do, and I intend to.

We build things. I fix things. You will learn every useful skill I possess. There is nothing on that list I will hand to somebody else because it is supposedly a man’s job.

You are not short of people who show up.

There are always teenagers moving through this house, your brothers’ friends who became part of our family without anybody deciding it formally. More than ten of them came to take you trick-or-treating. They came to your birthday. They gave up weekends to stand at gates so you would not have to be handed over alone.

Nobody asked them.

That is what a role model is. Not a title. Not a biological connection. Not a name on a court order. A role model is somebody who turns up when there is nothing in it for them.

You lost one person who was supposed to do that. You gained a house full of people who chose to.

Empathy needs boundaries

You recently told your school that you want to be like me.

That moved me, but it frightened me too.

I feel other people’s emotions as though they belong to me. For years, I believed that sensitivity was the weakness that allowed the wrong person into my life.

I do not believe that anymore.

Caring was never the problem. The problem was caring without boundaries.

Nobody taught me that I was allowed to say no, disappoint somebody, leave a room or protect myself without first securing everyone else’s approval. I learned those lessons in my thirties, in the hardest possible way.

You are six, and you already say no. You say it clearly, including to adults, and nobody in this house punishes you for having boundaries. You said no when it mattered, before some of the adults with the power to protect you properly understood that you needed protecting.

That is the difference. Not less empathy. Empathy with boundaries.

You will have both, and they will make you formidable.

The thing people used to tell me

When I was at my lowest, people would say: “You are only given what you can handle.”

I hated it. It was not true.

I was not handling it. I was being given far more than I could carry. The evidence was me sitting on a bathroom floor at two in the morning trying to work out how to survive another fortnight.

I do not believe this happened for a reason. I do not believe your brothers were meant to lose years of their childhoods. I will never describe what happened to you as a gift or a lesson we were destined to receive.

But I have changed.

I am not the woman I was three years ago. I do not frighten easily. I do not fold because somebody speaks with authority. I can recognise a pattern, hold a boundary and sit in a room with powerful people without abandoning what I know to be true.

None of that was given to me. It was built in the worst possible workshop, and I would return every piece of it if doing so could give you back what you lost.

But I cannot. So I will use it.

Whatever the world has waiting for you, you will not face it with a mother who is easily intimidated. You have somebody who has met the worst of it and remained standing.

It is simply how I became strong enough to stand in front of you for the rest of my life.

Who you are now

Twelve months of safety. This is what twelve months did.

The stutter has gone. The night terrors have stopped. You are no longer frightened of the car.

That was not clever parenting. It was time. The same bed every night. Predictability. And nothing you needed to be frightened of.

You waited months for your hair to grow, convinced that a special shampoo would make it happen faster. One morning, you tipped your head back, felt it touch your back and squealed.

You have turned a corner with reading and are thoroughly pleased with yourself about three-letter words. You make videos that all begin with “Hi, guys.” You love music, school, crafting, making potions, your friends and being surrounded by family. You will tell anybody far more about your favourite character than they ever asked to know.

A few weeks ago, I took you somewhere people have known us for years. You ate cake, gave me an enormous cuddle, wiped the entire slice down the front of me and collapsed into laughter.

You did not glance at my face first to check whether laughing was allowed.

Twelve months earlier, I did not believe the damage could be repaired.

But you are healing. Your brothers are healing too.

One went to prom and sat his exams. I do not care what those results say. He survived the worst years of our lives and walked into that hall anyway.

Your other brother and I went to see the Foo Fighters. Between us, we have been to four concerts this year. Crowds are still difficult for me, but all three of you can read me now. When I have had enough, we leave, and nobody treats leaving as a failure.

The three of you have the relationship you were never previously allowed to have. You make up dances together. You torment one another. You laugh.

On an ordinary school morning, one of your brothers looked at you and said you looked beautiful. Nothing else. Just that, on the way out of the door.

After everything you were made to prove about yourself, I cannot imagine a greater gift than being told by your brother that you are beautiful on a Tuesday morning.

And now it is August

For three years, July was the hardest part of our calendar. It held your birthday, but it held everything else too. Every summer, I braced myself.

Four Julys. Four tents. One was the place where I realised we had to leave. One was a refuge offered by a stranger. One was an escape across a border. And one was simply part of a child’s birthday.

July has ended.

It is August now, and there is nothing waiting for us. No hearing. No handover. No date circled on the calendar.

For the first time since you were three, we have a summer containing nothing but summer.

So this is what I want for you.

Stay as loud as you were on your birthday. Keep saying no to anyone, at any age, without apologising for it as I once did.

Learn the difference between being loved and being managed. Walk away when somebody repeatedly asks you to become smaller so that they can feel bigger.

Be kind, because kindness is already part of you. Build boundaries strong enough that your kindness never costs you your safety.

You do not need me to be your father. You have a house full of people who show up.

You need me to be exactly what I am now: your mother. Someone who listens. Someone who believes you. Someone nobody frightens.

You were a child who needed protecting. Then you became the child who understood she was not safe and said so aloud, before the adults with the power to protect her properly listened.

Last year, you asked for a box with your mother inside it.

This year, you did not ask. You did not need to. You were already safe, and you spent the whole day being free.

All my love, always, Mum

And if you are the parent reading this, terrified

I know where you are.

You are watching your child change and being told that your concern is the problem. They return home silent, frightened, angry or unlike themselves. They may fall apart with you because you are the only person with whom it feels safe to do so.

You recognise a pattern, but every event is separated from the one before it until the pattern becomes almost impossible to explain.

You report it. Nothing changes. You report it again. Still nothing changes.

You begin to wonder whether there is any point in continuing. You may even wonder whether the failure of professionals to act means you are wrong.

It does not.

I will not tell you that documenting everything guarantees protection. It did not protect my daughter. I will not promise that the next report will reach the right person or cause the system to act. I know how painful and dishonest that promise would sound.

What I will tell you is to preserve the record, if it is safe to do so.

Start one chronology. Record the date, what happened, who was present, what was said, what you observed, who you informed and what response you received.

Use exact words where you can. Separate what you directly witnessed from what you suspect. Keep original emails, messages, reports and photographs in their original form.

Write facts before adjectives. Not because your emotions are unimportant, but because a clear factual record makes it harder for somebody to dismiss the evidence because they are uncomfortable with your distress.

Do not ask your child to collect evidence. Do not question them until they feel responsible for proving your concerns. Do not ask them to choose between parents. Let their words remain unmistakably their own.

You do not need to speak badly about the other parent to give your child tools that may protect them.

Teach your child the names of their feelings. Teach them that their body belongs to them. Teach them that they may say no to adults. Teach them that a secret which makes them frightened should always be shared with a safe person.

Show them that love does not require silence, fear or unquestioning obedience. Let them love without requiring them to ignore discomfort. Listen without placing your conclusions in their mouth. Give them truth in portions small enough to carry.

Above all, make your home the place where they do not have to perform. Where they can speak, refuse, cry, laugh and change their mind without managing an adult’s emotions.

I cannot promise that the system will listen. I cannot promise that reporting will change the outcome. I cannot promise that doing everything correctly will be enough, because sometimes it is not.

That is the terrible reality some of us have lived.

For us, there was eventually an end, but it came at a cost. My children lost years that safety cannot return to them. The danger I had tried to warn people about was not prevented. Things became worse before they became better.

But they did become better.

My daughter is safe now. Her real personality has returned, not in one dramatic moment, but in noise, laughter, carelessness and ordinary childhood.

If you are still inside it, you may not be able to imagine that kind of future. I could not imagine it either.

You do not have to manufacture hope. Hope can feel like another demand when you are already surviving hour by hour.

Concentrate on giving your child the tools you can give them: a voice, language, boundaries, bodily autonomy and the certainty that home is a place where they will be heard.

And remember this when the system’s inaction makes you question yourself.

Its failure to respond does not mean you failed to speak. Its refusal to recognise the pattern does not mean the pattern was not there. Its failure to protect your child does not mean you did not try to protect them.

Your child may not see everything you are doing now. One day, they may need to know.

Let the record show that you saw them, believed them and never stopped trying.

If you work within the system

If you are a judge, magistrate, solicitor, social worker, Cafcass officer, teacher, police officer, GP, nurse or safeguarding professional, please remember that families do not experience abuse in separate administrative files.

A court sees an application. A police force sees an incident. A school sees a behavioural change. A GP sees anxiety or disturbed sleep. A local authority sees a referral.

A child experiences all of it as one life.

The pattern may exist only when those pieces are placed together. Do not mistake a fragmented official record for an absence of evidence.

Do not treat a lack of prosecution, enforcement or formal finding as proof that the original concern was false. Sometimes it means evidence was not gathered, agencies did not share information or nobody accepted responsibility for viewing the whole picture.

Look at what happened before and after contact, not only what occurred during a short observed session. Consider siblings, even when they are not formally named in proceedings.

Do not use a parent’s distress as evidence against their reliability. Do not use another person’s composure as evidence of safety.

Ask what has changed in the child. Ask when it changed. Ask whether the child’s words and behaviour are consistent over time. Ask what has already been reported and whether anybody has placed those reports side by side.

And when a parent repeatedly raises the same concern, do not begin from the assumption that repetition proves obsession or hostility. Sometimes repetition means the risk remains and nobody has acted.

Safeguarding should not require a child to suffer the predicted harm before the adults around them accept that the warning was real.

Why I have published this

I have published this because, while I was living it, I could not find enough people saying these things aloud.

What happened to us is happening to families who are described as difficult or obstructive when they are trying to keep a child safe.

A child should never be manipulated into rejecting a loving parent. But an allegation of parental alienation must never be allowed to silence a child, erase a pattern of abuse or turn the protective parent into the subject of the investigation while the original safeguarding concerns remain unanswered.

Safeguarding requires professional curiosity. It requires people to look beyond isolated incidents and consider patterns over time. It requires them to listen to children without assuming that a child’s voice belongs to whichever adult is easiest to blame. It requires the humility to reconsider earlier decisions when new information, or an old pattern finally seen in full, suggests that a child may be at risk.

I have shared this with care. Parts of this story belong to my daughter as much as they belong to me. One day, she will decide what she wants said about her life. If she asks me to remove this, I will.

Until then, I am sharing it for the parent sitting on a bathroom floor at two in the morning, convinced there will never be an end.

For us, there was an end.

Nothing I reported caused the system to act when I needed it to. The documentation did not save her from what I feared was coming. The ending came at a cost I will never pretend was acceptable.

But things did get better.

And when my daughter is old enough to ask what I did while decisions were being made around her, the answer will already be there.

Dated. Written as it happened. A digital trail carrying her voice.

Proof that I saw her. Proof that I believed her. Proof that I never stopped trying.

HEAL. SPEAK. CHANGE.

The factual account sits separately: What Post-Separation Abuse Actually Looks Like.

If you need support right now: the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247, free, 24 hours. Samaritans is 116 123. In an emergency call 999, and if you can’t speak, dial 999 then press 55. A fuller list, including support for men and for LGBT+ people, is in the companion post.

August 2026. Written in a personal capacity as a survivor and advocate, not on behalf of any employer or organisation. No patient, service or clinical information is disclosed, and no individual professional is identified. Names, locations and some identifying details have been removed or generalised to protect the children involved. References to any other person’s health or circumstances have been generalised, and nothing here should be read as a clinical opinion, diagnosis or assessment concerning any identifiable person. Nothing described here has affected my ability to practise safely.

Everything in this account is my own factual record of events I experienced, and every incident described is supported by documentary evidence held by me, including contemporaneous notes, correspondence and agency records. I have chosen not to reproduce that material here, in order to protect the privacy of the children involved and of third parties, and to comply with the restrictions that apply to information from private family proceedings.