Rudder4Life Blog

Watch a four-year-old for ten minutes. Why is the sky blue? Where does the rain go? What happens if I mix these two? They run experiments all day long, treating the world like one big laboratory and themselves as the lead researcher. No one teaches a toddler to be curious. It comes

Every 16th of June, we pay tribute to the courageous youth of 1976, a pivotal moment in history that this year marks its 50th anniversary. These young people took charge of their own destiny when the adults around them faltered. However, we want to use this momentous occasion to invite the parents,

In the earlier blog, we said the disorganised heart could learn a third thing beyond reaching and withdrawing. It could learn to stay, and in time become the harbour it had always been searching for. That holds. But here is the part nobody mentions on the day the weather finally clears: a

There is a particular loneliness that does not come from being alone. It arrives in company, often with the very person you most wanted near. You long for them, and the moment they draw close, something in you tightens, scans the exits, and prepares for impact. You reach with one hand and

Part One In 2006, a neuroscientist at Stanford named Robert Sapolsky began writing a book that would take him twelve years to complete. The result, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, is one of the most important and least comfortable books written about why human beings do what

The previous blog ended with a bold statement: gangs are gaining power in South Africa because they fulfil needs that society often neglects. This leads to an important question: if gangs are succeeding in this area, are schools failing? Unfortunately, they are, and for the same reasons. Both gangs and schools are

We keep asking the wrong question about South Africa. We ask why young people join gangs, why teenagers drink themselves stupid behind the school hall, why a fifteen-year-old in Manenberg or Hanover Park would trade his future for a corner and a gun. We ask as if the answer is mysterious. It

Ask a Grade 8 learner who she is, and she will tell you what she wears, what she watches, and who she sits with at break. Ask again, and she will run out of answers somewhere around the second sentence. This is not her failure. It is ours. We have built an

There is a sentence I have heard parents say to me, almost word-for-word, in different rooms and communities for the better part of my Life. It goes something like this: “I talk to my child all the time. I have no idea why she won’t open up to me.” I believe them.

A week ago, a three-part series was offered. Mattering, Formation, Adult Responsibility: three blogs, one argument, one closing call to the grown-ups in young people’s lives to stop diagnosing the youth and start examining ourselves. In the week since, we pondered the question, which many readers may have had and who may

Part 3 in a Rudder4Life Series on the Quiet Crises Shaping South Africa’s Young Where we have been Part 1 asked whether a child knows they matter. Part 2 asked who they are becoming. This final reflection turns the conversation in a direction that is harder to write and, frankly, harder to

Part 2 of a Rudder4Life Series on the Quiet Crises Shaping South Africa’s Young Where Part 1 left us In our last blog, we answered a question drawn from Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s Never Enough and Dr Mark Potterton’s Daily Maverick reflection on it: Does this child know they matter? We made the