Drummond Hall stands at the top of a hill in one of the most affluent boroughs of the city. Many of the houses here cost millions of pounds and are inhabited (if they’re inhabited at all) by lawyers, doctors, academics, television personalities and politicians. It's an incongruous setting for an NHS school, of which there are a few in the UK, designed as a provision for children with special educational and behavioural needs, and I wonder, sometimes, what the locals make of the service, the swear-words and screams floating over the playground wall.

The building is old and not quite fit for purpose, with a heavy oak door, a wood-panelled foyer, a large wooden staircase in the entry hall, and tall, draughty windows (all protected by thick sheets of plastic). The walls and cornicing are constantly being repainted but always somehow scuffed and covered in crayon. Paper displays on the walls last less than a week. Homophobic, racist and sexist graffiti is common, but quickly cleaned off by a dedicated team of domestic workers.

The provision, officially an NHS day unit, provides care to children aged between five and fourteen referred by local authorities. Some of these children have been excluded from mainstream education, others have never attended. Many have diagnoses of ADHD or autism. Most have extensive and complex histories of trauma, which can manifest as extreme behaviours, including verbal, physical and sexual abuse. Sometimes the students abscond. Local curtain-twitchers watch them storm down the hill, kicking cars and brandishing sticks, followed (at a safe distance) by staff members, of which I am one.

In addition to the usual academic roster of teachers, the school employs nurses and therapists (psychotherapists, occupational therapists, and others) as well as a psychiatrist. As a support worker, my job is to help structure the children's day and regulate behaviour. Regulation sometimes involves physical “holding”. Staff are trained in a restraint system that prioritizes harmless physical intervention and preserves the child's dignity.

In February 2020, I attended a council session on fostering. I had seen it advertised earlier in the day and with nothing else to do that afternoon I made my way to a small function room in the Town Hall where I sat with six others, listening to social workers and carers talk about the work. I learned about the different types of foster care, that it was rewarding but hard. I also learned that, as a single man, I was an outlier. All the other attendees at the event, and in the training that followed, were couples or single women, and as far as I could tell, all straight.

Even to my mind, a single man showing interest in childcare and children is odd, verging on the suspicious. I know, of course, that this wariness is the result of deeply engrained biases that say that women are natural carers – and men are something else – but the worries persist. They are worries that permeate this book, worries that, as a man, I’m poorly placed to write about childcare, worries that people will think there's something unpalatable about a man taking care of, and expressing affection and even love for children who aren't his “own”.

When a registration sheet was handed out at the end of the session, I wrote down my email and phone number. A week later, I received a message asking me again if I’d be interested in the training. There was a ten-page form to fill in, which I did. Looking back, I appreciate the length of time it took to make and ratify the decisions to foster. At each stage, the possibility of parenthood became more real. I could sit with it and, by small increments, find my way towards reflective equilibrium. Yes, on balance, I really do want to foster. Yes, these are the names, addresses and phone numbers of people in my support network. At the time, however, I found the slow grind of state mechanisms deeply frustrating.

It's the end of August 2023 and I’m sitting in my kitchen with Yvonne and Bree, making polite conversation while the kettle boils. Papers lie strewn across the table beside a plate of biscuits. Upstairs, my housemate is snoring, exhausted after her day at work. Outside, children are playing, kicking a ball against a sign that reads “No ball games”.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks writing and rewriting passages from this book, nervous about the encroaching deadline and the fact that, no matter how hard I try, there will always be more to write and better ways to write it. Like most people trained in the academy, I have spent restless hours contending with imagined critics who dispute my methodology, my facts, my experience, my intentions. I’ve spent even more time worrying about the effect any disclosures may have on my family, my friends, my colleagues, the students I have worked with. With a pang, I wonder if Yvonne and Bree will read my book. Will it affect their view of me too? My glasses steam up as I pour boiling water into the waiting mugs. I regret not having written a more sensible book, or at least a more guarded one.

Perhaps, I think, I should have stuck to analytic metaphysics. Metaphysics is supposedly “harder”, more abstract, a serious sub-field of academic philosophy. Therein, questions about parenthood are often pushed to the peripheries (so says the philosopher of pregnancy, Elselijn Kingma) because they are “softer”, “women's issues”, and marginalized within a subject that privileges the male voice and male perspective. I suspect these questions about parenthood would have snuck in anyway. In writing this book I have been repeatedly struck by the feeling (nothing more than this) that birth, children and childcare are in some ways a central, if unconscious preoccupation of academic philosophy and its writings.

Nicholas has been shouting racist abuse off and on since he arrived at Drummond Hall and shows no sign of stopping. He has been diagnosed as autistic and presents with “demand avoidance”, which is to say he doesn't respond well to demands such as “Don't say that, it's racist”. In fact, saying such things often makes him shout more loudly.

The on-going abuse is upsetting for everyone, especially the racially minoritized children. Like other staff members, I have needed to talk to the students about anti-Black hate speech, to challenge the racist language, and to dissuade the older children from taking things into their own hands. Once or twice, when the children have become “heightened”, we have had to separate them using holds. In these moments, when I’m talking about anti-Black racism or physically restraining a child, sometimes a Black child, I’m acutely aware of being a white (or white-passing) man. I have no lived experience of the force of anti-Black hate speech, and no lived experience of being restrained. I understand the need to prevent physical violence, but the situation is complex. The children recognize this complexity. They tell me I don't understand, that I’m part of the problem, and to a certain extent they’re right.

In a team meeting in my first year at the unit, my co-worker Wayne spoke about his experiences as a Black father. He talked about “the Talk”, the conversation Black parents feel compelled to have with their children to warn them about structural injustices they face, that Black children experience disproportionately high rates of exclusion in British schools and are over four times more likely than white children to be arrested.

I’ve been bird-watching with Filipe. Maybe “bird-listening” is more accurate. With the help of a bird-recognition app, we’ve learned to identify bird song. The two of us sit in the playground listening for chirping in the beech trees, the bark of magpies, the distant drum of a woodpecker. He sits beside me and sometimes, absent-mindedly, he’ll reach out and hold my hand or rest his head on my shoulder. He isn't the most fluent speaker, his words often come out in a jumble, but touch is one of the ways he communicates. Life at Drummond Hall can be hard, but it can be gentle too.

I’ve had various jobs, inside and outside the academy, but I’ve always referred to my work with children as the most “rewarding”. It's engaging, gratifying and meaningful in a way that's hard to define (I attempt some thoughts on this in Chapter 5). I’m not alone in feeling this way; many of us are drawn to childcare and to children, whether as would-be parents, professional carers or simply enthusiastic bystanders. For whatever reason, we think children are important, we think they’re meaning-making. With this in mind, it seems odd to argue the case to produce more of them. Oddness, however, is rarely a barrier to philosophical debate and we have, over time, collectively articulated a number of arguments in defence of procreation.

More often than not, we’re told that the decision to reproduce isn't a decision at all, but an instinct, a natural tendency, a drive, an expression of our beautiful animal natures. This is a pervasive and persuasive thought. We are human animals and making babies is just what happens.

Most of the children referred to Drummond Hall have issues with behaviour and behavioural development, issues that impact on learning and make it hard for them to cope in mainstream settings. These can include violent outbursts, sexualized language and actions, poor motor skills and sensory sensitivities (to loud or repetitive noises). Sometimes the issues are neurological in nature, sometimes they’re the result of traumatic encounters such as domestic abuse. The team uses different diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to assess the students, to understand their experiences and to think about how best to support them.

Nell Nicholson, the former head teacher at another NHS provision, Gloucester House, describes this as a “therapeutic milieu”; the staff, both academic and clinical, work therapeutically, “noticing their own feelings, noticing their interactions with one another, and trying to use that as ‘data’ “ (for example, staff anxieties can be explained in relation to anxieties felt by the students). This approach is grounded in psychoanalytic theory of the sort pioneered at Gloucester House's parent organization, the Tavistock and Portman Clinic. Feelings are not necessarily seen to reside in single individuals, but can be unconsciously exchanged or communicated. The work is also informed by more well-known thinking, of which the most prominent is probably attachment theory.

Attachment theory was pioneered by the psychologist and psychiatrist John Bowlby, who also worked at the Tavistock. The central tenet of attachment theory is that, for infants to develop into emotionally and socially stable people, they require, in their early years, a close, loving relationship with a primary caregiver, also called an “attachment figure”. The psychologist Mary Ainsworth describes this figure – first and foremost the child's biological mother – as a “secure base”. A consistently present primary carer provides the newly born infant with a stable environment.

One of my roles at Drummond Hall is to organize the school library, to check the books don't contain excessive descriptions of violence or explicitly sexual themes. Having age-appropriate books is especially important in a setting where the readers may have been subject to domestic abuse, traumatic bereavement or sexual assault (all mainstays, in various ways, of children's literature – think of the orphans, the kidnappings and murders). Acknowledging this is to acknowledge that stories can have real and sometimes harmful effects on their readers.

What is omitted, what is glossed over, can be as harmful as what's included. In an oft-cited TED Talk from 2009, the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses “the danger of a single story”. When literature repeats tropes and stereotypes it reinforces social expectations. If step-mothers are exclusively described as evil, child-hating women (a common motif in fairy tales), this will contribute to a general suspicion of step-mothers. Social critics like Darren Chetty and Melanie Ramdarshan Bold have used Adichie's line of argument to critique popular children's literature. Historically, for instance, there has been a distinct absence of queer and Black and brown protagonists in children's books, which (they argue) has reinforced expectations for heroes to be white and heterosexual.

Books, film, television, and other cultural products articulate and reinforce what is and isn't normal. They establish “norms”, rules and ways of being, and these can negatively affect children by setting unrealistic expectations or promoting certain ideas or attitudes over others. These norms affect the rest of us too. They’re more than “mere” social constructs.