love bombing

Oliver James is not a man to shy away from dangerous ideas. A straight-talking, often outspoken British child psychologist, he achieved notoriety with the books They F**k You Up and How Not to F**k Them Up, paeans to the inevitability of messing up our kids and how we can try to minimise the damage. (The answer, basically: chill the hell out.)

So, there was some surprise when he followed those two up with a rather more low-key offering called Love Bombing. Instead of the broad-spectrum bromides and broadsides for which James had become famous, Love Bombing offered a hyper-focused look at a specific dynamic in the parent–child relationship—namely, the point at which the relationship becomes defined by miscommunication and tension, and conflict becomes a seemingly permanent state of being.

“I remember I was asked by the BBC to do a television series,” James recalls,