Women old enough to be grandmothers are having babies. Fifty-nine-year-old Essex mum Susan Tollefsen has a one year old; can she fit in another baby before her 60th birthday? At 63, Lauren Cohen is a working mum with three children, all under five. Both Susan and Lauren represent a growing number of women around the world defying nature. With no legal age limits on IVF treatment and biological boundaries being pushed ever further, how do we decide what age is just too old to be a new mum?
Fifteen-year-old Danielle has spent much of the last decade in silence, 10-year-old Megan's failure to talk at school is threatening her future, and eight-year-old Red's grandad has never heard his only grandchild say a word. All three girls have a strange and isolating condition called selective mutism. At home they are as noisy as any other child, but with most people their anxiety about talking leaves them speechless. How will they overcome their frustrating problem and break their silence?
I Hate Mum looks into the lives of two boys who are at war with their mothers and follows their progress as they visit a specialist unit dedicated to helping families on the verge of collapse. Ten-year-old Adam has been violent and abusive to his mum and brother Jake (eight) for the past five years. At school, Adam is able to control his outbursts, but home is a constant battleground. Adam's anger has been affecting the whole family but family life has not always been that way, explains Sharon: 'He was what I call a perfect son. I never had problems with him at all. It was when Adam turned five or six that his behaviour started to change.' With Adam's behaviour growing increasingly worse, the family GP has referred them to specialist NHS unit CAMHS in Greenwich - part of the national network of child and adolescent mental health services. Working with the family and closely observing how they interact, the family therapists come up with a programme to connect the family again. But can they reunite mother and son? Over the past three years, Ryan (16) has been caught stealing from home, been excluded from school and smashed up the house, but the worst of his behaviour is targeted at his mum Cathy. Ryan lives with his mum, his older sister Annie and his mum's fiance Jamie. He's been going missing from home recently, and was once found sleeping on a night bus. Ryan and his family have been attending CAMHS for nine months and, although there has been some improvement in Ryan's behaviour, his family still don't trust him alone. Can CAMHS counsellors help Ryan get to the nub of his problems before it's too late?
This film follows couples over 18 months as they take a controversial route to find cures for their critically ill children. Their children need life-saving, bone marrow transplants. Using IVF techniques, the couples try to have a new baby who will be a perfect tissue match, and therefore a perfect donor, for their ill sibling. As practising Catholics, 'creating' a child to cure another presented Alison and Tom with a moral dilemma. Alison: 'Although we're kind of desperate in that we want to help [our son] David, we're not totally desperate in that we've not considered what we're doing. We've thought about it a great deal and we still think this is the right thing to do.' David and Samantha's daughter, Jessica, died when she was 11 years old. Now the couple face losing their two-year-old son, Alex, who suffers from the same disease. But before they can start treatment to try for a baby who could cure him, they must fight for NHS funding. David says: 'We're not talking about I want a baby with blonde hair and blue eyes. We're talking about a child that is healthy.'.