Dr. Kathya “Kaye” has spent more than 35 years working in psychology, education, human development and the creative arts. Her path has never belonged neatly to one discipline.
She has worked as a transpersonal psychologist and educator, founded educational projects, taught adults and children, explored neuroplasticity, movement and creativity, and spent decades working with people whose ways of learning, communicating or experiencing the world did not always fit comfortably inside conventional systems.
Long before BaBeeYaga had a name, the questions behind it were already shaping her life — why does one child flourish in an environment where another withdraws? What helps a human being feel safe enough to learn? Why do rhythm, movement, creativity and relationship sometimes reach a person when words cannot? And perhaps most importantly: what happens when we stop beginning with what is “wrong” and start becoming curious about the person in front of us?
Her professional life developed across psychology, education and the arts rather than through a single narrow route. She founded Terraforma Foundation and established educational initiatives including KCDC in Ireland and the Transpersonal College in Johannesburg. Her work brought together psychological understanding with movement, creativity, learning, sensory experience and the deeper developmental needs of children and adults.
She also trained in eurythmy and developed movement-based work of her own, including the 7 Blueprint, using movement and rhythm as ways of exploring the relationship between body, emotion and human development.
Over the years, she worked with children, parents, educators and adults from many different backgrounds. Some learned easily within traditional systems. Others did not. Those were often the people who taught her the most.
When a child struggled, Dr. Kaye learned not to ask only what can we teach this child? She became interested in another question: what is this child showing us?
A child who constantly moves may be communicating something. A child who withdraws may be communicating something. A child who repeats the same activity again and again may be creating predictability in a world that feels unpredictable. Behaviour is not simply behaviour — it is information.
That understanding became central to Dr. Kaye's work. She became increasingly interested in the individual human being behind the diagnosis, difficulty, behaviour or educational label. Not simply how to make people fit systems, but how to create environments in which different kinds of people could flourish.
Professional experience was only part of the education. The other part happened at home. Dr. Kaye is a mother and grandmother, and her own family taught her lessons no classroom or professional training could have provided.
Family life brought neurodiversity out of textbooks and into ordinary days — mornings, meals, bedtimes, school, noise, transitions, celebrations, arguments, creativity, exhaustion, love, and the endless improvisation required when real human beings refuse to behave according to theories.
She discovered that some of the most powerful supports were often remarkably simple. Predictable rhythms. Colours. Songs. Movement. Stories. Repeated traditions. Food. Nature. Creative work. Knowing that Friday had a particular feeling. Knowing what came after breakfast. Knowing that a familiar story would return.
These small things could create orientation where explanation alone could not.
As the years passed, another role became increasingly important: grandmother. There was something about grandmothering that gathered together everything that had come before.
The psychologist remained. The educator remained. The researcher remained. But beside them appeared something quieter — the woman who tells the story again, who remembers the old recipe, who notices the moon, who sits beside a child without needing to fix the moment.
Who knows that sometimes the answer is not another technique. Sometimes the answer is presence. A cup of something warm. A walk outside. Making something together. A familiar rhythm. A story.
This eventually became the seed of BaBeeYaga.
BaBeeYaga did not begin as a parenting method. It grew slowly from decades of experience — from psychology, from classrooms, from working with neurodivergent children and adults, from creative practice, from motherhood and grandmotherhood, and from watching modern family life become increasingly complicated.
Parents today have access to an extraordinary amount of information. They are also surrounded by an extraordinary amount of pressure. How should a child sleep? Eat? Play? Learn? Regulate? Socialise? Develop? Every answer seems to produce another instruction.
Dr. Kaye wanted to create something different. Not another expert standing above families telling them what they ought to be doing. Something closer to having a wise grandmother nearby — someone who might say: here is something you could try, here is a story, here is a little rhythm, here is something to make together. Take what helps. Leave what doesn't. And most importantly — you know your child.
That became BaBeeYaga — the grandmother in your pocket.
Today, BaBeeYaga brings together many strands of Dr. Kaye's life — psychology, education, neuroplasticity, movement, storytelling, seasonal living, creativity, nature, neurodiversity, motherhood, grandmotherhood. None of these stands alone. Together they form a way of looking at childhood and family life that has developed through decades of observation, practice and lived experience.
Dr. Kaye continues to write stories and books, create resources for families, explore childhood development and share practical ways of bringing rhythm, creativity and connection back into ordinary life. But beneath all of that work remains the same curiosity that began many years ago: who is this human being? What do they need in order to flourish? And how can we create a life in which they have room to become themselves?
I have spent most of my adult life observing human beings. Teaching them. Learning from them. Sitting beside them when life became difficult. Watching children grow into adults and adults rediscover parts of themselves they thought they had lost.
And after all these years, I am less interested in perfect theories than I once was. Human beings are wonderfully inconvenient. We do not develop in straight lines. Children surprise us. Families change. Life interrupts every plan.
What matters is having something to return to. Relationship. Rhythm. Curiosity. Creativity. And the willingness to look again at the person standing in front of us.
BaBeeYaga is the place where I have gathered what I have learned. Some of it comes from psychology. Some from education. Some from children. Some from my own family. And quite a lot of it came from sitting at kitchen tables.
I hope something here becomes useful at yours.