Some parenting problems do not respond to the usual advice. When a child’s behaviour tips into violence, or they retreat behind a closed door and stop coming out, the standard tips about consistency and consequences can feel almost insulting. Non-Violent Resistance (NVR) is an approach built for exactly those families, and in June 2026 I released NVR Companion, an iOS app to help parents practise it. This article explains what NVR is, what the app does and does not do, and why I made the choices I did.
What Non-Violent Resistance is
NVR grew out of the work of Professor Haim Omer and his colleagues at Tel Aviv University. PartnershipProjects, who say they were the first to use the approach in Britain, describe it as “an innovative form of systemic family therapy, which has been developed for aggressive, violent, controlling and self-destructive behaviour in young people”. Oxford Health’s CAMHS service puts it more plainly: it is an approach that “helps to raise the presence of adults in a young person’s life in order to foster positive relationships”. The same page traces the idea back to Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who used the principles “to bring about peaceful political difference”.
The behaviours it is used for are the ones parents rarely mention at the school gate. Oxford Health lists hitting, kicking, spitting and threatening behaviour, but also violence turned inward, such as self-harm and disrupted eating, and children who isolate themselves.
What sets NVR apart from most parenting programmes is where it points its attention. It does not set out to change the child. It asks the parent to change how they respond: to stop escalating, to stop struggling in secret, and to become a calm, persistent presence the child cannot ignore. Omer’s own site says the approach goes by two names, NVR and “the new authority”, and describes the work as showing parents “how to regain their place, voice and influence”, so that they can “become an anchor for their children”.
The tools parents learn
A parent going through an NVR programme, whether with an NHS CAMHS team, a local authority or a private practitioner, will meet a fairly consistent set of ideas. What follows is my summary of the East London and Oxford NHS factsheets and PartnershipProjects’ introduction to NVR, and the links are there if you would rather read the originals.
De-escalation comes first. East London NHS Foundation Trust’s NVR factsheets call it “the first tool in the NVR toolbox” and reverse the familiar saying: in NVR you “strike when the iron is cold”. You do not meet fire with fire, and you come back to the issue at a neutral time, when everyone can think again.
Baskets are how you choose your battles. You cannot resist everything at once, so behaviours are sorted, and only a small number are actively resisted while the rest are set aside for now. A parent quoted on PartnershipProjects’ introduction to NVR describes still trying to remember “the basics, the grounding, the choosing of my battles and only dealing with the small basket issues”.
An announcement is a short written statement, read or handed to the child, naming the behaviours the family will no longer accept and committing the parents to resisting them without violence. ELFT’s third factsheet explains the point of putting it on paper: “Each carefully pre-planned written statement is designed to increase the presence of the parent in the child’s mind.”
A sit-in is an act of resistance carried out calmly in the child’s own space rather than as an argument, and ELFT is careful to say that parental presence shows just as robustly in the quieter, connecting version as in the traditional one.
Supporters matter because NVR rejects the idea that a family should cope alone. Relatives, friends and teachers are recruited openly, which makes behaviour that has often been kept secret visible to more people than the parents carrying it. One of the parents quoted on PartnershipProjects’ site puts it better than a factsheet can: “It is also acceptable to ask others for help and not feel ashamed.”
Reconciliation gestures run alongside all of this. ELFT names four kinds, quality time, reflective listening, connecting comments and connecting actions, and they are unconditional rather than a reward for good behaviour.
And self-care is built in from the start. ELFT is blunt about why: it “is not optional, but vital, to help prevent parental burnout”.
Another parent on that same page sums the whole thing up in a line I keep coming back to: “NVR is not a marathon nor is it a sprint. It is a lifelong change in parenting approach.”
Why an app
I’m Wayne George, a software engineer in London. I am not a therapist, and I want to be clear about that from the outset. What I bring is a habit: when I meet a structured method, I want to build the thing that makes it easier to follow.
When I looked at how NVR is taught, the gap was obvious. The programme happens in sessions. The hard moments happen between them. The materials are handouts, worksheets and a couple of good books. The announcement drafted so carefully in week six is in a folder somewhere. The list of supporters is on the back of an envelope. How the last fortnight actually felt, which a practitioner will ask about, is a blur by Thursday. And at half past ten on a Tuesday night, with a door slammed and your heart going, the thing in your hand is not a folder. It is a phone.
So the brief I set myself was narrow: put the core ideas, the planning tools and the trackers in one calm place on the phone, and then get out of the way.
I had built one app before with the same stance on privacy. Mood Share keeps everything on the device, with no accounts and no data collection, and I have written separately about how that works. Shipping it convinced me that this is the only sensible approach for anything genuinely personal.
What is in it
An app for a programme like this has three jobs, and they pull against each other. It has to explain the ideas well enough to be useful at eleven at night. It has to hold the writing a parent does, the baskets and the supporters and the announcement, somewhere steadier than a notes app. And it has to stay out of the way, because nobody opens an app like this for entertainment.
The listing describes five sections. Learn is free and covers the core concepts: “what NVR is, the baskets, de-escalation, the announcement, sit-ins, and reconciliation gestures”. If you only ever use this part, it still does the job of a well-organised set of handouts that cannot get lost.
Growth and Connect are named after the shorter ideas a practitioner would sketch on a whiteboard, and none of them are mine. The parent line is ELFT’s picture of parenting styles, permissive at one end, authoritarian at the other, with the ground worth standing on in the middle. The shield is the imaginary armour ELFT suggests a parent picture, “to help protect them when the child makes hurtful comments”. Connection before correction is the observation that a parent has more influence over a connected child than a disconnected one. The seesaw, the Goldilocks zone, the stress position and the magnifying glass sit alongside them. Connect is headed, in the listing’s own words, “Stand against the behaviour, never against the child”, which is close to the whole approach in a sentence.
Planning is where the writing happens: sorting behaviours into baskets, building a supporter network, drafting an announcement. Wellbeing is the part for you rather than your child, with daily mood check-ins, a compassionate letter to yourself and a self-care tracker, because a parent running on empty cannot hold a calm presence for long. There is also a Crisis section with helpline numbers, kept deliberately simple so it is reachable in a hurry.
Learn costs nothing. The other four sections, along with a set of deeper interactive planners and trackers, are opened by a one-time unlock called NVR Companion Pro. It comes in three tiers, Small, Standard and Generous, at £1.99, £4.99 and £9.99, and the listing is explicit that they “all unlock exactly the same content”, so you pay what fits your circumstances. There is no subscription and nothing recurring.
The app needs iOS 18 or later. Version 1.0 went live on 2 June 2026 and a small maintenance update followed on 12 June.
Private by design
The App Store description says it in five short sentences: “Your data stays on your device. No accounts. No cloud. No analytics. No tracking.” The privacy label on the listing reads “Data Not Collected”, and that label is a literal statement rather than a marketing flourish: under Apple’s definition, data processed only on the device is not collected, because collecting means transmitting it off the device where the developer or a third party can reach it. The Mood Share article goes through that definition in more detail. Both of the apps I publish carry the same line.
I made that choice because of what a parent writes in an app like this. An announcement is, in effect, a list of the worst moments in your house. A record of your mood is a fortnight of how you really felt. A compassionate letter to yourself is exactly as private as it sounds. None of that should sit on a server I run, and the simplest way to guarantee it does not is to have no server at all. There is nothing to breach, nothing to sell and nothing to hand over.
The trade-offs are real and I would rather name them than hide them. No cloud means no sync between devices and no web version. No account means there is nothing to recover, so the app lives and dies with your phone and whatever backup you keep of it. And no analytics means no dashboard telling me how many people use it or which screens they linger on; the only feedback is what someone chooses to send me. I am comfortable with all of that.
A companion, not a substitute
The name is deliberate. The listing says it directly: NVR Companion “is an educational and self-help companion. It is not a medical device, and it does not replace professional advice from a clinician, therapist, or NVR practitioner.”
NVR is normally learnt with a practitioner or in a group of other parents, and that is where the judgement, the tailoring to your family and the week-by-week support come from. The app assumes you have that, or are looking for it, and tries to make the time between sessions more useful. If you are not yet connected to a programme, a GP or your local CAMHS service is a reasonable place to start, and organisations such as PartnershipProjects offer training and information.
If your child is in immediate danger, or you are, the Crisis section has helpline numbers, and 999 is always the right call.
Where I want to take it
What I want is for the app to be worth a practitioner’s recommendation: something an NVR team in the NHS, or someone in private practice, can point a parent towards between sessions in the knowledge that it will not harvest anything from them. That is an aim rather than an arrangement, and it is what I would like the app to earn.
If you are a practitioner and you have opinions about what is missing, what is wrong or what would make it easier to recommend, I want to hear them. The same goes for parents using it now.
Try it
NVR Companion is on the App Store for iPhone, and it runs on Apple silicon Macs too. Download it, read through Learn, and if you are already on a programme, try drafting your next announcement in it before your next session. If it helps, or if it does not, email me at hello@waynegeorge.uk and tell me why.