Post-partum

[Following on from the image above]

What alienates us from our gut feeling as parents?

👉Traumatic or disrupted birth experiences or health system interactions that leave us feeling disconnected from our bodies and our babies

👉Social structures that prevent us seeing the breadth of normal infant behaviour before we have our own babies

👉A pervasive sleep training culture and lack of access to quality resources around how to make co-sleeping safe

👉Individualistic culture that leaves parents ex…

I have never felt so angry in all my life as in the last two weeks.

I'm certainly not immune to anger, but it often passes pretty soon. Until the last fortnight, the worst bout of anger I've had in recent years was the week I spent writing my book chapter on anger (funny that).

This time though, it's been epic. I didn't have a blue with my partner, and nothing particularly awful happened, but every tool in my tool-belt has been called on to avoid throwing the child I love most in the world acr…

“Come at me baby, I can take you. Give me everything you’ve got”.
My daughter was five months old when these words left my lips.
The moment they escaped, I felt sick.

I knew I couldn’t handle all the parts of her.
She was a firecracker.
All her feelings, all her boundary pushing, her power and glory... they were too much for the woman who spoke them and I knew it.

I was scared.
The anxiety rose.
It would take a huge, ongoing up-levelling, to be with a child so strong-willed.

A year and a half later, she …

This morning I watched a video of Serena Williams training in the lead up to the Australian Open with her daughter hitting balls alongside her. Aside from being super cute, it got me reflecting on a question I was asked in an interview earlier this week: “what would be the single most important step we could take towards solving the problem of childhood inactivity?”

Physical activity in children helps with concentration, learning, emotional regulation, sleep quality, bone and muscular health, c…