I am a mom, have a PhD in Psychology, have completed the year-long Compassionate Inquiry training with Dr. Gabor Maté, and am the founder of growing up connected.

I have a mission: A mission to help children grow up connected; connected to themselves, their parents, their community, nature, and the world at large, and that we, as parents or caregivers, re-connect with our own intuition, our inner voice, and people around us, that we grow (up) right alongside our children.

So that we can all live healthier and happier lives, more in peace and harmony with other people, animals, and the environment. So that we can live more connected to one another. So that we can live with more joy.

When we stop looking at the typical behaviors of babies and children — their reluctance to sleep by themselves, their repeated wakings throughout the night, their insistence on being held, and on doing things by themselves as soon as they are old enough, their angry outbursts, their fear of strangers, and their distaste for vegetables — as inherent deficits we need to fix, when we ask instead why they act in those ways, how these behaviors helped them over our evolutionary history, we come to see that there is nothing wrong with children, that these behaviors make perfect sense. And with this understanding we can feel true compassion, and find ways to parent and relate to our children that respect their evolved needs and lead to better sleep, less crying, more independence and cooperation, the development of healthy emotion regulation, a healthy intuition around whom to trust, the development of healthy eating habits, and so much more, while also respecting our needs as parents.

Together with my husband Brent, and our daughter Matilda, I am on this journey myself.

A journey of parenting that aims to understand our children. Understand their evolved needs. Understand what helps them flourish, feel safe, become independent, and a cooperative member of our family and society.

A journey of recognizing and better understanding my own unhealthy patterns and becoming a more mindful, compassionate, and loving person. A journey to embody and live the values I hope to teach my daughter.

When I was pregnant, Brent and I knew we wanted to take a different path to parenting; one that treats children with respect, compassion and love, that isn’t based on punishments and rewards, that views children as inherently good.

We have both a PhD in Social Psychology, and are deeply interested in an evolutionary perspective. And so, when I was pregnant, we read everything we could on how evolution has shaped children; what we learned deeply changed our outlook on parenting.

Being on this journey has been the greatest gift I never knew I needed. It has changed my perspective on what parenthood means and how children thrive, it also has made me realize that to embody this gentler, more natural way of parenting we need to begin with ourselves; with curiosity about ourselves, an openness to observe, recognize, and change our own habitual patterns of self-blame, criticism, and reactivity, and replacing these with compassion, mindfulness, and meeting our own needs, with being a loving ‘parent’ for ourselves and a model to our children.

Being on this journey is an invitation to become happier and healthier ourselves.

What we learned has deeply changed our view on parenthood, and on (how to live) life more broadly.

And, because we find what we learned so valuable, we want to share it.

I hope you join us on this journey, and together we can learn, grow, and connect.

With love,

Anita