Parenting Philosophy
What’s your parenting Philosophy?
I didn’t come into parent education because everything was working beautifully. I came because it wasn’t.
When my children were young, we were in the thick of it. My eldest was having big behaviours, hitting, biting and emotional storms I didn’t know how to respond to, and my second baby, nearing one year old, simply would not sleep. I remember walking her around the block in the pram at 2am, exhausted, desperate, and quietly wondering what I was doing wrong. Feeding to sleep wasn’t working. Nothing seemed to settle her. I was at my wits’ end.
That was the moment I began searching - not for “better techniques,” but for a different way of understanding children.
I found Hand in Hand Parenting, and I dived right in. What started as survival slowly became a deep re-orientation of how I saw children, behaviour, emotions, and myself as a parent.
Over the years, I’ve studied, lived, tested, integrated, and gently discarded many approaches. I’ve been shaped by extraordinary mentors, therapists, teachers, and philosophies - and by my own children, who remain my greatest teachers of all.
A blended, responsive philosophy (not a rulebook)
One of the things I care most deeply about is not turning parenting into another place we feel we’re “doing it wrong.”
I don’t believe in strict, one-size-fits-all methods. Families are diverse. Nervous systems are different. Temperaments vary. Children have unique wiring, histories, and needs. Parents do too.
My work is about helping you:
Tune into your child
Understand your nervous system
Make sense of behaviour through a lens of connection, development, and safety
Find what genuinely works for your family, not what looks good on paper
I love weaving together multiple approaches and supporting parents to trust themselves, rather than outsourcing their intuition.
A bridge between worlds
I often feel like I sit between two worlds and it’s taken me a many years to find my feet in this place (Anyone else find themselves crying their eyes out in the theatre during Frozen 2 when Elsa realises she is a bridge between two worlds…or was that just me).
I’m deeply drawn to the “woo”: spiritual, unexplained, energy work, low-tox living, natural remedies, the body’s innate capacity for healing, homeopathy, and holistic understandings of health. I’m also grounded in science, physiology, neurodevelopment, and decades of hands-on clinical experience as a physiotherapist and CranioSacral Therapist.
I value unstructured play, outdoor childhoods, and emotional freedom and my children ALL love organised sport. I’m drawn to homeschooling philosophies, yet my children attend mainstream school. We co-sleep by choice, with evolving beds and musical bedrooms, and we all sleep well. I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I don’t believe in punishments, rewards, or bribes yet I’m also human. Sometimes those old patterns still come out of my mouth. I yell sometimes. I mess up often.
What I do believe in deeply is repair.
Apologising.
Owning my part.
Taking responsibility as the adult.
Doing my own inner work to understand my own patterns and responses.
Coming back to connection, again and again.
Reverence for children
At the heart of everything I do is a deep reverence for babies and children - for their wisdom, their emotional intelligence, and their innate knowing of what they need.
Listening really is at the heart of it all. Listening to ourselves, our bodies and our children.
This work isn’t about perfect parenting.
It’s about present parenting.
Curious parenting.
Repair-filled parenting.
Human parenting.
You don’t have to do this alone, in fact I think it is near impossible to change the way you wish to parent alone. We all need support, we all need guidance, love, compassion from those who are a little further down the road.
And it’s an honour to walk alongside families on this path.