How to step into your power, find your joy

How can you step into your power, and find your joy as you care for your baby or toddler? In this recorded talk, I offer some ideas to get you started.

I delivered this 8-minute talk at the NDC Rural Online Launch in 2021. I discuss some of the broader social contexts in which women or parents are caring for babies and toddlers, including

• Market forces

• Social media

• Historical devaluing of maternity.

This talk doesn't aim to foreground the context of trauma, in the midst of which many women, or parents and carers, find themselves raising their babies and toddlers.

In Australia, the impact of colonisation remains a devastating and dominant source of intergenerational trauma amongst First Nations Peoples, which I haven't aimed to address in this talk, but would like to acknowledge.

Acknowledgement of Country

I and my team at The NDC Institute, home of the Possums programs, acknowledge and pay respect to the Australian First Peoples, and in particular the traditional custodians of the land upon which The Possums Sleep Program was made, the Yuggera and Turrbal Nations.

Australian First Nations nurtured and slept beside their babies and toddlers on this continent for perhaps 65,000 years, teaching their children how to care for other humans, for the land, and for the waters so effectively that they became the longest continuous culture on our planet. You can find out some of what I learnt from working with Australian First Nations Peoples here.

I acknowledge the unprecedented historical violence of the European settlement of Australia, which continues to affect many First Nation People's lives and families today, due to the well-documented intergenerational effects of trauma. I write more about this here.