I have always known I wanted to work with children.  My earliest memory of the joy I feel around children, is of me leading my ten younger cousins around my grandparents property.  I was in my element.

When I studied psychology at school, I knew I had found my calling.  

Although I enjoyed my earlier career, working with children in a specialised centre, I always felt like something was missing.  Parents were still struggling in their homes with the most basic of tasks….eating dinner at the table, getting their child to sleep, going to the supermarket, and when I finally became a mum, I realised why.  Parenting is overwhelming, fraught with conflicting advice and lonely with the loss of our village.

My own journey with motherhood and parenthood has been enriching and full. My four children have provided me with both the most rewarding, fun and joyful moments of my life, as well as the most challenging ones.  

My introduction to motherhood was stressful and shaped my experience for years to come. My eldest son was born 11 weeks premature and spent 8 weeks in hospital before we could take him home. Leaving him every day, struggling to breath, so tiny and fragile, was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. It was the harshest beginning and taught me so much about letting go of control.

I remember sitting on the couch holding him, he screaming and me crying, not understanding why it was all so hard, begging my husband not to go to work.  

I felt completely out of my depth.

I realised that if I was struggling so much, other parents must be also, and so began my mission to help families in their home, become the calm, content family they always wanted to be.

I am a highly flawed woman and mother. My life is far from perfect, in fact it is incredibly imperfect in all the right ways.  

My son became blind in one eye as a result of his prematurity and he has issues with his lungs.

My middle daughter struggles with her academics enormously. My middle son struggles with his siblings and my youngest is a tad on the bossy side.

My marriage fell apart after 12 years and four children. I was heartbroken. It challenged my sense of right and wrong, perfect and imperfect, good and bad and shook me to my core. My life is hard as a single mum. 

And so, like you, I experience the overwhelm, the bone tiredness, the depletion, the confusion and frustration that parenting today brings.  As a mother of four I am acutely aware of how challenging and chaotic family life can be, especially today.  

BUT in amongst that struggle, I have, through my work and my own mothering, discovered a simple solution which allows both children and parents to become calm and independent, whilst also loving and connected.  

This allows for a fun and simple family experience.  

I trust the information that I share with you through my services, because firstly, almost all families I have worked with have benefited from them, and secondly, because I myself have.  I know that my approach has led me to a freedom that literally saved my mothering life and created such change in my children.

I am in a unique professional position having worked so closely with families in their own homes across many years, with the entire age range (birth to young adults).

Working in this way, I have discovered that the fundamental issues children of all ages face today largely stem from one thing… their difficulty to self-regulate and the resulting dependency on external things.

Self-regulation is innate, we are born with it. But certain factors can either impede its development or stop it altogether. When this happens, the child requires co-regulation and looks outside themselves for this assistance, usually to their mother.

We as parents today struggle to know how to allow our children the space to practice and develop self-regulation, so we constantly go to our child and fix the problem for them.  We know we want our children to be independent, but how do we accomplish that without the upset and struggle?

When we constantly fix our children’s problems for them, whether that be difficulty falling asleep, getting the yellow plate instead of the red one or wanting their ipad, our children develop an external locus of control.  This is where they think that something outside themselves has the answer to their problem (not inside themselves as with an internal locus of control).

In this way a baby needing feeding or rocking, is the same as a toddler needing control, a young child needing their iPad and a teen needing their phone. They believe that they can not be content or solve their problem without them.  As soon as they feel uncomfortable they need to attract that externalise source to them, so their problems can be solved and they can feel comfortable again.

This is why I am able to work with such a broad age range. Essentially the issue is always the same. The child is co-dependent on something outside themselves for their happiness, their contentedness and the solution to their problems.

This causes behaviour problems because the child needs to attract the attention of the external source and often anxiety because as well as needing those things, the child intuitively knows they can not control them, and so is constantly in a state of worry, anger, frustration or anxiousness.  This is why children with an external locus of control are vulnerable to mental and emotional health issues.

Turning this around, so the child develops their ability to self-regulate and create an internal locus of control is my life’s work. It is my passion.

I want to help children, babies to young adults, create a buffer against mental health issues so they can thrive and live the life they want happily x