This Fall I participated in a weekly new parent-baby group in Sebastopol, CA with Kerry Ingram. I met Kerry years ago when she found one of my self-care guide downloads and invited me to be a wise woman to visit her mom and baby groups. I remember thinking I would love to join something like that to meet other mothers and babies if I ever had a child one day… and about six years later it happened!
Kerry has been supporting new mothers, babies and families for the past decade in CA and now is sharing her curriculum to create a ripple effect of sharing more of these nourishing postpartum groups around the world.
Care for the next generation really does start with the mother, and the more we can surround families with support in early postpartum the easier it will be to interrupt harmful narratives and create networks of love, care and support when we need it most.
In this episode we discussed:
Kerry’s experience postpartum: the surprises, challenges and ways she found the support she needed
How community support impacts early parenting and is culture-making by creating space to see and interrupt harmful narratives
How to be a village tender and step into leadership for new parents in your community
The “Early Parenting Villains” and how these systems, for example, ‘consumerism’ ‘diet culture’ or ‘patriarchy’ come up so often in new motherhood, how to identify them and ways to shift our relationship with them
Self-care in postpartum, asking for help and building community
Links in this episode:
Kerry’s Course: Village Tenders Postpartum Community Care Course
Stay in Touch with Kerry:
Stay in Touch with Rising Women Leaders:
Kerry Ingram is the founder of Community Supported Postpartum whose mission is to build ecosystems of care one community at a time. She contributes to this vision by teaching folks all over the world how to step into the role of Village Tender by creating local parent and baby groups that get parents out of isolation and into a web of support and care.
Kerry is a parent (both biological and foster), an early childhood educator (20 years), a postpartum doula, with additional education in women and gender studies (SUNY Oswego), and maternal mental health care (PSI). She has been facilitating local parent and baby groups for over 10 years and teaches others around the world to step into leadership with her Village Tenders Postpartum Community Care course, curriculum and business framework.