Welcome to Grow Parents! We offer support to parents and parents-to-be exactly when they most need i
07/03/2022
does exist!
Unfortunately here in Spain, as in most other countries, obstetric violence does exist.
Thanks to many strong men and women this is luckily changing, little by little. One of those people is Marina from . She was my midwife during my first birth, and ever since she gained a fan. She does the heavy lifting. Not just the incredibly important support before, during and after birth, but the impactful awareness she campaigns through here ig account is key to changing the birthing protocols, standards, culture and expectations on all levels.
In an ideal world, it would be amazing to just be able "to go with the flow" when baby wants to come out and trust our care team to advocate in our best interest. Unfortunately, in reality a lot can go wrong when we put our trust in "others" for such an impactful event. Both emotionally and physically the parent(s) and baby are never-seen-before vulnerable during labour. And in such a delicate moment traumas are easily formed.
Things you can do:
🔸Inform yourself about the protocolos of your care team and hospital
🔸Talk to other parents who gave birth in that place and ask about their emotional experience (rater than asking only about the observable facts)
🔸Reflect on what your images and expectations are about your birth. Ask yourself where they come from (movies, mother's stories, ...) Do you like this images? How realistic are they?
🔸Inform yourself on what obstetric violence and respected birth means (a tip: it has nothing to do with wether it is a vaginal birth, a cesarean, medicated or all natural delivery. It is all related to the treatment of your physical and emotional needs during labour!).
🔸Hire a doula, coach or therapist that can help you with the emotional preparation. ( is an amazing doula in Madrid that can help you out!)
🔸If you did have a traumatic birth, seek help. You can contact me for more info and resources. Or if you prefer a therapist is a great place to start!
📷 Photos taken by my 4 year old, with the enthusiasm of my 2 year old loving the t-shirt.
31/01/2022
We're back with extra support for new & not-so-new-moms that might benefit from sharing & caring with other moms about the emotional challenges that come with motherhood. With the extra professional support from psychoanalist and mental health coach .life.coach
Contact us or reply to this post if you're interested!
We (re)start at the beginning of every month, so the timing is perfect to join us now for the February group!
Are you a dad and also want a group like this? Or ar you a couple and want to join us together? Contact us so we can start a new group!
01/07/2020
A must read for all tired moms and dads! A little laugh, and most importantly a great reminder we too need to be cared for 🍰😴
20/05/2020
We believe parenthood is only truly understood by those who live or have lived through it. That’s why at Grow Parents we think it’s important that all our team members (and most of our guest experts) are parents as well.
Unfortunately, this means we’re all at home with our kids while the corona crisis is passing through. And although we would love to be super heroes with extra mega powers and do everything at ones, we decided we would settle for the reality.
We are training our “I’m doing my best, which is always good enough”-mindset and focus on household and kids duties. And as you who are reading this is probably a parent yourself, you’ll know better than anyone that household and kids are a lot to combine!
We do reserve a couple of hours per week for urgent parent support; so do contact us when you’re in need of help.
We know this is a hard and uncertain period. There are downsides and upsides in it. And most of all, it is what it is… So our humble suggestion is: be kind to yourself and others as often as possible.
01/05/2020
𝐌𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐝𝐚𝐲 is coming up. Wouldn’t it be nice if we used this day as an opportunity to mindfully connect to our mommy spirit? ⠀⠀
May your baby's kisses and hugs fill your heart with joy. ⠀⠀⠀
May your baby's smiles give you wings to fly.
May you feel that their unconditional love warms your whole being.
May you register how unique it is that they call you mama.
May you realise how much they look at you and see a super hero.
Even if this day isn’t your day to feel it, there will always be tomorrow. And the day after. And the ones thereafter.
Our Grow Parents’ team wishes all the incredible mamas a happy mother’s day!
22/03/2020
This is a little reflection of our founder and Life Coach, who is at home with her husband, baby son and toddler daughter:
***
“My phone gets bombard by activities to do with kids at home, guidelines on how to stay healthy, jokes about the coronavirus and videos of professionals talking about all the detailed info they know until now about covid-19. I receive check-in messages from friends and family and see other professionals blooming during this strange quarantine period. My mind involuntarily creates millions of “I should” thoughts, triggered by the outside world. Although all of it is well intended, it somehow stresses me out.
After the 10nd day of quarantine at home, I came to a conclusion: "I need to do quarantine in my unique way, and I’ll adapt constantly according to my own experiences." This is a lesson I learned when I became a mother, and It’s a lesson I need to constantly remind myself of in life.
Quarantine is difficult. We're not always happy. We are faced with new and complicated challenges. And at the same time, we are doing great:
- my son learned to roll over, so he’s happily discovering the floor space of our apartment
- my daughter is rapidly developing her two home languages and I get to know her inner world as she can explain it better each day
- my husband and I are learning to be together again 24/7 and it’s showing us we are discovering a better way of communicating.
Can we use this period more efficiently, more constructively? Sure.
Though for me, when I’m being honest, I feel like we're actually doing GOOD ENOUGH!
So, why stress about the “should’s”? It’s a strange and unknown period. Accordingly, our days are weird and different. And, you know what? I think that’s totally fine!“
***
What makes your quarantine unique? How do you personalize this period? What works for you and your family? We invite you to look inside and stay close to your own well-being. Whatever that means for you is the only "should" you'll listen to.
Share your "mind vs reality" experience in the comments or private message and we'll share it as an image for other parents to read and feel reinforced in how normal and good enough they are.
08/03/2020
Happy international women’s day, mamas (to be)!
On many levels we could strive for equality. Reality is only a woman’s body can grow an other human being. That is something unique and marvelous. Luckily it has been understood and appreciated a little bit more each day. And it's important to point out there's still room for growth. A day like this is a great reminder for it.
It is hard work being a woman, being a mama (to be). Let's remind ourselves there is always someone out there who loves you. And above all we'll celebrate womenhood and motherhood today!
27/01/2020
Sweet parents(-to-be) of Madrid: we'd love to recommend the guided meditations by Char Tamason. Her Thursday sessions for parents and babies are true self-care moments to recenter and connect with yourself and your child. The Monday sessions, on the other hand, are perfect for winding down your body and mind. For those pregnant moms: the techniques she teaches will come in handy once you start your labour and want to stay connected to your body's wisdom! https://www.facebook.com/healthbyintuition/
Health by Intuition offers guided meditation classes, intuitive healing, intuitive coaching, and workshops online and in Thailand. It is for people who are ready to take action to improve their overall health and well-being in mind, body, and spirit.
17/01/2020
At this workshop we will guide you to create your own unique postpartum care plan. We'll take a closer look at your needs, your support network and your relationship. Based on your personal aspects, you'll create a plan that you can share with your network and apply to your life. This workshops aims to make sure you get the support and care you need to be the thriving parent you can be.
Making a postpartum care plan is a helpful tool for expecting parents to realistically prepare for the postpartum period. Parents of small kids will be happy to get space and guidance to think about what is missing for them to feel good and enjoy their parenthood even more.
*At the event a photographer will be taking pictures of you and your baby/belly. These pictures will be used for marketing purposes for the Grow Parents emotional support groups. By partaking in the workshop you agree with these terms. All participants will gain access to the pictures for personal use after the event.
07/01/2020
Pregnancy feels like a count down and you made it once your healthy baby is lying on your chest. The truth is, that moment that most pregnant parents consider to be the finish line is only the beginning of a whole new adventure.
Prepare yourself, not only for the birth, but very importantly for the post-partum period. You're going to be a new parent, overloaded with new information and unknown challanges.
We help you to prepare for the expected and unexpected changes that "life after giving birth" will bring you.
The January edition starts next Wednesday: 6 weeks of guided group conversations with a preset topic. You can register for all or single sessions: parents@nurturetogrow.com
Parents often feel overwhelmed by the newness of having a little baby joining the family. New information and experiences are torpedoed at you with no time to process it all.
We offer a safe space to hear yourself think and observe your feelings. Our experts, life coach and psychotherapist will help you navigate through the newness so you can discover your new identity as a parent.
Starting next Wednesday: 6 weeks of guided group conversations with preset topics.
Sé el primero en enterarse y déjanos enviarle un correo electrónico cuando Grow Parents Madrid publique noticias y promociones. Su dirección de correo electrónico no se utilizará para ningún otro fin, y puede darse de baja en cualquier momento.
A project from our hearts - how it grew into this.
Grow Parents is a project that comes straight from our hearts.
We, Amy and Laura, are both expat moms living in Madrid. Amy is a psychotherapist, Laura is a social worker and life coach. Love is what brought us to Madrid, love is what keeps us in Madrid, love is what we feel for our jobs, love is why we became mothers, love is what we live for. So as you can see, love is very important to us. And as we go on loving others so much, we often forgot to love ourselves.
After moving to Madrid, we faced the challenges that come with a big move like this. We started up our professional careers again, we looked for new friendships, we searched for a new balance in our relationships and we discovered the city until it became our own. On top of that, we decided to start a family. Amy has a little son, Laura has a little daughter and is expecting a son.
Becoming a parent is an adventure on itself. Doing it in a new city while not having your closest friends and family around, is a whole other dimension of difficult. Understanding the public and private health system, struggling with a foreign language, finding our way through the city to get to all the places we needed to go, searching for the right material to prepare our houses for the babies that were on their way, attending “preparto” classes and doing prenatal physiotherapy to get the practical and physical situation under control - we did it all.
Then, the days came our babies decided to come out and join us in our madrileño adventures. And that’s when it hit us. We had no idea what to expect from this new period in our lives. Suddenly we became mothers. Totally responsible for these tiny little babies. We had less time and less energy to invest in our relationships. Our bodies had changed. Our houses were never the same again. Our routine was nothing we could recognise. Everybody had opinions about how and what we should do. It felt like they had all the answers, because we had never done this. So we looked to others, compared and read. And we loved. We took care of our babies and of our husbands. We breastfed and co-slept. We made sure our families abroad got all the pictures and videos to stay up to date of every little change that happend in the development of our infants. We received visits, we travelled to show our babies off. But the one thing we didn’t do, was love ourselves. We forgot to check in with our own well-being.
Since we decided to create a new human being, our focus had been on the outside. We had been so busy with all the preparations and adaptations, that we never actually asked ourselves how we were doing or what is was we needed. We didn’t create space to be aware of all the changes that had happend to us and we weren’t conscious of how all of it impacted our well being.
Sure, we took care of our basic needs: we ate, drank and sometimes even slept and bathed. But how were we really doing?
When Laura stopped and asked herself how she was doing, she honestly had no idea how to answer. She had been managing. After a lot of self-inspection and questioning, she concluded two things:
I’m not enjoying motherhood as much as I had imagined. Am I even enjoying it at all?
I’m spending my few free moments in front of Netflix. Why is that? Isn’t there anything else I want to do when I’m not taking care of others?
It’s only now, 1,5 years after she gave birth to her sweet lovely vibrant daughter, that she started enjoying being a mom. It’s only now that she doesn’t need to hide behind the netflix adventures but actually knows what it is she wants to do with her life.
Worldwide, postpartum anxiety happens to 1 in 5 women. And 70% of them actually hides or downplays the symptoms. This kind of anxiety can come in many forms and intensities. Some are easily recognisable, but most of them are pushed aside as, for example, tiredness. The best way to prevent it is surrounding you with support. A support system that encourages you to reflect on your own needs and helps you to create space for your emotional journey into parenthood.
Both Amy and Laura experienced the isolation and anxiety that comes with becoming a parent and would have loved to get that kind of emotional support back when they went through it all. After doing extended research within the mom and expat community, it turned out to be a need of many parents. This is why Grow Parents was born. There’s a big gap in the parent care market. It’s time we start treating mental health as we do with physical health. It’s the base of a healthy and happy life that influences the well being of your whole family.
The conclusion of it all? Love yourself enough so you can love your kids even more. Don’t forget: Happy parents make happy kids!
Spread the word and/or join the project. The May-June edition of 2019 is starting this week!
