Little Hands, Big Plans - Motherhood and Business
Becoming a mother changes everything—including how we view work, career, and purpose.
After this shift, many of us crave more freedom, flexibility, and family time, but we also want to make an impact and contribute financially.
On Little Hands, Big Plans, we explore the many ways moms are building a life that works for both their family, faith and their dreams—without getting stuck in hustle culture.
✨ You’ll hear:
✔️ Stories from moms who’ve shifted careers, paused, pivoted, or started businesses
✔️ Actionable tips on creating time and financial freedom
✔️ Conversations about letting go of guilt, overcoming fear, and taking the leap
✔️ Encouragement to build a life beyond the 9-5, if it’s not working for your family
If you’re ready to embrace motherhood while still dreaming big, join me every week for honest conversations and real-life strategies.
🎧 Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen!
Little Hands, Big Plans - Motherhood and Business
Blog to Business: How Raised Good built a parenting community by reaching millions of readers worldwide
Tracy Gillett, author and founder at Raised Good, wanted to inspire parents to raise their children with more connection and intention. What began as a blog during her son's nap times has grown into a platform reaching millions, offering resources and community for those seeking alternatives to conventional parenting approaches.
Tracy shares how an award-winning blog grew into a thriving natural parenting community, the Gather membership, and the annual Raised Good Summit. We talk safe bed-sharing and co-sleeping, secure attachment and the power of rupture-and-repair, homeschooling while working, and finding the courage to use your voice. Tracy opens up about her fertility journey, career pivots, and the relationship-first strategies that helped her collaborate with top experts
What you’ll learn
- What it means to follow natural parenting principles
- Science-backed safe bed-sharing & co-sleeping basics
- How secure attachment survives (and grows through) repair
- Designing work and learning around family values
- Building community off social media (inside Gather)
- Turning a blog into a purpose-driven business and summit
Register for the free 2025 Raised Good Summit running September 18-22 featuring over 25 masterclasses with world-renowned experts about raising kids who feel deeply loved, can handle big emotions, and come to you when it matters most.
If this episode resonated with you, please share it with another mom who needs encouragement. Subscribe so you never miss an episode, and connect with me on LinkedIn.
For other episodes and resources, visit our website at https://littlehandsbigplans.co/pages/podcast
Today I am joined by Tracy Gillett, the founder of Raised Good, a global community and award-winning platform that helps parents embrace a more natural, conscious approach to raising their children. What started as a simple blog during her son's nap times has grown into a movement that reaches millions of families worldwide with resources, online courses and the popular Raised Good Summit. Tracy has interviewed thought leaders, built the Gather community for parents and continues to inspire moms to follow their natural instincts. I am so excited to talk with her today about her journey, how she built a sustainable business while mothering with intention, and what's ahead for Raised Good. The 2025 Raised Good Summit is scheduled to start this week, thursday, september 18th to the 22nd. It is completely free to attend and includes over 25 interviews with world-renowned experts about raising kids who feel deeply loved, can handle big emotions and come to you when it matters most. I've attended previous summits and attending always leaves me inspired to raise my kids in a way that fits my values, not someone else's rules. If you're interested in attending, I have left the link to the registration page in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Little Hands, big Plans the podcast for moms who want to reimagine work after kids and build a life where family comes first, without giving up your dreams. I'm Emilia and I know firsthand how much motherhood shifts our careers, our priorities and our pace. But instead of seeing it as a setback, what if we saw it as an invitation, an opportunity to design a life with a little more freedom, a little more presence and a little more fulfillment? Each week, we'll have honest conversations with moms who've shaped their work and business around what truly matters. Whether you're considering a career pivot, dreaming of a slower pace or just wondering what's possible, you're in the right place, so grab a little something warm, settle in and let's explore the possibilities together. I'm so excited to be with you here today and learn more about Raised Good and the upcoming summit that you're hosting. I know at the beginning, raised Good started as a blog for you while your son was taking naps, and I would love to know how that came about and what your early posts were about.
Speaker 2:Oh sure, Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be chatting with you today. Oh sure, Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be chatting with you today. And yeah, it did start out as a blog tapping away on my notes app on my phone when my son was napping. It sort of had its origins when I was trying to get pregnant. It took us three years to get pregnant.
Speaker 2:I've got endometriosis and we sort of went through quite a fertility journey, which anyone who's been through that knows the toll that it takes on your mental and emotional health, and I'd always thought that I would start a blog about fertility to share what I'd learned on that journey. But when I became pregnant and then when I became a mum, my focus shifted pretty quickly to sort of natural parenting and some of the things that I'd been discovering along the way and that had made my journey of motherhood just so joyful. And it was still really hard and there was a lot of sleep deprivation and all the stuff that we can't escape as new parents. But I just felt this incredible sense of, yeah, just calm and presence and joy for being with my baby and I would go to other, I would go to baby groups and mom's groups and other moms would say to me, like what are you doing differently? And so I wanted to start sharing about it. So when I first started blogging, I was writing about sleep, because that's probably what takes up so much of our mental bandwidth when we're when we've got a baby. So much of it is about sleep.
Speaker 2:So I started writing about sleep and then my son got his first cold and then I wrote about colds and breastfeeding was a big surprise for me, and so I wrote about breastfeeding and bed sharing and really just about the different things that I'd learned, which was sort of breaking the rules of modern parenthood. We're told that bed sharing is dangerous and breastfeeding is encouraged, but really until a certain age when it's acceptable and you start getting funny looks Maybe if you go beyond six months or 12 months. Breastfeeding a toddler or a young child isn't really normalized in our society. So it felt like kind of breaking rules and I love learning a different way to do things and my past career had been that I was a veterinarian and I love animals and always have in nature, and so I just remember thinking about looking to nature for how they, you know how different animals do some of these things and you're like a mama bear is never going to put her baby bear in a different somewhere else to sleep, in a different den to sleep.
Speaker 2:And so I started diving into James McKenna's work and different people like that, just learning about how different cultures do it and how humans had parented through history, and so that's why I called it natural parenting, because it sort of feels like how were we, as humans, designed to parent? And yeah, we're not hunter-gatherers anymore, we're not living in sort of we've lost the village, we are living in a modern world. But how can we bring some of those practices into our parenting to make it easier and to flow easier and to also make it more joyful and to create securely attached children and to protect our own mental health as mothers?
Speaker 2:Yeah that's sort of the long answer to how it started.
Speaker 1:You answered my question that I was going to ask about how you see natural parenting because that is how I first found your content was that I had my baby at a hospital and I had taken the only baby class I had taken before he was born was the hospital get ready for baby and then they had a parent get together, which was all extremely anti-bed sharing, and I was convinced that if people found out that we were bed sharing, that someone was going to call child children's protection or that I could accidentally roll on my baby or something could happen. But we were struggling because he was just needed the contact as most babies do, and so I was one time rocking him. I couldn't stay awake. It was a couple of days of extreme sleep deprivation because he would start crying as soon as I put him down on the crib and then I almost dropped him because I was on like a rocking chair and that's the first day that I said, okay, we need to just sleep because this cannot be safer.
Speaker 1:And then I think I found your content on the different cultures and it really resonated with me because I'm originally from Honduras and my mom just thought this whole situation was so silly because she had co-slept with me and my brother and she didn't see why I would be so worried that I would harm my baby by doing that. So I really I resonated with that. But I also resonated with your science backing, because when I was first introduced to this world, I needed that evidence that my baby was going to be okay, as opposed to just someone telling me that my baby was going to be okay, like my mom. So I'm curious if you were raised that way or how did that come about for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love the story that you shared and that's why I'm you know, my son's 12 now, but I still continue to talk about sleep and one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about it is because our society puts mothers in the exact position that you are in. So we're saying you know breastfeeding, you should breastfeed your baby, but breastfeeding and bed sharing are meant to go hand in hand. And putting a mother in a position where she's going to fall asleep on a rocking chair or fall asleep on a couch they are some of the most dangerous positions for a baby to fall asleep, to get wedged in, you know, in the cracks of a couch or dropped, like you were saying. It's so dangerous to be putting mothers in that position and that extreme sleep deprivation and being a new, new mom, you're going to be tired like there's no getting away from that. But I just remember thinking, because my baby was in bed with us from night one, even in the hospital um, just how exhausted I would be if I had to get up and walk to another room and then get my baby back to sleep again and then go back to sleep. So, yeah, I'm super passionate about it for that reason and I love that. Your mom was like no, this is the wisdom, just follow it. And yeah, and if you hadn't been exposed to all of the societal noise about bed sharing being dangerous, then you would have just been more confident to just follow what your mom had done. And that's why I think it's so important to meet these myths that just pervade our society with solid science, which is what people like James McKenna and Helen Ball are so amazing at doing.
Speaker 2:But no, I was not raised. You know, I was in a crib from night one, or a cot as we call it in Australia. I was formula fed and you know my, my parents had, I had fantastic childhood and an abundance of love and all of those things, and my mum just did what she thought was right and, um, you know, and then and then, when she saw me parenting my baby differently that was, she actually took that on. Really she was like I wish I would have known about this, I could have done some of these things. So, yeah, no, I wasn't raised like that. I was just.
Speaker 2:I've always just been very curious. I try to meet new ideas with curiosity rather than shutting them down or putting a label on them. I had a midwife who said to me that I would sleep with my baby, and she really supported me with that and challenged the idea that he would go in a crib. We had the crib, we had that ready, and I remember her just saying no, there's no way, he's going in there, he's going to sleep with you. And so I started to go down that path of like. I thought she was crazy when she first said it, but then I was really curious and so I started to learn about co-sleeping and I think information is power, right, I think just educating ourselves on what we don't know.
Speaker 2:And once you start questioning things that we're told by society, then it's sort of like sometimes I wish I could just go along with what everybody said. It would be easier just to like go with the crowd. But there's so much richness to be gained from going your own way and peeling back the layers and learning about what's right for you and not just following society. Because the truth is that we're you know mental health of certainly the States Canada, australia, like Western nations we're not doing too well, we're getting something wrong, and so I think it's okay to be critical thinkers and to say, hey, what if there is a different way to do it.
Speaker 2:What if our babies do just need close contact at nighttime? We're mammals, this is how we're designed to be, and when we go against that, there's going to be consequences. Babies are going to cry and they're going to want to bring us close, and that's not because they need to be sleep trained. It's because they're crying for us. They're crying to bring us close. So, yeah, that's sort of a bit of a background as to how I got into it so, yeah, that's sort of a bit of a background as to how I got into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I relate with that so much because what you said about how everything builds on to each other, because that was the first thing, the sleep was the first thing and I felt that it created such a connection that then the next thing on my journey is I had signed him up for daycare. At four months I was planning on I already had my own immigration law firm, so I was planning on not skipping a beat, going back to work as normal which I couldn't imagine doing that with the hours I was putting in and also not having daycare. So that was four months. Everyone told me that some babies do it even younger. And then the sleep, I feel like, created such a bond that I couldn't, I could not do it, I couldn't follow through with it because he was breastfed on demand. How was that going to work? He was breastfed on demand, how is that going to work?
Speaker 1:And then one thing after another, and I really love that we're talking, because I feel that, because you're ahead and you are so willing to share your wisdom from having parenting longer than other moms, it's been great, because eventually I remember if it was in the Gather community or in a podcast interview you said you talked about schooling.
Speaker 1:That was the next thing and you said I was the same way as you where I believe schooling is so important education more than schooling now. But you know, then you hear people homeschooling and that seems a little too far, like I always was looking ahead and thought, ok, but the next thing I have to do what everyone else does, and then it would come, and then I would realize the wisdom that you had shared in advance. So now it's great because I see ahead. There's still going to be things that now I'm like well, not that. But then the attachment and the relationship with the child can really completely shift your perspective as a mom. So I'm curious on what work looked like for you if you hadn't planned necessarily to go down this natural parenting path at the beginning. What did work look like for you in the early years and how did you make that work?
Speaker 2:what did work look like for you in the early years and how did you make that work? Well, I'd been a veterinarian before my son was born, working in practice, but which was a career that I loved, and everyone who goes into that profession does it for love of animals, just passion for that. But it's not a job that's great for your mental health and by five years it's not a job that's great for your mental health and by five years. I think. They told us in final year uni that by five years, 50% of veterinarians had stopped practicing. So I became very aware of my mental health.
Speaker 2:I worked for about a decade in practice, but then we moved to Canada and I worked for like a biotech, an animal health biotech company. We made supplements for pets, but I was working from home, so that was really great, and in Canada at the time it was 12 months maternity leave, so I took the full 12 months. Now it's up to 18 months and you can even take longer like completely unpaid. So I think that's really important and in the States that doesn't exist, which is something that I think that's really important, and in the States that doesn't exist, which is something that I think you know it needs to be fought for and I really feel for parents in the States that don't get proper maternity or paternity leave. So I had that leave and then I went back to work and I live on the West Coast. Most of the people in my company were on the East Coast and I Coast and I would get up and work early in the mornings and I suddenly became a whole lot more efficient at my work than what I had been before.
Speaker 2:I was a mum. I became a lot more focused. I worked at night times as well. My husband and I juggled things and we just made it work. And then Raise Good was sort of born on the side of that. So yeah, it was definitely a juggle in those early days. It's not easy. I was very lucky to have a work from home job, but there was still lots of Zoom calls and meetings and all that kind of stuff that you need to schedule. But yeah, we made it work. But, like you, my son never was in daycare. My husband traveled a lot for work. So we did have a couple of girls when my son was about maybe three or four that would come around for a couple of hours a week and just play and be in the house together and help me get some work done. But yeah, it was a juggle for sure.
Speaker 1:When did you transition to what Raised Good is now? How did that shift happen between full-time work, parenting and then also growing your company on the side?
Speaker 2:Well, it just sort of grew. It grew slowly. It started as a blog. I was blogging weekly for a number of years and then I slowly started creating products and in 2020, I started the summit. And that was a really good time to start it because everyone was at home and Zoom suddenly took off and speakers who weren't able to go and speak anymore because of COVID lockdowns and all that stuff made the summit easier to start then. So I guess it sort of started to take off then. But I had planned to sort of transition into the business and out of my job at some point. The company that I work for they actually they went under and so so we all lost our jobs about two years ago and and I didn't want to go and get get a job I wanted to just make Raise Good what I do. So I guess that's the point that I became all in on Raise Good was about two years ago, but, truth be told, I was always pouring more passion and time into the business than I was into my day job.
Speaker 1:I really love how you write, because when you read your writing it reads like you're having tea with a wise mom. I love how you mix practical stories with your own wisdom, with science, with other cultures. It's just, it's really unique, and I think I'm not surprised why it has grown in the way that it has. And I would love to talk more about how the summit came to be what it is now, because I know it's coming up and if you could share just a little bit more stuff that you're excited about as it relates to the summit and you've been able to get some really big names. So for someone that's starting out, how did it grow? What tips do you have for someone that wants to do that as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, so it starts in a week. So, depending on when this episode comes out, it starts on September 18th, then it's five days with 26 speakers in total, so it's five or six speakers a day. This is the sixth summit that I've done, so there's been five before, and every year I say that it's the last, because it's just this mountain of work. It's just. Every year I'm like, oh my gosh, it blindsides me how much work it is. But, yeah, in terms of speakers, in the work that I do, I always prioritize connection and relationship, and it's the same thing when it comes to speakers.
Speaker 2:So for years I've been creating connections with people in the parenting space, and it's always wanting to do something for somebody else before you ever ask something of them. So, whether it was sharing their articles on Facebook back when Facebook was sort of more of a big deal than it is now, or, yeah, doing things for others, and then, yeah, reaching out through relationship, and I think the other thing, too is just being willing to be vulnerable and being willing to be knocked back and just ask and ask again and ask again. So, persistence. Some of it is definitely being scracky and trying to figure out how to get in contact with the people that you really want to connect with. You know, back when I first started blogging, I managed to get Arianna Huffington's email address through, you know, when the Huffington Post was big, and that was one of the things that really helped raise good takeoff when I was posting on the Huffington Post.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think it's just about backing yourself and also realizing that people are just people Like. Just because someone might have a following on Instagram or have published a bunch of books or, you know, be an expert in a particular topic, they're still just people and it's just having the confidence to say I'm worthy of speaking to this person and wanting to share and just being enthusiastic and curious and really deeply knowing their work as well, putting the time in properly reading their books and diving into the work, not just trying to get people on, because it will elevate where you are. So really doing it in an authentic way through relationship has sort of been my approach to it.
Speaker 1:Those are such great tips because one of the things that I hear a lot from when there's hesitation in starting something new is well, there's already this perspective that has been shared. There's already, you know, there's already someone speaking on this, and that does, I think, come down to the feeling that your voice, or adding your voice, is also not worthy, that you don't have anything to add. But it is a common struggle I think that we go through, and I was wondering if you struggled with that when you were starting and how you pushed past that. If you did, yeah, I think there's always imposter syndrome.
Speaker 2:I think nobody really escapes that Well. From people that I speak with, it's a common thing. But I think one of the things that I heard early on was that there's almost no unique messages anymore, like, probably you know most things that have been said before, but there are new messages and they can be said in a different way and everyone brings a unique perspective and stories that are worth sharing. Humans are designed to learn through stories, to be around the campfire and share stories and inspire one another. So, yeah, I think everyone deserves a place at the table and to be able to come and share what they've learned, and the more that we do that, the more that we elevate one another. And, yeah, so I would say it's similar to you know, my son has.
Speaker 2:You know you were talking about homeschooling before. We've been on a homeschooling journey from you know, from kindergarten through grade six, and he was at a stage where he really needed something different and so last week he started a new school, which was a really big deal for us. It's an incredible sort of outdoor focused school, but it's different. But he was scared. He's like nervous and excited and feeling all the feels, and that's what being brave is, isn't it? We try to teach that to our kids to be scared and to do it anyway. So never waiting to feel ready, just jumping off that cliff and surrendering to feeling scared and doing it anyway.
Speaker 2:I think if people are waiting for some kind of external permission or to suddenly feel confident like it's never going to happen, confidence comes through action, through taking action and doing things and messing up and learning, and so having a lot of self-compassion, not judging yourself. And you know, I look back on some of the blog posts that I wrote in those early days and I would do them differently now, but I have so much gratitude for the new mom who was like it would have been much easier to not be typing on my phone when my son was sleeping, but I had something to share with the world and my writing wasn't perfect, but I was like just get it out there.
Speaker 1:So done is better than perfect is one of my mottos for sure, and some of the topics that you share about can be considered controversial, depending on the viewpoint that someone has, like co-sleeping or breastfeeding past infancy. Was that hard? Did you ever get pushback on that? Or how did you always just feel comfortable in sharing that? Because I think on the one hand it's controversial, on the other hand it can be very personal. You're sharing something very personal about your parenting journey with a bunch of strangers on the internet.
Speaker 2:Essentially, yeah, I've always just been happy to speak my mind. And if you're always worried about everybody liking you or everybody thinking that you're okay being a people pleaser which is how so many of us were raised, which is what this way of parenting is all about it's about not raising people pleasers, about raising people who know who they are, being authentic. You've got to figure out what you value more, and it's not that I don't care what other people think, but it's that I care more about this message and about what's right for my son and about what I see is right for other children. All babies need closeness and connection. There's not a baby on the planet that needs to be sleep trained, and people won't like it when they hear that, particularly if they have sleep trained, but that's the truth. Sleep training is not for babies. It's for parents to get more sleep, and I think it's worth.
Speaker 2:I remember when you get negative comments on posts or things, and I remember someone at the start saying when the haters come out, you know you're saying the right thing. It's going to be triggering for people when we talk about controversial things, but I think that's part of the problem in our society at the moment is that we're not willing to have hard conversations. We want to be able to just have our own worldview echoed and mirrored back to us all the time, and so I think it's important to be willing to have a conversation. It doesn't mean you need to parent the same way that I do. I've never been about that. It's about just saying this is how I'm doing it and it's working for me, and wanting to share that, because it's a minority way of doing things and yeah, I just think it's. I think kids are really misunderstood.
Speaker 2:I think toddlers are really misunderstood, I think, babies, you know, we don't, don't fully understand what they need and we put so many judgments on it. But I often just think about, you know, if we were, if we were just put on a on a deserted island, how would we parent and how would you get back to that sort of intuition and instinctive way of parenting? And that's what I try to share, just to empower parents to say that they're going to do it their way not just in a way that's going to please those around them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and with homeschooling as a journey and how it has evolved over the years, I'm curious how you structure it now, how you've structured it in the past, especially with working, because sometimes working moms feel that they can't homeschool because it's harder to juggle. So would love to hear about what your journey looked like on that end.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean, like I mentioned earlier, I had a work from home job and my husband was also working from home. So we were lucky in that sense, in that we could sort of juggle things my husband would be with my son in the mornings, and then I would be with him in the afternoons, or sometimes I would be with him all day. I've worked Sundays before.
Speaker 2:I've worked nighttimes after my son's in bed.
Speaker 2:It's really about figuring out what the priorities are and how you construct your life around it.
Speaker 2:So I think the first thing is sort of an openness and an awareness of what your child needs and how it can work for you as a family. But we've also been part of a homeschool co op, so my son has gone to school sort of various numbers of days, but when he was in kindergarten he sometimes would go one day a week or one morning a week, or sometimes two mornings a week, and then in grade five and six he was going three days a week and then we were homeschooling two days a week. So finding those kind of communities that have aligned values can make a huge difference, finding other families that are doing it the same way that you're doing it and sort of sharing that load as well. But yeah, it can be challenging to figure out and it leads to a lot of parents that I know. That homeschool, you know, figuring out different careers or working from home or cutting back on expenses, yeah, so I think it's different for every family.
Speaker 2:But yeah, we've just tried to be flexible in how we structure our work and yeah, and it's worked for us over the years. It's not been easy, it's certainly a challenge in that juggle, but yeah, that's how we've done it.
Speaker 1:It seems like more and more communities are popping up too, so hopefully for anyone that is interested, it'll become easier. But speaking of community, can you tell us a little bit more about the amazing Gather community that you started and what makes it different from other parenting spaces online? Yeah sure, from other parenting spaces online? Yeah sure.
Speaker 2:So I started Gather about two years ago and it's a membership community that is really just geared towards what I would have wanted when I was a new mom. It's really grown over the last couple of years. We have a bunch of courses in there, we have workshops and masterclasses. We come together for Zoom chats, for discussions about sleep and questions around that sort of all of the things that you want to cover as a natural parent are in there, and there's also a community space which we've taken off Facebook, which has been really good. It was on Facebook for the first year the community aspect of it but our members wanted to move off. So that's been really nice to have it free of social media.
Speaker 2:And the crux of it is about helping parents understand. Yeah, we often focus on behavior when it comes to our kids. So recently we've been focusing on getting beneath the behavior. What's the emotion beneath that behavior that's driving it? What's the need or the unknown skill that's there? So really getting to the root cause of some of the challenging behaviors that we see with our kids. And then also, what do kids need in childhood? So we focus a lot on the foundational needs of children. So things like simplicity, play, playful parenting, secure attachment and ordering of their immaturity and what that means for us as parents. So really empowering parents to figure out what their kids need and then also helping mums to get what they need as well, because we need to be looking after ourselves too, and we talk about things like reparenting and inner child work and that kind of stuff too. That comes along with conscious parenting. So it evolves and grows every month. But yeah, it's one of my favorite things that I do at Raise Good.
Speaker 1:I really loved being a part of the community I believe I joined right in when you first opened it and I've loved how you've curated knowledge and how easy it is to find different topics, because you know, it's not always possible to follow along that specific month.
Speaker 1:But I know that I have a resource that if I'm struggling with a specific issue I can go there and I will find as much or as little resources as I can handle at that point. So if you know that sometimes there's a book companion but I don't always have time to read the whole book, but you will still have sort of a reader's digest or a guide that I can read that can give me the highlights to at least get me started on the guidance that I'm seeking. So I've really loved that. I've also loved the podcasts that you do, the short ones that I can listen to for other topics, because sometimes we go on walks and it's better, I find, than having to read sometimes. So I love that and I hope it continues to grow to eventually also include in person, because it's great to connect with other moms that are on a similar journey and that have similar beliefs about children and parenting.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I'm glad to hear that it's landed for you in that way. And yeah, it's constantly evolving behind the scenes and I always have ideas of like I could do this or I could change this or do this like that, and try to have things like, yeah, sort of short podcast episodes and things. And I think about how I consume content and, yeah, sometimes it's not easy to read or watch a video or do so having audio is fantastic and yeah, that would be my dream to just try to grow, grow the members in there, because we have members from all over the world. We've got people from South Africa or Australia or New Zealand or the UK or Europe and the States and Canada and Alaska and all different places. So, yeah, the bigger the community gets, then the more that we can start to create that opportunity for in-person connection.
Speaker 1:Yes, and even grandmas. I believe there are even some grandmas in the community, which I think is so neat because so much wisdom you know in different stages, and what does natural parenting look like for you now that you have a 12-year-old? What kind of things are you finding are perhaps different than the norm, and were you expecting it? Different than what you were expecting, than the?
Speaker 2:norm and were you expecting it different than what you were expecting? Yeah, I think the tween years can kind of I felt like I was cruising for a while, had this down, had it figured out eight, nine year old and then suddenly 10, 11, 12, those tween years come and yeah, so I'm on a stage where I'm like leaning in again and reading more up on this kind of stage and, like you said, it's always good to have someone who's a bit ahead of you on the path. So, my friend Vanessa LaPointe she's got late teen and young 20-year-olds and Tina Payne Bryson and people like this and I'm like looking ahead to them for advice and wisdom. But, yeah, I think motherhood and parenthood is this.
Speaker 2:It's this constant journey of holding on and letting go and that bittersweet reality that we're parenting through attachment and we're holding our kids close and we're co-sleeping with them and we're breastfeeding and you know, when you've got a little kid, you are just their entire world and they think you're amazing.
Speaker 2:But then the ultimate aim is that we are raising kids to independence. We are raising them to be able to go out into the world and to be their own people and this is when they start with that pushing away. So for me, one of the biggest challenges has been feeling my son, you know, starting to really become his own person. Experiment with you know who he is and he's suddenly interested in clothes where he'd never been interested in them before. He's suddenly wanting to express himself in different ways and honoring that and being able to be okay with that. There's this beautiful saying that always makes me want to feel a little bit teary, but it goes along the lines of you know, when you've got young kids, you're the sun and they orbit around you, and then slowly over time, you become the moon that is going around their world, and so I start to slowly feel that shift.
Speaker 2:But at every single stage there is this intense kind of I don't like to use the word pride so much, but just how proud I am of my son and of the way that I've parented and seeing him go out into the world with this deep confidence, but also, when life knocks him down, that he comes straight back to me, that he shares things with me, that we've always made mistakes very safe, and that I've always met things with. Not always you can mess up all the time, but I've tried to meet him with curiosity, not judgment, and so, particularly going into the teen years, I want him to feel confident that he can still come to me with stuff. So I think it's very true that we need to make space for the little things that little kids get frustrated about, like the cookie, like oh, that's so sad, right. Oh, my broken toy. And we need to make space for those frustrations and those upsets when they're little, because as they get bigger it's you know now it's the birthday party they didn't get invited to, or it's the girl that doesn't have a crush on them, or it's the those sorts of things.
Speaker 2:So it's it just. It's like the underlying premise still stays the same, but it just starts to feel a little bit different and look a little bit different. But underneath it is still that like connection. I'm really leaning into playfulness, which I always have, but you know, playfulness starts to look a little bit different. And yeah, so essentially it's the same, but it's just it's a little bit more of the letting go rather than the holding on all of the time, but knowing that they need us just as much at every stage, it just looks a little bit different.
Speaker 1:That's so beautiful. It makes me want to hold on so tight to these little years, because I can feel that's going to be hard. I mean, it's happy, it's bittersweet once they start to pull away.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely, but I project myself into the future as well. There was this it was on Australian radio that sort of went a bit viral about a month ago about a story that someone had written. You know that they were 80 years old and suddenly they got projected back into their 40 year old body or their 35 year old body or whatever age you are when you're reading it and suddenly you were like with your kids again and you were just like soaking it in, and so sometimes I even project myself just to you know, my son's 12 and I'm like but imagine when he's 18, then I'm going to be like, oh my gosh, he's so little when he's 12.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Hold, him close, I can still snuggle with him on the couch and then, when he's 18, I'm going to be like, oh, he's still so little. Imagine him when he's 30. Every stage is amazing and, yeah, some of the things that we get to do now with our kid is just awesome. Like we went to the Oasis concert in Los Angeles on the weekend. We took him down there for the weekend and I couldn't have done that with my four-year-old, but he just loves them and he loves their songs and and he was he's a highly sensitive kid who needed to wear, you know, earphones when we go to the movies and, you know, cover his ears when I blend the smoothie and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:And there he is with 90,000 people at the Rose Bowl and this massive band, and he's just there for it. And so you get to experience these different things as your kids get to different ages with them, and I just want to be as present as I can be for it and, particularly in the teenage years, going with it, and teens have this intense need to have new experiences and so wanting to be a part of that with him as well, instead of starting to step to the sidelines and think, well, he doesn't need me anymore because they do. They need you just as much. So I'm excited for the teen years. I think we demonize them a bit, like we do the toddler years, but I think they can just be incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds incredible and it's also reminding me of the book Holding On to your Kids how the author speaks a lot about the toddler and the teen years being kind of mirrors of each other. And, yeah, I really hope that you will continue to share how you did about your toddlerhood journey, about now as you navigate the teen years, because I think for parents that are not quite there yet, it'll be great and also helps to know what foundations we can start putting into place to make sure that our kids do want to take us along in a different way but still have that strong relationship as they grow. Does your son have any input, feedback into raised good? How does he get involved?
Speaker 2:No, he doesn doesn't. He doesn't really get involved. He just uh, if I'm having a bad parenting moment, then he'll throw it at me. He's like but I thought that you were great, I thought that you like, do this parenting stuff for like your job, so you should be better, like a little devil. So, yeah, no, he, he knows about it, but I've, you know, and I've intentionally it's hard.
Speaker 2:I want this to be about my motherhood, not about his childhood.
Speaker 2:I want to respect his privacy, and so I try to share, in a way, that sort of reflective of my experience, and so I don't share a lot of photos of him on.
Speaker 2:You know, I could have shared loads of cute baby videos, of different things on social media, but I'm like no, it needs to be more about sharing the story of what it is for me, because I think it's most of what I share is about how we need to be as parents. I think the mainstream narrative is about what we need kids to do. We need them to behave or to comply or to be obedient, and that's the easy way out. The hard way out is to say, actually there's nothing wrong with our kids and how do we need to show up for them. What kind of parent do we need to be? And so at the moment, you know, as my son goes into the teenage years, it's the question isn't like how do I get him to be different, it's like how do I become a mom to a teenager? So, yeah, he doesn't. He doesn't have a great deal of input into it.
Speaker 2:He knows what I do, but, yeah, sometimes it's funny when he's like I think, you should be able to do this better so I think, that I think that's also permission for for parent. None of us are doing this perfectly. We're all messing up, yeah, yeah, and, and it's not about that.
Speaker 2:I think, it's sort of a side effect of social media and sharing too much of perfect things on Instagram. That's not what it really looks like. So I think it's important to keep it real and to show up authentically in your parenting and to have a whole lot of self-compassion when you mess up, to get really good at apologizing. I think that's one of the most important things in parenting to be able to repair ruptures when you rupture that connection with your kid when you mess up. Yeah, so that's.
Speaker 1:That is another thing that I really had never heard about. But when we entered the toddler years, if I felt that I messed up, I would feel really guilty and like my child was going to be messed up forever now because I acted in a way that could impact our attachment. And I think recently or is there going to be a speaker at the summit that's speaking about this right and how attachment is meant to be strong and can you share a little bit more about that? Because that is definitely something that has helped us tremendously in learning for me that there is a possibility of repair and that I can't hold myself to this crazy standard of trying to do it right all the time For sure.
Speaker 2:So this is something I talk about a lot and I have a course on attachment and we also talk about this in Gather and we had a lesson last week about rupture and repair, so like specifically, what to do when you mess up and to not hold yourself in a place of guilt. That's also not what your child needs in that moment. When you're doing that, you're just putting all of the focus on yourself instead of on your kid, and we all do it. But I think when we can start to normalize that, just because you're doing natural parenting or conscious parenting, positive parenting, whatever label we put on it doesn't mean that you're suddenly some kind of perfect human and it's actually best that we're not perfect. If our kid never sees this mess up, then suddenly they're held to this impossible level of perfection and they don't have the ability to learn that relationships can be bigger than a mistake and relationships can handle when things go wrong, when people disagree, when people have an argument, when we yell when we didn't mean to, and that we can own that mistake and take full responsibility for it and show up and apologize in a way that's authentic. So an authentic apology is along the lines of oh bud, I'm so sorry that I yelled. That must have made you feel really scared and I'm working on it. I'm really sorry. As opposed to what we might've heard when we were kids, which might've been along the lines of I'm so sorry, but it's just because you hadn't cleaned up your toys, that's not a real apology. So getting really good at apologizing, having self-compassion, that you know we're all operating under intense pressure. We're all trying to work and keep a household going and cook good food for our kids and have good relationships with our spouses, and all of the different things that we're trying to do. It's an impossible number of tasks I think modern life is set up for us to crack.
Speaker 2:So when we do with our kids, it's just really important that we show up authentically and apologize and repair the mistake and then that just teaches them that we don't need to be ashamed of mistakes. We don't need to hide them or lie or do any of those things. And if it is very triggering to us when we mess up, then maybe it's because it wasn't safe for us to make mistakes when we were kids, and that's when we can lean into it and not blame our kids and say that it's our kids that were triggering us. It's not our kids that trigger us. Our triggers live inside of us, and that's for us to get curious about it and say, huh, why is this so? Why does this feel so raw for me? And that's when we start to get into what people talk about in a child work and reparenting. And if we can lean into that instead of just judging our kids or blaming our kids or sticking them in a timeout or pushing the behavior down, then that's when we can really grow as people as well.
Speaker 2:So attachment is the. I think, particularly in the early years, that's almost the most important work that we can do as parents creating conditions for secure attachment. And so I talk about that a lot. And at the summit we have Dr Sarah Brenn coming to talk about secure attachment, and I think she talks about five myths, but one of them is this idea that attachment is fragile. It's definitely not. It's not broken with a bad day of parenting or a bad week of parenting. Attachment is a system that is designed by nature to understand that we're not going to be perfect as parents, and that's where the rupture and repair process comes in. So, yeah, we're diving right into that with Dr Sarah Brin and I'd really recommend that masterclass. It's an awesome one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's definitely one that I do not want to miss. And the first summit, and I think one of the things that I found so helpful is that there's so many different topics that you can go in and out of depending on the stage that you're in. You don't have to feel like you have to watch five days. You can go for the ones that you need at that time, and that evolves over time. So where do you see the Gather community raised good five years from now? What are your goals?
Speaker 2:Just for it to be bigger and bigger in terms of community and connection and that it's thriving and that it's the go-to place for parents that are wanting to follow this kind of path of connected, conscious parenting. Like you said, you've been in there for a long time and there's members in there that they feel like friends. We get on Zoom calls and I'm like, yep, I know what's going on with Hayley. I know that Brandy's been on holiday to Greece. I know that Sammy's been, you know, thinking about moving it's. You get to know these women that are in there and it starts to really feel like a village and that you mess up or you've got a challenge or you're not sure how to do something and you can come in and get support from others who have walked a similar path.
Speaker 2:If you don't have that in real life, which I think can be so nourishing and build so much confidence when you're parenting in a different way from mainstream, just having a real open curiosity to learning and seeing how other cultures do it, we're all just humans on this planet. So, looking at how you know, what we see in front of us we think is normal, or what we see as being common we think is normal, but that's not always true. So, I think, just being curious, trying different things, treating it as an experiment, leaning into it, seeing how it feels, and yeah, just, I think it's so important that we learn to trust our intuition and that we take charge of our lives and that we don't just do what other people tell us to do. So, yeah, just just go for it. Follow, come and read some of my blog posts that I've written over the years to get a flavor for what it can feel like and what it can look like and see if it resonates. And, yeah, I think, just dive on in On my website, raisegoodcom, you'll find everything, and on Instagram, I'm just at raisegood.
Speaker 2:If you come to the website, you'll find the summit. So, yeah, it starts. Come and grab a free ticket and, like you said, if you come and watch one masterclass or three masterclasses, you'll get so much out of it and there's so many different topics for different ages and stages of parenting, so there's something there for everybody.
Speaker 1:For today's takeaway I have one Follow your baby, not the script. Natural parenting often starts with one brave, practical decision and expands from there. Use connection and your values as the guide. Two rupture and repair is the superpower. You will mess up. Offer real apologies, repair the moment and move on. Remember that secure attachment is resilient.
Speaker 1:Three find work that fits your family. Careers can bend Early mornings, night co-ops and seasons of less. Treat it like an experiment and design work around your priorities. Four share your voice, even if it's been said before, start small, be persistent, build genuine relationships and let action create confidence. Five community makes it sustainable. The Gather community shows how learning, short-form resources and off-social spaces can help you stay the course and also feel less alone. And lastly, don't forget to join the Race Goods Summit. It starts September 18th and runs to September 22nd 2025. It's five days and over the five days you will get to listen to over 25 speakers. The summit will include tons of practical help for every stage. Grab your free ticket in the show notes.
Speaker 1:That's it for today's episode. Thank you for spending this time with me. I know how valuable your time is and I hope you're walking away feeling encouraged to dream a little bigger about what's possible for your work and family life. If this episode spoke to you, it would mean so much if you shared it with another mom who needs this kind of encouragement. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and if you want to keep the conversation going, connect with me on LinkedIn. Just search Emilia Cotto. That's E-M-I-L-I-A, c-o-t-o. Until next time, remember, motherhood isn't the end of your dreams, it's just the beginning.