[00:00:01] Today we are joined by Brittany Chambers.

[00:00:04] Brittany Chambers: I find that really often we are looking for solutions or looking for answers to something that we've pathologize that's just normal, like wakefulness, like a desire to be close to our babies.

Emily Race-Newmark: Brittany is an infant and family sleep specialist and the founder of Good Night Moon Child, an Integrative Infant Sleep consultancy informed by the latest research in neuroscience, developmental psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. As an activist and an educator, Britt is challenging harmful prevailing paradigms and dispelling fear-based parenting myths.Through deep investigation and relationship-building, she aims to walk parents back home to their brilliant innate intuition.

[00:00:23] Brittany Chambers: My name is Brittany Chambers, I'm an infant and family sleep specialist, and I am a mom. I'm a mom to a two and a half year old girl named Lily, who is extraordinary and who has taught me so much about my own humanity. 

[00:00:36] Brittany Chambers: When I think back to this journey of becoming an infant and family sleep specialist, the red thread of sleep has been evident since I was a really little kid. I was born into a family that was really bright, really academic, really heady, and not very embodied despite all of their profound, wonderful qualities.

[00:00:57] Brittany Chambers: And my parents were pretty young when I was born and they looked at the inclusion of me and the family as something that needed to be amended to their lifestyle, as so many parents do, right? They said, okay, we've got this girl. She has certain needs that she has. I was a highly sensitive baby, and I would not sleep.

[00:01:18] Brittany Chambers: And at the time that I was born in the eighties, the prevailing rhetoric, as it still is today, is you need to teach her how to sleep. So my parents, despite their instincts saying otherwise, did deploy the cry it out method with me, and it never worked. 

[00:01:33] Brittany Chambers: This story was one of those tales that my family kept telling intergenerationally even, much to my detriment, right? Of, oh my gosh, we would put Britt in her crib and week after week, month after month, she would just keep crying. It never worked. She never fell asleep. 

[00:01:48] Brittany Chambers: So that was my family story, the girl who wouldn't sleep.

[00:01:52] Brittany Chambers: Fast forward into adolescence and I developed some fears around sleep that actually spiraled into insomnia. 

[00:01:59] I was up all hours of the night. I had really irrational phobias surrounding sleep. In the 20 year interim between my adolescents and when my daughter was born, I never really gave much more thought to sleep or this perilous thing that happened to me as a kid because there was levity infused in my family.

[00:02:15] Oh my gosh, she just wouldn't sleep. 

[00:02:17] Then when my daughter was born, I realized that she was highly sensitive like I was. So I had this brand new baby and my partner laid her on our bed and we were swaddling her because that's what we thought we had to do.

[00:02:29] And this was like night one of her life. And we looked at each other and we were like, what do we do now? Where does she go now? And I just instantaneously and instinctually said, she goes on my chest, that's where she belongs, right here. So I put her on my body. 

[00:02:44] And prior to this I had bought what I now know to be sleep training materials and resources. I wanted to get sleep. I wanted my baby to sleep. I wanted to be well mentally and physically. And I thought that was the formula to get there. 

[00:02:56] Emily Race-Newmark: Yep. 

[00:02:56] Brittany Chambers: What unfolded over the next couple of weeks was a very evident pattern of my daughter needing contact and closeness to sleep, almost exclusively. This realigned me with my instincts in a way that just blew my mind. 

[00:03:09] Brittany Chambers: I hadn't expected to reacquaint with this very nagging internal feeling that we weren't meant to sleep separately. And that babies are crying for a reason and that they should be responded to.

[00:03:20] Brittany Chambers: This led me down a path of pursuing evidence-based research. I was really curious as a new parent of what's really going on here? Are my instincts at odds with science, am I towing a harmful line here? Or is there evidence that suggests that maybe our instincts are right?

[00:03:36] Brittany Chambers: I was acquainted with Dr. Greer Kirschenbaum, who's a neuroscientist in this space, and she's a phenomenal advocate of normal biological infant sleep. She actually studied infant mental health, which is how she discovered that the circuits for anxiety, depression, and resilience are built in the first three years of life and that our responsiveness has epigenetic and genetic effects on our babies' wellbeing. 

[00:04:02] Brittany Chambers: She is now a huge advocate for responsive sleep. I trained under her and was just so enthralled, in awe of everything she was teaching, everything I was learning, and I knew that I wanted to give parents the same information that was available to me through her and through the research that I had done. 

[00:04:21] Brittany Chambers: I founded Goodnight Moon Child, which is an integrative infant sleep consultancy. We work with parents all over the world. The underpinning of what I do really is helping parents reconnect to their instincts so that moms aren't in the situation I was in, where they're like, okay, I need this baby close to me, but is this dangerous? What am I doing? 

[00:04:42] Brittany Chambers:  That's a bit about where I came from and why this spoke to me. I feel like it's a full circle, really interesting, Dharmic, karmic experience. 

[00:04:51] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. 

[00:04:51] Brittany Chambers: And through my work with families, through co-regulating my daughter for two and a half years and co-sleeping and contact napping and all the things that I've done with her, I've healed myself in the process, which has been really profound. 

Emily Race-Newmark: This is a topic and a conversation that I hold with a lot of importance because of how triggered I was initially by it - and the beauty I discovered on the otherside.   

When I was pregnant with my first child, my husband and I took the birth class with our local birth center to prepare ourselves for the unknowns of labor. What I didn’t realize was we would also be given some materials to prepare us for AFTER the birth — including some reading on safe cosleeping and the science of attachment. There’s one article in particular, which I’ll link in the shownotes, that actually “took me out” for a couple of days - I was so confronted by what I was reading that I unexpectedly found myself crying, angry, and frustrated.

The article was about the importance of attachment, not just as a potential option but as an important component of a child’s healthy brain development.

The article continued: “Babies, we know, cannot survive on their own. All basic needs must be met through a relationship with a caregiver. What this new research tells us, however, is that these needs go far beyond the simple ones of food and sleep, and are intimately tied to the emotional world.In psychobiological terms, babies are unable to regulate themselves. Despite being born with the capacity for feeling deep emotions, babies are unable to keep themselves in a state of equilibrium, lacking the skills to regulate either the intensity or the duration of those emotions.Without the assistance and monitoring of a caregiver, babies become overwhelmed by their emotional states, including those of fear, excitement, and sadness. In order to maintain emotional equilibrium, babies require a consistent and committed relationship with one caring person. As you might expect, the research indicates that the person best suited for this relationship is the mother.”

What I was grappling with was essentially the idea that my child was going to be dependent on me. That sounds crazy for me to hear myself say NOW, but at the time, I was still very much holding onto some false promise that I could … well… maintain my independence into motherhood, like that was something to strive for. I had heard and read plenty of stories from other people at this point of “success stories” where parents were able to maintain their independence, some semblance of their “pre-baby life” after the baby arrived. And there was definitely a part of me that wanted that, that was having this moment of reckoning. 

I recognize now that part of the anger that was coming up for me in the time of initially reading this article was tied to this feeling of “so much was on me” - that as the mother, I was going to have to hold this immense reality. And again, I was very much coming from a paradigm of individuality, imagining myself as a mother alone in the world, unsupported by a community of others.

The article continues to mention the importance of attunement, or attachment, from other caregivers as well: “nonmaternal caregivers in the child's life. While the mother-child dyad maintains primacy because of its psychobiological underpinnings in survival and optimal development, the child cultivates an array of "affectional bonds" that include, most important, the father or partner, as well as other members of the network of close family and friends. Attunement in each of these relationships is intensely important because the child is always taking in new information and being shaped by the world… and acknowledges that there are cultural changes required to actually support the mother in this role.”

On the other day of my breakdown and grieving process following discovering this article, I slowly made steps towards finding and integrating a different way within myself - one that was instinctually craving and wanting to live in this way; one that knew it was time to move out of a state of embodied independence and individualism and that would honor our inherent need to rely on one another - and the understanding that this begins at birth. 

Months after my daughter was born, I was introduced to Britt. 

I forget exactly where I met Britt - whether it was first through her instagram or through the Centerline Community’s whatsapp group (more on the Centerline Community in that separate interview recently released with Jenny Tucker). I felt a certain kinship with Britt through her writing and the way she viewed the world, was challenging systems — and when she unprompted gave a shoutout to this podcast, I decided that the feeling must be mutual and I reached out to schedule some time to hang out in real life. 

We got together for a coffee and matcha date and I left actually feeling nourished, rather than depleted - which is typically how I feel as an introverted-leaning person who can sometimes get drained by socializing. The difference was we were able to dive deeper than just the surface and really be real with one another, which we’ve continued to build on as our friendship has deepend over the years. 

I wanted to bring Britt on the show because I felt like her messaging stands out in a world where sleep training is the dominant narrative - at least that I found myself personally navigating as a new parent. We’ll talk more about the controversial nature of this and I’ll touch on my own journey of finding co-sleeping and nurturing at night as the path for our family, but first I want to preface all of this with WHY this conversation is so important regardless of whether we are parents of young children or not. 

I believe the main threads and themes that Britt and I speak to here are actually symptoms of a deeper problem - one that many of our podcast guests bring to the surface — and that is of our inherent disconnection with our desire for connection, and our obsession with independence. I believe this is so ingrained into our dominate culture that we don’t even realize it at times. 

[00:05:06] Emily Race-Newmark: One thing I wanted to name in the start of our conversation, because this conversation to me always lands as a bit controversial, 'cause the rhetoric out there on sleep training for me 

[00:05:15] Brittany Chambers: totally 

[00:05:15] Emily Race-Newmark: so prevalent and so in order for your message to really be heard, how do you approach the fact that there is this prevalent culture supporting sleep training?

[00:05:24] Brittany Chambers: Oh, this is one of my favorite topics because I think we have to have difficult conversations. And Emily, I think you're so brave for even having this conversation. I can just hear the celebration from the cross disciplinary fields that have been banging this drum for decades. Talking about normal biological infant sleep, this is not new. 

[00:05:45] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. 

[00:05:45] Brittany Chambers: To answer your question on how I address this controversy or this tension is really grounded in this basic tenant that there is no prescriptive solution for anybody. 

[00:05:57] Brittany Chambers: And I also have close friends and family members like my parents who I love and respect that went down a road that wouldn't work for me and maybe doesn't align with babies' biology or babies' developmental needs. 

[00:06:11] Brittany Chambers: But I think weighing trade-offs and candidly, doing an internal and external audit of your life is a radical process for some people. And some people can't take that on Mm-hmm. while they're also bearing the weight of new motherhood. And if certain systems and policies were in place maybe more people could take a look at their instincts and align accordingly.

[00:06:35] Brittany Chambers: But I fundamentally believe that everybody is doing the best that they can in parenting. I don't think anybody sleep trains with the intent to harm.

[00:06:43] Emily Race-Newmark: Oh, thank you so much. 'cause I wanted to have that in the background for folks. So no matter where you're joining this conversation, removing any sense of right or wrong, like you were saying. 

[00:06:50] Brittany Chambers: Yeah. 

[00:06:50] Emily Race-Newmark: But I also really want this message to be heard because depending on where people get their information , it can get lost and it's so important, if anything, just to bring us back home to our own instincts.

[00:06:59] Emily Race-Newmark: All of that said, let's actually start with defining what sleep training is at this point in time, and then also how you would define your approach of integrative infant sleep?

[00:07:08]  The generally accepted notion of sleep training is equivalent to a behaviorist intervention. So it is training, and I think there's a misnomer that it's teaching. Babies can't actually learn when they're experiencing heightened stress and they can't learn if they don't have the brain architecture to learn what we're teaching them.

[00:07:26] Brittany Chambers: But that's the general notion that we're teaching or training or bestowing something upon them that they must learn. And that usually involves a lack of responsiveness and or conditional or intermittent responsiveness. So listeners might have heard of the Ferber method, which is under the Auspice generally of "Cry Out."

[00:07:46] Brittany Chambers: There are so many different methods. There are so many different books, and most of them derived from pseudoscience that's actually opinion based and behaviorist assumptions that we're applying to infant brains. 

[00:08:01] Brittany Chambers: It's really complicated. But that is generally what sleep training is.

[00:08:05] Brittany Chambers: and Integrative infant sleep is holistic. It's interdisciplinary. It's pulling from anthropology, evolutionary biology, neurobiology, and psychology, and it's really looking at root cause concerns. 

[00:08:22] Brittany Chambers: At the basis of integrative infant sleep is this acknowledgement that infants do wake regularly, that's normal, that's natural, that's our biology.

[00:08:31] Brittany Chambers: There's like 10% of the population of kids who are born with a temperament and sensory profile that allows them to sleep through the night quite early on. That is the unicorn baby. 

[00:08:40] Brittany Chambers: The babies that I'm seeing, the babies that integrative infant sleep applies to are the kids that are often also being considered as candidates for sleep training because they're waking regularly.

[00:08:50] Brittany Chambers: I work really collaboratively with parents on deep investigation. We look at medical red flags. And I refer out to specialists if I see something that really needs to be addressed. 

[00:09:01] Brittany Chambers: For example, if a child is experiencing apnea they will be waking regularly and sleep training wouldn't solve that problem. That is something that requires medical intervention. That's a root cause solution.

[00:09:12] Brittany Chambers: We can also look at things like daytime sleep hygiene and ensuring that cortisol and melatonin is balanced throughout the day so that babies are not going into sleep with too much cortisol in their systems, which is really difficult for them and can result in wakefulness. 

[00:09:28] Brittany Chambers: And then we look at sensory and temperament profile, which affects sleep so severely and it is often overlooked and often easily tweaked to fill a baby's sensory cup so that their bodies and their nervous systems have what they can need so they can sleep.

[00:09:46] Brittany Chambers: And then of course, depending on the family, the how is determined from there. 

[00:09:51] Brittany Chambers: It's really holistic and really inclusive of the whole family too. That's the other thing that I think is notable. It's not just me and the mom or me and the baby working together.

[00:10:00] Brittany Chambers: I bring in partners and caregivers and daycare and grandparents and really the village, whoever else is caretaking this baby. 

[00:10:08] Emily Race-Newmark: Beautiful. 

[00:10:09] Emily Race-Newmark: I'm kind of like, wait a minute. So we should really underline the fact that babies are designed to wake up in the middle of the night.

[00:10:15] Emily Race-Newmark: There's nothing wrong with that. And also like adults, I imagine, sometimes wake up in the middle of the night. I know, I do. So that's normal. 

[00:10:22] Brittany Chambers: Yes. 

[00:10:23] Emily Race-Newmark: I'd be curious to hear it in your words, but you probably get clients who their hands are thrown up in the air, they're like, I don't know what to do. I can't get my baby to sleep. Or I'm exhausted. 

[00:10:30] Emily Race-Newmark: What is that like when someone's coming to work with you in the beginning? 

[00:10:35] Brittany Chambers: Oh yeah. I'm just feeling into those experiences right now because it is so hard, emily, mothers, parents, caregivers, we are parenting in a system that is designed for profitability, for extraction, for separation. None of those things parlay with normal infant biology. Parents often feel this fundamental failing when they come to me and they come to me floored at the intensity of infancy.

[00:11:03] Brittany Chambers: They're like, what am I doing wrong? What is wrong with my baby? And to take a moment and just acknowledge exactly like , you underscored. Nothing is wrong with your baby. They're being a baby. 

[00:11:15] Brittany Chambers: And I feel like culturally we don't actually know what a baby is. 

[00:11:18] Brittany Chambers: I think we've forgotten that they're not little adults. They're actually fetuses. And this blew my mind when I learned this because human babies are born with 25% of their brain volume. We are born prematurely in the context of our development, and we have this exo gestation that occurs for nine to 18 months after we're born.

[00:11:38] Brittany Chambers: Most of the human traits that we develop, actually develop out of the womb. And a lot of that has to do with our early nurture. I try to reassure parents when they come to me, a, nothing is wrong with your baby. And B, there's this beautiful neuroplasticity that's going on right now that you have a chance to shape based on your responsiveness. Even if this feels exhausting and you feel like you're building a rod for your own back, or this is trite what you're doing it's actually not, it's literally building your baby's brain. 

[00:12:08] Brittany Chambers: That's the starting place, I would say, for conversations with parents to reframe and the notion of not being alone.

[00:12:16] Brittany Chambers:  I watch people exhale with that realization because I don't think that parents are talking about this culturally. It's taboo still. We've somehow associated our baby's ability to sleep through the night, which is not even an ability, but we've associated their sleeping with our parenting proficiency.

[00:12:36] Emily Race-Newmark: Like a pass or fail situation on us that we are responsible. 

[00:12:41] Emily Race-Newmark: Totally. 

[00:12:41] Brittany Chambers: Yes. 

[00:12:50] Brittany Chambers: The problem is so multifaceted. It's like a cake with all these different layers. 

[00:12:54] Brittany Chambers: The first one we should talk about is this deviation from nature.

[00:12:58] Brittany Chambers: Because fundamentally, if we've forgotten that we are nature, that we're of nature. If we are disembodied, we're not able to respect our own needs or our baby's needs. 

[00:13:10] Brittany Chambers: I find that really often we are looking for solutions or looking for answers to something that we've pathologize that's just normal, like wakefulness, like a desire to be close to our babies.

[00:13:25] Brittany Chambers: If we could reacquaint with our natural state of being, as in recognize that we're living in ancient bodies, we're giving birth to ancient babies, and these babies are coming out and they're expecting the inputs that they've had for 30 to 60 million years, evolutionarily.

[00:13:43] Brittany Chambers: That recognition in healthcare, in the workplace, would be absolutely paradigm shifting. That's problem number one. 

[00:13:50] Brittany Chambers: And then of course, the landscape in which we're forgetting our nature, the landscape in which we're parenting is patriarchal capitalism and liberal individualism. We're all living in it. And the primary goal of raising babies isn't actually to create securely attached humans. That's not at the pinnacle of our societal North star right now. It's to create obedient citizens who's primary purposes to fulfill themselves via work.

[00:14:16] Brittany Chambers: If we pick that apart, that is so problematic because if that's the baseline, the foundation upon which policies are made upon which systems are created, we're never going to be able to serve the mother-baby-dyad or a family if we're worshiping the wrong gods. 

[00:14:32] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah, the value system is off.

[00:14:34] Brittany Chambers: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Again, to use the cake analogy, those are two layers, within this paradigm that we're in, the medical industrial complex that's designed to keep profit paramount. 

[00:14:44] Brittany Chambers: Another researcher's work that I love is Dr. James McKenna. He's at the University of notre Dame, he talks regularly about how this information, about parenting infants in an optimal way for their brain development and their secure attachment has been floating around academia for years, but doesn't hit the mainstream because there are power structures that can't accept this information because entire careers, entire institutions have been built on false constructs and profit. 

[00:15:14] Brittany Chambers: The last piece of this is our cultural desire. So you talked about values, Emily. This is one of them that I think really needs to be reexamined or tweaked, but we are obsessed with short-term quick fixes, and I think we're causing a lot of our own suffering through that value stream.

[00:15:31] Emily Race-Newmark: So basically we forgot that we are nature, we're living in a system that worships productivity and profitability, and this research, this information getting out to the masses would actually have all of these current institutions crumble because their foundation is built on us not behaving in these ways that integrative infant sleep would enable, for example. 

[00:15:53] Brittany Chambers: Precisely. And then pair all of that with rugged individualism.

[00:15:57] Emily Race-Newmark: Right.

[00:15:57] Emily Race-Newmark: Yes. 

[00:15:58] Brittany Chambers: Yeah. And there's a recipe for isolationism and burnout. 

[00:16:01] Brittany Chambers: The lack of parental support is just disastrous. We're recording this on Mother's Day weekend. And it's been this looming, omnipresent, fought for me that the number of flowers that will be bought this weekend and the gestures.

[00:16:15] Brittany Chambers: They're all beautiful in their own right, but this is happening in a context where we're the only industrialized nation without paid family leave. 

[00:16:22] Emily Race-Newmark: It was insane to me prior to having a child. And now that I've had a child, I'm like, wait.

[00:16:26] Emily Race-Newmark: And to your point, you've talked at the start, which I think is also important to underline the fact that we all have different degrees of access and privilege and there's different levels to 

[00:16:33] Brittany Chambers: yes. 

[00:16:33] Emily Race-Newmark: Which we're surviving in these constructs that you're describing. And so I know for myself, I recognize where I have certain privileges that others may not have, one being I don't have to go back to a job at three months and I just notice my natural biological timeline of connection with my daughter was that of around nine, 10 months, I started feeling okay, I could take a little more space to pour into these other things.

[00:16:54] Emily Race-Newmark: That might just be unique to me, but I think the point being, where else are we cutting short our nature's desire to connect with our child

[00:17:02] Brittany Chambers: yes. 

[00:17:02] Emily Race-Newmark: In favor of what we think we're supposed to be doing to survive in this current paradigm. 

[00:17:07] Brittany Chambers: Yeah. Survival is exactly it. And you just brought something up in me that feels so potent.

[00:17:14] Brittany Chambers: I worked with this mom who had two weeks of leave and it wasn't paid leave, so she had two weeks. And talk about privilege. That's something that we could get into if we want to. What is sometimes dubbed the anti-sleep training community or the normal biological sleep community is overwhelmingly white and privileged.

[00:17:34] Brittany Chambers: That's problematic. I'm concerned that we don't have enough diverse voices in this space. But when I've worked with parents who do not have privilege, who have no choice but to go back to work or to parent in a certain way, which has included needing to sleep train out of sheer survival, we are failing these mothers and babies systemically.

[00:17:55] Brittany Chambers: This is not a personal failing. 

[00:17:57] Brittany Chambers: This is parenting in impossible parameters. 

[00:18:01] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. 

[00:18:01] Brittany Chambers: It's really sad. 

[00:18:02] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. So hearing you say that, if you're listening from that lens of you're feeling the weight of all of the world basically on your shoulders and feeling like you're failing, that is not a shortcoming of yourself.

[00:18:13] Emily Race-Newmark: That is literally the system failing you. 

[00:18:15] Brittany Chambers: Yeah. 

[00:18:15] Emily Race-Newmark: Need to underline that too. 

[00:18:16] Brittany Chambers: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. 

[00:18:18] Brittany Chambers: And look, if you wanna edit this out, feel free. But I think it's really important because there's something in here that's a really fine line to walk and I have this conversation with clients with great discernment because I can't have this conversation with a client that is severely financially, economically oppressed.

[00:18:35] Brittany Chambers: It's super insensitive. 

[00:18:37] Brittany Chambers: But to have it with a client that does have a level of privilege, there's an initiation within this difficulty. It's an invitation to heal, to go inward, and especially from a nervous system perspective. And I also think that there's something within this transformation that taps women back into their power that's been stripped for centuries.

Emily Race-Newmark: Emily here taking a quick break to remind you about our Patreon page. All contributions, no matter what the size, are a massive help to fund the production of this podcast. As a thank you, you'll receive extra bonus content from this interview, such a s:

• Brittany shares some tips and also busts some myths on how to cosleep safely

• More about the natural tendency for infants to wake often and what it looks like to support ourselves as parents in this while also being responsive to our children 

• Diving deeper into parenthood as a spiritual initiation and the importance of the mother-baby dyad (particularly with sleep) 

Once again, we really thank you for being a part of this community, for sharing and supporting conversations like this one. Our Patreon page is a great way to support us to keep this podcast going. So thank you for considering, for checking it out and for hopefully joining as a member.

Now, enough from me, let's head back to Brittany as she shares her vision for the world. 

[00:19:09] Brittany Chambers: Part of my vision is, recognizing that we actually survived and thrived as a species because of our empathy.

[00:19:19] Brittany Chambers: This misnomer that Darwin dubbed us survival of the fittest. It's wrongly attributed to him. He actually called us survival of the compassionate. He spoke to this in his sympathy hypothesis, which if you're listening and wanna Google this, it's absolutely fascinating because he actually noted that compassion is the driving force in our survival as a species and it's our ever present instinct.

[00:19:43] Brittany Chambers: And there are researchers that are looking at what this means and how it relates to the development of our nervous system and our genetics and our humanity. Central to our humanity is touch, is responsiveness, is being in social relation with one another. 

[00:20:01] Brittany Chambers: The central tenet of my vision is that we remember this about ourselves, that we eschew notions of separateness, of hyper independence, of rugged individualism, and we remember that in order to thrive and survive as a species, we could extrapolate this out to our planetary climate crisis, we have to remember that compassion for each other, for our babies, for our planet is essential. We can't just keep going full steam ahead, apathetically extracting, using and ignoring.

[00:20:37] Emily Race-Newmark: Numbing. 

[00:20:38] Brittany Chambers: Numbing. Precisely. How I see our path ahead is compassion, connection and moving away from separateness.

[00:20:49] Emily Race-Newmark: What would you have to say around how our relationships might look in your ideal world, across parents and children or that village you described, even workplaces, how might those relationships change shape?

[00:20:58] Brittany Chambers: It needs to be a grassroots and a top down shift. 

[00:21:04] Brittany Chambers: The workplace needs to radically change in order to accommodate parenting in a way that respects kids' developmental needs. 

[00:21:12] Brittany Chambers: There are great examples of this happening currently.

[00:21:15] Brittany Chambers: One way of shifting is coming out of the post pandemic world with the rise of remote work, and then an offering of flexible schedules. 

[00:21:28] Brittany Chambers: It's so simple to say oh yeah, flexible schedule is great solution, but then we also have to have employers with policies that allow for this and create room for this and really prioritize this not just something that they're offering one-off ad hoc to people. 

[00:21:43] Brittany Chambers: It needs to be central to their values. 

[00:21:45] Brittany Chambers: There's so many psychosocial benefits for parents, evidence across the board that maternal postpartum mood and anxiety disorders would be reduced if parents had flexibility in the workplace.  That's one solution. This is low hanging fruit.

[00:22:00] Brittany Chambers: These things could be solved. 

[00:22:02] Brittany Chambers: And I work with clients a lot in this actually about advocating for themselves in the workplace.

[00:22:05] Brittany Chambers: This is an area of personal passion because I was let go from a job under the guise of my position being eliminated. This was after transitioning into parenthood and advocating fiercely for flexibility with my daughter, who was only four months old at the time. It was very obvious that I was pushing too hard against an institution that wasn't going to bend and that I was weighing down their payroll.

[00:22:32] Emily Race-Newmark: That is a tension 'cause I also used to work in the corporate space and used to have a lot of budget conversations with the people team or whatever to approve different policies or benefits to parents and other employees.

[00:22:44] Emily Race-Newmark: The profitability conversation always comes up at the end of the day. You mentioned that it is beneficial to the company as well. What might that benefit be?

[00:22:52] Brittany Chambers: Retention alone. 

[00:22:53] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. 

[00:22:53] Brittany Chambers: Looking at cost of rehiring and then looking at who do you actually want working for your company? Do you want people that have diverse backgrounds and look into mothers even slightly And the value add that they bring to the workplace, it's just profound. They're super efficient. Study after study shows that there's more efficient than any other worker mothers are. Because they have incentives to be, and because their brains are wired for multitasking. 

[00:23:18] Emily Race-Newmark: Yeah. And then of course on that macro level, what kind of society are we all responsible for creating? And I think companies, organizations have so much room to really innovate and create 

[00:23:29] Brittany Chambers: yes.

[00:23:29] Emily Race-Newmark: New shapes for our society to look because doesn't it benefit all of us if we start rethinking about honoring and valuing our connection, our relationships, our health, our wellbeing? 

[00:23:38] Emily Race-Newmark: We all started out as babies. So what you're describing is really a human nature. It's not like babies are over here, this separate being you're talking about human nature here.

[00:23:47] Emily Race-Newmark: One piece that you're bringing to folks is you're offering resources, you're offering resourcing so people can feel a little more equipped to handle what parenting can often be as a challenge.

[00:23:58] Emily Race-Newmark: What do you think in an ideal world, resourcing for parents specifically, would look like?

[00:24:03] Brittany Chambers: This is another thing that I think could be easily implemented and is happening. There are folks in this space that I'm actually working with, that are developing resources slowly but surely, to educate pediatricians, governing bodies, because providers need cross-disciplinary education and information. 

[00:24:22] Brittany Chambers: The average pediatrician, I have many that are friends who I love deeply, this is not a knock on pediatricians, literally have 20 minutes of infant sleep education in four years of medical school. And then these pediatricians are put in a position to give advice on sleep within the confines of a 10 minute doctor's appointment.

[00:24:39] Brittany Chambers: They just can't do it. They're not attempting to cause harm when they're handing you a piece of paper that says "read Baby Wise and follow the instructions". They're literally doing what they can in the time that they have. But I also don't think that's a good excuse. We need to be doing better.

[00:24:54] Brittany Chambers: The American Academy of Pediatrics needs to be doing better, and they've created some guidelines based on the available research surrounding SIDS, for example, but they're just like 25% of the way there. 

[00:25:06] Brittany Chambers: Communicating the scientific body of knowledge to providers is step one.

[00:25:12] Brittany Chambers: And then step two is creating free resources for parents so that parents can go to the internet, or go to their local PEP group or whatever family resource is in town, and get a handout on normal biological, infant sleep.

[00:25:28] Brittany Chambers: And learn, human nature, not only their babies, but their own. And then learn some ways to work with their baby's biology and this really critical period of infancy. 

[00:25:37] Brittany Chambers: And then taking virtuous action. There's this notion that we need to fix as providers, but what if we just get really good at referring clients out and finding solutions that are inclusive of and conducive to whole family wellbeing? 

[00:25:50] Brittany Chambers: I can't tell you the joy that I feel when a client comes to me and is oh, my lactation consultant referred me to you, and I'd asked my pediatrician for a referral, but they don't know of anybody and they don't even think that this is a real field.

[00:26:02] Brittany Chambers: So building referral networks, collaborative care models, those are resources. And I see this happening in circles of more Grassroots care, collaborative care models, not necessarily within the medical industrial complex, but I also think that's changing slowly. 

[00:26:19] Brittany Chambers: And then we need to, culturally, politically, however we can seep this into society, acknowledge that babies are humans first. And that they are an oppressed class of people. Yeah. And we need to start treating babies with equal rights. The fact that this is even, on the table is something we need to talk about, I think is deeply concerning.

[00:26:39] Brittany Chambers: So I would love to see rhetoric around this become more pervasive. 

[00:26:46] Emily Race-Newmark:  Do you feel like the perspective we have around parenting itself, becoming a parent, what that looks like, do you feel like that needs to shift at all?

[00:26:54] Brittany Chambers: Massively. Yeah, massively. I think it is seen as an ending. It is seen as a disability. You are suddenly inconvenienced, you are suddenly incapable, you are suddenly less productive. And when these things, being productivity, et cetera, availability, pleasing, performing, perfecting, when all of those things are at the pinnacle of our culture, parenting is at odds with that.

[00:27:22] Brittany Chambers:  Naturally your first priority is your kids, their wellbeing, their safety. That's fundamentally has a tension with showing up to work, taking the 6:00 PM client call, all of these things that we're expected to do. 

[00:27:36] Brittany Chambers: I don't think culturally we have a reverence for parenting like many indigenous cultures do.

[00:27:41] Brittany Chambers: We could learn a great deal from ancient wisdom and parenting models outside of the West that do have a more collectivist mindset and really value children and the communal raising of children.

[00:27:58] Emily Race-Newmark: What is your vision for community? 

[00:28:00] Brittany Chambers: We need to reject this notion that success has one way of appearing. That it's the house with the fence with the cars in a neighborhood separate from our neighbors, maybe living next to each other where we all go off and do our own thing all day and then come back together with our nuclear family. And then nobody has conversations or cooks together or raises kids together. 

[00:28:24] Brittany Chambers: We need to return to our roots in so many ways and actually connect and work symbiotically and use each other's strengths as complimentary services. There's a lot we could do, outside of capitalism even.

[00:28:41] Brittany Chambers: I think that people could grow food together and raise kids together. Parent co-ops are a great example of this happening. Being okay with vulnerability is central to this, right? We've lost our ability to admit that we need help parenting and that we were never meant to do this alone. Our parental biology, the maternal energy expenditure required to parent one baby is almost mismatched biologically. We were evolved to have many hands on deck.

[00:29:12] Emily Race-Newmark: Right.

[00:29:12] Brittany Chambers: So returning to a model of care for mother, baby, for families, for parents, for communities where we can work as one is essential. 

[00:29:25] Emily Race-Newmark: I think it's important for folks to be able to walk away from this conversation with an action and so if you were to listen to this and pause the conversation real quick, what's an action you would invite someone to take in this moment? 

[00:29:35] Brittany Chambers: Close their eyes and put their hands on their heart and feel their beating heart, and then put their other hand on their belly and feel this ancient gut wisdom that was developed over millions and millions of years. 

[00:29:52] Brittany Chambers: To honor that for a moment, recognize that you are not just a body, you are an entity, a being that has so much wisdom.

[00:30:03] Emily Race-Newmark: Awesome. Beautiful.

[00:30:06] Emily Race-Newmark: Brittany, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. I am trusting that this conversation's gonna leave folks with exactly what they need. Thank you for being here.

[00:30:13] Brittany Chambers: Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for providing this container to have this conversation, and thanks for parenting the way you do. 

[00:30:20] Emily Race-Newmark: Oh, thank you. You too. 

[00:30:22] Brittany Chambers: Yeah. Appreciate you, Emily. 

[00:30:23] Emily Race-Newmark: Appreciate you. 

Emily Race-Newmark: There was so much more to this conversation that we couldn't include in the final edit. So if you're craving more, head over to patreon.com/thisishowwecare to support the show and hear more from Brittany. 

Thank you for all the ways that you support this podcast, whether that's through your Patreon contributions, listening, leaving reviews, sharing episodes with the people in your life, or subscribing to our newsletter and Instagram to be part of the conversation.

This episode was produced by me, Emily Race, co produced by Kimberly Anne, with audio by Andrew Salamone and music by Eric Weisberg.