Every family has its story, and each family story has a beginning.
I grew up with the $99 story...$99 was the amount due to the hospital after I was born in Indiana. My very young parents did not have the money to pay the hospital. My father had to tell the people at the hospital, “You can keep her if you want or you can let me pay you when I can.” The hospital let me go home with my parents that day in October, 1956.
In 1993, I discovered that I was just as unprepared as my 17-year-old mom was to become a mother, though I was twice her age. I was not equipped or knowledgeable about how to parent well. My newborn son had an unsettled nervous system and I was an unsettled parent trying to sort out my new life. My husband and I were blessed with a second son in 1997.
During our family’s early years, we participated in several parent-child programs in our community including PEPS (Program for Early Parent Support), Listening Mothers, and the classes offered at Lake Washington Technical College and Bellevue Community College.
My boys began their love of school in those weekly classes which were so interesting and fun, and we parents had the opportunity to learn about healthy child development and positive discipline techniques. I was fascinated and compelled to learn all that I could for my children’s sake.
When the time came for me to go back to work, I realized that what I most wanted to do was to work with parents raising young children. In 1997 Bellevue Community College hired me as a parent education instructor. In the years since, I have developed an affinity for the early parenting experience: the universal life experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, becoming a parent either through childbirth or adoption, adjusting to parenthood, and learning how to parent well.
At the college I have worked with hundreds of families. I have also worked as a PEPS group facilitator, as a co-founder/leader of my Church’s Family Life group, and as a community educator at the local hospital and for some of the local PTSAs. I love to help new families get settled into their own warm, caring, and nurturing family nest in a manner that will help their children thrive.
I have learned that how we choose to manage our families in regards to sleep, diet, family schedule, work commitments, stress, discipline, communication, emotions, conflict, and our understanding of development and temperament when the children are young will influence what happens when our children become teenagers and adults. Parents can increase the odds of their child’s success. Teaching and guiding parents to do this is what I love to do. What we do now will matter later.
Sometimes, I like to think of this in this way: the work and effort we put into raising our young child is like parenting the teenager your baby/toddler/preschooler/grade schooler will become.
Beginning a family can be an especially tumultuous time. There are so many changes that are happening in a short amount of time, often with very little sleep. I support parents during these times of transition, easing the family stress along the way.