On Monday, we’ll be talking about a very important aspect of Postpartum Mood & Anxiety Disorders with Claire of @lifewithababy.  Claire is the Executive Director of Healthy Start, Healthy Future and Founder of the Life With A Baby program. Life With A Baby is a three-tiered peer support system for parents.  It offers local, community-based social events to build relationships, online support, and multi-lingual parenting programs.  Claire founded Life With A Baby after her own struggles with social isolation and depression.  Life With A Baby serves over 5000 members across the province of Ontario.  Claire is involved in innovative initiatives and partnerships focused on peer support, parenting, newcomer supports, parent engagement, and financial literacy.  She is passionate about supporting parents, developing collaborations, reducing social isolation, and building healthy and strong parent-child relationships. Claire was nominated for the 2013 Citizen of Character award in York Region.

Our discussion will focus around the concept that if you struggle with a Postpartum Mood & Anxiety Disorder, you don’t love your baby.   We know that’s not true. Many of us love our children more than we are capable of expressing.  Sure, we may be exasperated with them, with the issues we face as a result of our PMAD, but simply having a PMAD is not indicative of not loving your child. It can take time to bond, time to get to what other mothers seem to have so easily, but it doesn’t make us less of a woman or less of a mother. It also doesn’t mean that we aren’t in love with our child simply because we aren’t expressing it how we are “supposed” to according to society.

Join Claire and myself as we talk about this very important aspect of PMAD’s and attempt to remove some of the stigma around the assumption that mothers with a PMAD don’t love their children. (Because we do!)

Also, if you’re in Claire’s neck of the woods, check out their pledge – they’re working to reduce isolation. If you’re able to host just one peer event, sign the pledge. End the isolation of new mothers and help decrease episodes of Postpartum Mood & Anxiety Disorders.

We will be chatting at 1pm ET about the same topic but Claire won’t be joining us until 8:30pm ET. Look forward to seeing you there!!!