So you all know I’m a hippie, right? I made my kids’ shampoo for the first five years of their life, I don’t use paper towels or commercial cleaning products, I use naturopathic and holistic medicine rather than Western medicine, I don’t own any toys that require batteries, I believe in natural birth as an empowering and profound experience for women, and I don’t shave my legs. You get it: I’m a total hippie.
Well, as you can imagine, conventional parenting magazines never sat right with me because they simply didn’t address the things I needed to know as a parent interested in cloth diapering, sustainable parenting, and how to stop well meaning family from buying your kids every battery-operated toy in existence for every birthday and holiday. There used to be a print magazine called
Mothering
that was THE parenting magazine for moms (and dads) like me. It is now available only online for environmental reasons at Mothering.com and it is a tremendous resource for those interested in what’s referred to as Natural Family Living.
Mothering, which is based out of New Mexico (the state with the highest midwifery and breastfeeding rates in the United States), is not just for hippies. It’s for parents interested in parenting with an environmental and holistic set of considerations. It covers cloth diapering, baby wearing, all aspects of natural birth, and all aspects of choosing toys and activities for all ages of babies and children which are designed for optimal development on many levels. It also features a lot of writing about gentle discipline and the challenges of raising gentle children in a violent world. It’s got recipes, it’s got humor, it is inclusive of families of all shapes, sizes, colors, sexual orientations, and financial backgrounds and it’s a wonderful resource.
I was honored and thrilled to be asked to write a guest piece for Mothering.com and I chose to write about why and how I became a Certified Lactation Educator Counselor. I discuss what led to my training, how I did it, and what my life looks like as a CLEC.
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