EP: 2 The Conversations Our Field isn't Having (Yet)

Hi, everyone.

Welcome to our second episode of Bonded From the Start.

We are so glad you are joining us today and continuing to listen as we start this new adventure.

Today's, uh, episode is gonna be another joint just me and Karina episode today, and it's gonna be about what we think are the biggest topics in perinatal mental health and infant mental health that need to be addressed.

Yep.

So both of us have a lot of similar experiences and some differences too, and also things that we see in our work, obviously protecting for confidentiality and all of those things, but just some important themes that either professionally or personally that we see.

So we figured that we would share those with you.

Yeah.

And these are gonna be just quick mentions of these topics and a little bit of conversation around them, but for sure these are probably gonna be topics that we deep dive later on in our podcast.

But we wanna just give you an idea of what we're thinking is super important about this field and what we need to be talking more and educating or advocating for in this space.

So I'm gonna start with one of my topics, and what I picked as what I think is one of the major topics that needs to be talked around in this space is the lack of support for families at multiple stages of parenting.

And it's this, like, assumption that I've been seeing so many parents mention to me, like, "I just want it to be me caring for the baby right now." Which again, I'm all for supporting, like, parents caring for their babies and, and having that bonding time, but I feel like it's coming from this place of I'm the only one that can take care of my baby.

Like, the mom is the only one that can do it.

And that just, for so many parents, is not realistic.

And I think it sets them up for this expectation of burnout and stress because they think, "Oh, I'm supposed to be the only one caring for my baby 'cause the parents are the number one attachment figures for kids and that no one else can be an attachment figure for their child." And then they find out, "Oh, it's really exhausting caring for this baby by myself.

Why am I feeling such a failure in it?" And, and so this is why I wanna talk about this topic because I feel like there's this expect- this societal expectation, and then there's the reality, and they're just not aligning.

And a lot of that comes from that idea that it's just the parents that take care of a, a newborn or a baby, when really, biologically speaking, it's supposed to be four adults for every one child.

That's how we were raising children, like, generations ago, back when we were in, like, smaller tribes and villages.

And then when I tell parents that, they're like, "Oh my God, if I had three other parents, like, or caregivers in the house with me taking care of my kids, or if there's two kids, eight, how much easier would parenting be?" And so that's why I think this is such an important topic of what people think parenting is like and what it means to be an attachment figure versus what biologically is the reality.

Yeah, and actually the topic that I'm gonna talk about next, or at least preview to you, actually bounces right off of that.

So if we think about the fact that ancestrally we parented in communities and villages, in 2026, parenting doesn't really look like that.

Most oftentimes, people are debating around their careers or how they are going to raise their children.

So 2026 has just a lot of demands and conflicting demands on parents.

Do we move cross-country to support a partner's career, or do we stay close to family? Do we post our children online, or do we not? Do we share things with our family members who may disagree with us, or do we not? How, how do we show up as parents, and how will other people...

What will other people think? So as much as we, you know, k- at least try to put out there that we don't care what people think, we still care what other people think in 2026, which of course comes from, you know, many places.