The Responsive Family Sleep Podcast

Early parenting is an intense time that can challenge us physically, emotionally, and mentally. A wonderful tool for coping with the intensity, challenges, and changes that come with parenting a young child is mindful parenting. In this episode I’m joined by Sultana Karim, a therapist with a specialty in both the perinatal period and trauma. Our conversation springs from a wonderful parenting group she runs and focuses on regulation, mindfulness, and self compassion. We discuss:Radical acceptance, and how not accepting our reality creates more suffering.Mindful parenting and how it can help you be aware of your own needs and balance meeting your needs with meting your babies needs.How we can regulate ourselves so we can approach parenting with more creativity and problem solving abilities.The importance of coregulation and how our littles look to our nervous systems to help them regulate.Mindfulness as a regulation tool in parenting.Self compassion, self kindness, and reframing negative thoughts.It was so fun seeing how much of my work overlaps with Sultana’s work as far as the non-therapy specific suggestions she shares. There’s so much great wisdom in this conversation, and Sultana is deeply knowledgeable. I hope you enjoy it.About SultanaSultana Karim is the Owner and Licensed Therapist at Karim Counseling Services, PLLC. She is a Licensed Professional Counselor in MD, VA, DC, & MI, a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP), Registered Yoga Teacher, Certified EMDR Therapist, and a Certified Perinatal Mental Health Professional (PMH-C). She has over 12 years of clinical experience andspecializes in treating sexual and domestic violence, perinatal/ maternal mental health, pregnancy and infant loss, birth trauma, and childhood/attachment trauma in her practice. She strives to help parents to connect to their minds, bodies, and relationships. She also co-facilitates monthly healing circles for moms with Villa Advocacy Group. She is one of the founding members of the Virginia Maternal Quality Care Alliance and a member of the Perinatal Mental Health Coalition of Virginia and the PUSH Coalition. In these organizations, she strives to advocate and educate the community on maternal/perinatal mental health, maternal mortality, community-based collaboration and solutions, trauma-informed care, cultural humility, and implicit bias. Connect with SultanaWebsite: www.karimcounseling.orgIG: www.instagram.com/karimcounselingFB: www.facebook.com/karimcounselingConnect with KimGrab a free sleep myth busting guide and learn more about working with Kim:https://intuitiveparentingdc.com/Instagram: instagram.com/intuitive_parenting_dcFacebook:  facebook.com/intuitiveparentingdc

To those in the US who celebrate, Happy Thanksgiving. This is a short episode to kick off the holiday season. There’s so much pressure to create traditions and have perfect family holiday rituals right from the start. In this episode, I encourage you to consider what you’d like to carry forward from your own childhood, allow for organic traditions to unfold, and remember you don’t have to have it all figured out now in the early years – you can always create new traditions as your kids get older. Enjoy the holidays!Connect with KimGrab a free sleep myth busting guide and learn more about working with Kim: https://intuitiveparentingdc.com/Instagram: instagram.com/intuitive_parenting_dcFacebook:  facebook.com/intuitiveparentingdc

How can you make informed decisions when you don’t know all your options? Well, you can’t! From sleep setups and safety to navigating big sleep transitions and parent led changes, knowing your options makes a huge difference. In this week’s episode I’m joined by my bestie, doula, educator, and doula business coach Kaely Harrod for a conversation about the challenges of making decisions without all the information. Parents are actively not educated in ways that set them up for informed decision making around sleep and that can have real safety consequences as well as feeling like they have no other option than to do something that feels wrong or like a bad fit for their little. We talk about how this unfolds with sleep safety and parents sleeping in dangerous ways because they aren’t taught about safety beyond crib/bassinette sleeping – so either falling asleep in an unsafe bedsharing situation or in a dangerous situation trying not to bedshare. We also talk about how this plays out in the choices parentsmake in supporting sleep and making bigger changes. Kaely shares some of her own early parenting and sleep experiences with her 3 kids and some of the ways she empowers her clients to be able to make informed choices with high quality information.About KaelyKaely has been a doula unofficially since 2010 and officially since 2018! She’s built her business to the point of supporting hundreds of families, but realized along the way that it wasn’t enough to be an amazing doula, she also needed to be an amazing CEO! She’s since added mentoring small business owners and doula entrepreneurs to her repertoire to help others find their clear path to a thriving doula business while avoiding doula burnout!Connect with Kaelyhttps://www.harroddoulaservices.com/kaely-daily-podcasthttps://www.harroddoulaservices.com/Instagram: @harroddoulaConnect with KimGrab a free sleep myth busting guide and learn more about working with Kim:https://intuitiveparentingdc.com/Instagram: instagram.com/intuitive_parenting_dcFacebook:  facebook.com/intuitiveparentingdc

Have you ever noticed how much sleep information and advice seems to be very generic, one size fits all? As if all babies have the exact same sleep needs and it’s only a matter of being consistent to get all babies sleeping alike. In this week’s episode, I’m unpacking why continuing to talk about baby sleep in these one size fits all type ways is wrong, unhelpful, and really out of step with what we know about the wide range of babies’ needs. After all, babies are individuals with individual sleep needs. So sleep conversations, information, and suggestions needs to be nuanced, or at the very least acknowledge the wide range of normal.Connect with KimGrab a free sleep myth busting guide and learn more about working with Kim:https://intuitiveparentingdc.com/Instagram: instagram.com/intuitive_parenting_dcFacebook:  facebook.com/intuitiveparentingdc