What our Village team are reading, doing and listening to at the moment.
App
If you would like to get on top of your monthly cycle and know what to expect from the rhythm of your body, check out this great app. I also just got the book by the app creator and I although I’ve just started reading it, I feel it’s going to be a good one! ~ Brenda
TV
Funny, honest and unflinching look at the wide variety of different genders, sex and relationships. Even though this is a teen fiction series I find it so enjoyable and eye-opening (and Gillian Anderson is #mumgoals). I want to raise my daughter to be unashamed of her body, gender and sexuality and this program gives me hope that the dialogue around this subject can be not just normalised, but easy. ~ Emma
Book
Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn
This book is a hard hitter.
It challenges the way many other parenting books discuss discipline and suggests how rewards (including positive reinforcement) and punishments are essentially the same thing – methods where adults judge a child in order to try and get them to act a certain way. This is a fascinating viewpoint. Quite mind blowing once I realised how much this runs through so many elements of society too, not just in child rearing.
The book also made me realise that even when you know all of this theory, when trying to apply it in real life, if you don’t have unconditional love for yourself, it’s hard (maybe even impossible) to provide unconditional love for your children.
If anyone else has read this book I would love to chat to you about it and see what you think or if you decide to read it after this recommendation, please let me know your thoughts. ~ Yasmin
Event
These amazing playworkers put on free play events in various places in London. They bring loads of loose parts like blocks, cloth, trolleys, tubes and parachutes and the children build their own playground. We went to a session behind a church near Tottenham Court Road recently and stayed for the full four hours! It was really welcoming and friendly and I had fun joining in as well as sitting back and letting my son get on with it. Follow them on Instagram and find out where you can join in too. ~ Molly
Expert
Infant sleep is usually in the top three concerns for parents and carers, regardless of how baby is fed. Lyndsey Hookway has a fantastic array of free resource via her social media pages. She is a gentle sleep coach, which is a very different approach to sleep training. Basically, she empowers parents and carers by explaining the physiological norm of infant sleep and why any attempts in training in the first year (if not second!) result in feelings of failure.
This is not to say that she doesn’t have tactics to support your family sleep journey: habit stacking, for example, is one particularly useful tool. The aim being to gradually remove habits that you don’t want to use around sleep time by gently replacing them with ones that you do! She is just wonderfully supportive of parents and her social media posts can really help you to feel that you are not failing, you are not alone; that what you are experiencing is normal infant sleep behaviour – your baby is not broken and, yes, you are enough. ~ Lisa
Join us at The Village to chat with us about these in real life! And let us know if you have any recommendations of your own that your fellow Villagers might be interested in.
