Lauren Smith

Parenting has a way of bringing us face-to-face with parts of ourselves we didn't even know were there. The things we swore we'd do differently. The moments when our child's behavior hits something tender in us. The confusing experience of knowing how we *want* to show up as a parent and still finding ourselves reacting in ways we don't always understand. I work with parents and caregivers in that space. Children are developing all the time, but so are we. As our children move through new stages, they ask different things of us. Sometimes what looks like a parenting problem makes much more sense when we slow down and look at what is happening developmentally for the child, what is getting stirred up for the caregiver, and what is happening in the relationship between them. My approach is attachment-based, developmental, collaborative, and rooted in what I think of as **audacious tenderness**: making room for the messy, contradictory, deeply human parts of parenting without judgment, while still having the courage to look honestly at what isn't working and try something different. I'm not here to hand you a script or tell you the "right" way to parent. You already hold vital information about your child and your family. Together, we can make sense of patterns, anticipate developmental shifts and regressions, explore how your own experiences may be showing up, and find responses that feel genuine to you and supportive of your relationship with your child. Parenting is deeply personal work. It can be joyful, funny, tedious, activating, tender, and incredibly vulnerable, sometimes within the same ten minutes. You can love your child fiercely and still find parts of parenting really hard. Both things get to be true here. Sometimes families don't need years of therapy. A little scaffolding at the right developmental moment can change how you understand your child, yourself, and what is happening between you. My hope is to help you leave feeling clearer and steadier, with more compassion for both of you and more trust in your own capacity to parent the child in front of you.