Podcast Episode 94 - Writing a new narrative beyond the social construction of motherhood
Interview with Dr Sophie Brock
I chat with motherhood studies sociologist and educator Sophie Brock. Together we discuss ideas like the social construction of motherhood and the perfect caregiver myth, as well as Sophie's own story of navigating motherhood and business. At the core of this conversation, we explore how the world impacts our experience of who we are within motherhood and the nuances of creating our own path.
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About Dr Sophie
Dr Sophie Brock is a Motherhood Studies Sociologist and Mother who offers education on the sociology of motherhood to understand how society impacts mothers. Covering concepts such as the perfect mother myth, the care/career conundrum, the anger-guilt trap and more, Sophie’s work contributes to changing the cultural construction of motherhood, to create a world where Mothers feel empowered, supported, and valued.
Sophie’s offerings include self-study courses, mentoring, The Motherhood Studies Practitioner Certification online training, and her podcast The Good Enough Mother.
We explore the following questions:
What do you do as a social scientist, and how does that relate to motherhood?
How did you become interested in motherhood as a topic and come to this work?
What was it like starting your PhD in motherhood studies before you were a mother?
What revealed itself for you when you became a mother that you hadn't realised before?
What do you mean by this idea of ‘motherhood’?
What's your experience of how the perfect mother myth impacts our caregiving roles?
How did you go from single mum and a new Dr Sophie Brock to starting your business?
What were some of the bigger challenges that cropped up along the way? How did you overcome them?
What do you do now, and where can people find you?
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Transcript
Julia Jones:
Hello and welcome to the Newborn Mothers Podcast. Today I have Sophie Brock on the podcast who is a motherhood studies, I don't know if you like the word expert, but you are. You've got a PhD in studying motherhood, motherhood studies. We are going to talk a little bit today about the social construct of motherhood, but also how that impacts upon many of our roles as women, and especially our roles as postpartum professionals. Sophie, do you want to introduce yourself in your own words?
What do you do as a social scientist and how does that relate to motherhood? (00:33)
Sophie Brock:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Julia. I'm really interested and curious to see where our conversation leads. Even in that introduction or even in the process of being asked, "Introduce yourself, who are you?" I mean, that also gets at the root of what a social scientist is interested in. How do we present ourselves to the world? How do we want to be perceived? How does the way that others see us shape how we see ourselves?
So that's at the core of what I'm interested in for mothers specifically. So part of what I've looked at through my research and my studies is, how does the experience of being a mother in today's society, how does that feel when we take into consideration all of the external factors that come our way?
So I talk about this as kind of an analogy of thinking about a fish in a tank and going, okay, well how does the tank affect our identity? How does the environment affect our relationships? How does our broader world affect what it means for us to be a mother?
So that's my perspective as a social scientist, as a sociologist. I've just always had a real fascination with mothers' experiences and our inner lives. So that's what lights me up.
How did you become interested in motherhood as a topic and come to this work? ?(01:45)
Julia Jones:
Yeah, and that's my next question is, how did you come to this? Because it sounds like even before you had children, you were interested in this topic. Identity is such a huge part of motherhood probably in every culture, because I always think the mother is the ultimate archetype. It's like every culture has expectations, and a role, and ideas about what a mother is, and should be, and should look like, and should act like. There's no one who's immune to that. How did you become interested in that as a topic?
Sophie Brock:
I've always kept a diary, a journal, since as long as I can remember. So each evening, I would sit down and I would write in my diary, and we'd take trips away as a family. I would write about things and try and capture my lived experience through language and words, and try and make meaning of what I was experiencing.
So that is in the context of as well, my own childhood and upbringing. My dad was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, it's also called ALS in other countries, when I was five. He was given two to five years to live. So it was a terminal diagnosis, and it's a degenerative disease. So over time, you have muscle wastage and you slowly lose your independence essentially. So I witnessed dad experience that throughout my childhood. We were grateful that very miraculously, he lived for 20 years.
So what I witnessed over my own childhood and upbringing, other ways in which my mum needed to step into a caregiver role beyond the mothering role. So I was very conscious of the ways that our outer world perceived us as a family, and the barriers that we faced and that my dad and mum faced in moving through daily life because of disability, and stigma, and expectations.
I witnessed, and as a family, we noticed all the ways that dad was idealized and cast as a hero, which he was. But he always emphasized my mum, and that you actually can't talk about him without talking about her and us as a family.
So I kind of had this awareness from my own childhood experience, and made meaning and explored my own sense of self through writing. That carried over through into high school, I did this major work looking at Sylvia Plath, the poet, and Kathleen Folbigg who wrote journals. It was all essentially looking at ambivalence in motherhood and identity.
So these themes carried me and my interest throughout those formative years and then into my university education and through a long path, it wove me into a place where I stumbled across motherhood studies as a discipline, and it went from there in terms of opening my interest and pursuing this area of study.
What was it like starting your PhD in motherhood studies before you were a mother? (04:34)
Julia Jones:
Yeah. So you'd started your PhD in motherhood studies before you were a mother yourself?
Sophie Brock:
I did my honors dissertation first, and that was well before I became a mother. Then went into the PhD, and I became pregnant in my final year of the PhD. I think my first submission was when I was six months pregnant. Then you get it back from your examiners and then you've got to submit it again, and then you wait to get your final email and letter saying that you've been awarded that. I received that a few days before my daughter was born. I was almost 42 weeks when I had her. So I felt like she was waiting for me to receive that email before she decided to come.
Julia Jones:
Got to have your PhD first mum.
Sophie Brock:
That's right. Yeah, we get that out of the way.
What revealed itself for you when you became a mother that you hadn't realised before? (05:26)
Julia Jones:
That's amazing. So I also started learning about postpartum care before I was a mother myself. Then when I became a mother, it really opened my eyes to a whole lot of new things. For me, the thing that I'd never learned about, which is different to you, was actually the identity shift. For me, what I learned about after I had a baby was how much I became a different person and how much none of my postpartum doula studies until then had really mentioned that. So a lot of that came later when I started studying neuroscience and anthropology, because I wanted those questions answered.
So I'm curious, you already obviously had a little bit of that identity piece. What revealed itself for you when you became a mother yourself, that you perhaps hadn't realized before?
Sophie Brock:
Yeah, it's a great question. There's a really big difference between theoretical knowledge and lived experience. So I would say that in lots of ways, motherhood studies really equipped me well to navigate the identity shifts and changes that came with mothering. It equipped me well to handle guilt, ambivalence, anger, the perfect mother myth, the pressures and expectations I placed on myself, and others placed on me. I felt pretty confident with a lot of that. What I felt less confident about was the act of caregiving and what that would mean.
When I became a mother, my marriage ended unexpectedly, sort of the week that I gave birth. So I had this expectation of what my family would look like and what my postpartum would look like, and that all unraveled really quickly.
So when I was in there, and I've written about this recently actually for an article, it's not out yet. But in retrospect, looking back, I can see the ways that I drew on particular tools to help write a new narrative for myself, and to help heal, and to help me feel anchored and tethered to some part of my identity actually through my mothering.
But at the time, you're in it, and you're in the thick of it. So I make meaning from it once I've come through the experience and I can see all the ways that actually, my studies really did support me and equip me to have the tools to navigate that rebuilding of self. Also, at the time, sometimes you're just putting one foot in front of the other and doing the best you can with what you have. So probably, that space of rebuilding was a really big shock to me.
The other thing that I did not expect was the interconnection between my daughter and I in terms of nervous system stuff. I didn't know any of that beforehand. I didn't know what biologically normal infant sleep looked like. I didn't know a lot of the practices that your listeners and the people that you support are trained in. I didn't know a lot of that in terms of the practical caregiving and how I needed to be looked after as a mother. So yeah, it's complex, isn't it? There's so many different dimensions.
What do you mean by this idea of ‘motherhood’? (08:31)
Julia Jones:
So interesting. It's almost like we came at it from the exact opposite direction, and then have ended up in the same place anyway. Amazing. So then I'm interested, why don't you tell me a little bit first about, what is this idea of motherhood? What do you mean by that? There might be some people kind of listening, going, "I don't really get it."
Sophie Brock:
Yep and that's really normal, because actually, part of how it functions is that we don't get it at first. So I mentioned earlier that fish tank analogy that I used to try and help make it a little bit more tangible.
So if we were to all imagine ourselves as fish inside a tank, the fish are the mothers or everyone in society. The bowl, the fish tank, that's our society. That's the world that we live within. We're swimming around in water, which is our culture. We don't know we're in the tank until we start having conversations like this. So you go and do sociology or social science. Oftentimes, it's just considered this is the way things are, this is just what it means to be a mother.
What happens, though, when we live within a particular time, cultural context, historical period in a particular family structure, we experience that tank in a really different way to if we lived 200 years ago or if we're a single mother, versus if we're partnered, or if we have a disability, or if our children have additional needs. All these different things shape how we experience that tank.
So if we were to talk about, what do we actually mean when we say motherhood is socially constructed? Are we saying motherhood's made up? What does that actually mean?
What I would say is when we say motherhood is socially constructed, we're saying that our social world and what our culture deems to be the good mother impacts how we see ourselves, impacts how we talk about ourselves, impacts the value that we have on ourselves. It impacts how we deem ourselves to be going as mothers, and whether we perceive ourselves to be failing or thriving.
It also impacts us in really tangible ways as to whether we have maternity leave, whether there are certain barriers that we have in front of us that make it harder for us to mother, opposed to whether we are actually supported in community. As you so often talk about Julia, we're not meant to be doing this alone in the ways that we so often are.
So coming back to this fish tank analogy, we're swimming around in this water, we're absorbing all these ideas about what it means to be a mother and that all happens way before we become mothers. We absorb those ideas through our own family systems, through how we were mothered, through how we hear people talk about mothering, through media advertising, through pop culture, through our systems like school, maternity system. All these things impact how we come to know what it means to be a mother in our society.
If we were to get a big black texta and write all around on that tank, imagine we have an alien drop in from Mars and they say, "Tell me what being a good mother means in your society. Paint me a picture." We would write out on that tank all of the things. So the perfect mum, the good mum, well motherhood came easily for her. She didn't have to fight, she didn't have to struggle. She wanted to be a mother. She aspired to be a mother. She had a glowing pregnancy. She loves every minute of being a mother. She finds motherhood come to her naturally and easefully, she doesn't struggle to breastfeed. She has a baby who is a “good”... I'm using inverted commas. She has a “good” baby who sleeps and does all of the things that “good” babies do. She's presumed to be partnered. She's often put on the pedestal as being the white middle class mother who's heterosexual and ticks all of those boxes of the white picket fence, and the house, and the idea of what it means to be a successful adult. She has children. Not too many, because that's irresponsible, but not just one. Because then, what about giving your child a sibling? She didn't become a mother too young, because that's irresponsible. She didn't become a mother too old, because then we label her the geriatric mother. She's usually not disabled. She finds things... I mean, we could spend the entire podcast talking about it.
But part of what this picture paints is an archetype, an idealized image of what it means to be a mother, that leaves very little room for nuance, and also traps us. Because no matter how much we contort ourselves, we can never meet all of the idealized expectations of who that perfect mother is.
So we've been absorbing them often unknowingly, through that water we're swimming within, through that tank. Then when we become mothers, they've embedded themselves as beliefs. This is where a lot of mum guilt comes from, that we judge ourselves as not being enough, not doing enough, not being good enough, failing in some way.
So that's kind of in some ways, simple in some ways, complex answer to your question of what we actually mean when we talk about the social construction. We're talking about how the world outside of us impacts our experience of who we are and how we experience our motherhood.
Julia Jones:
That was so confronting to listen to. As you were giving all those descriptions, I noticed I started sitting in really defensive. I crossed my arms. I leaned back, because I don't think there'd be a single person listening who could possibly tick all of those boxes. I mean every mother on the planet...there's no way anyone's going to be able to actually achieve all of that. Or even want to, because some people are single by choice, and some people don't want a picket fence. So it's funny that we still have this ideal. Also, that thing that when you take a little step back, you realize that other cultures have different ideas of what that should look like.
What's your experience of how the perfect mother myth impacts our caregiving roles? (14:26)
I'm interested as well in taking that conversation one step further. When you were mentioning your mother stepping into that caregiving role with your father, I think that's really interesting, because that mother myth does impact all of the caregiving we do. I would even say it impacts professional caregiving, for example, postpartum professionals. But also probably nurses and teachers, and all of those kinds of particularly feminized roles. What's your experience with that too?
Sophie Brock:
I think that a lot of the time, women step into positions that are critical, lifesaving, and life-changing. They step into spaces though to fill gaps that exist, because structures have failed to provide responses and solutions. So I think that unpaid care work is devalued, but it's heavily relied upon in our society, but it is seen as not work. It's not financially recognized, compensated. I think that, and we know from the research that we see that in caregiving professions like people who are teachers, nurses, childcare educators. Anybody who is in a role that involves the provision of care in some way often faces some sort of barrier around the value of their work or the necessity of it.
I think on the one hand, we've valorized care and we say, "The supermum, how could we do it without her?" But then we also rely upon her and when she has needs, that's inconvenient for us. So I think... I say us, I'm talking about our society and our broader structure. So I think that whenever we're talking about care, we're also talking about social relations, and we're also talking about power and how do all of those things come to impact us as individuals? We're also talking about love.
So these are really core things that get at who we are, our identity, our lived experience. I look at the care that my mum provided for my dad, and that was absolutely out of love. It was also sometimes out of necessity because someone had to do it.
So I think it's both, and being able to actually hold the complexity of what our lived experiences are and to be able to see ourselves and others more fully is what I think needs to happen when we're talking about those caregiving roles for mothers, and others more broadly.
How did you go from single mum and a new Dr Sophie Brock to starting your business? (17:03)
Julia Jones:
Yeah, I love that. I could talk about this topic all day, but I want to bring us back as well to then your journey. So how did you go from single mum, a new Dr Sophie Brock, and finding your next path in the world? What made you then start this business, and how did that become your next step?
Sophie Brock:
Well, I was trying to figure out how am I going to do this? So how am I going to make enough money to live, to support my daughter, to support myself, and to not just survive, but find a path through which I could thrive?
Julia Jones:
Necessity, and out of love.
Sophie Brock:
Absolutely. I think a big thing that I had to work through probably throughout the first two years, and then often ongoing as healing often is, is moving from my own mentality of victimhood in some way essentially of, "I didn't choose this. This is so hard. Why is this so hard? This isn't fair."
I think sometimes, that's really useful for us to be in that place and receive validation, affirmation, and understand the way that structural things and things outside of us come to effect the level of choice or freedom that we have. And also, I had to find a path that would enable me to take back my power in some way.
So I knew for me, what were the priorities. The first priority was that I didn't want to move. I didn't want to move away from my mum, my sister, my close friends. I didn't want to have to go through family court either with my ex-husband.
So all of those factors were first kind of shaping, well then what are my options for my career? What can that look like? I could do casual teaching at the university. I could work on building up my publications to try and move, how do I position myself and my subject area expertise? Because there's a few different routes I could have gone with that based on my dissertation.
I started listening to podcasts when I was walking my daughter in her pram, intentionally going over the grass so that it would bump a lot to help shake her into sleep, with loud music playing oftentimes too. She would love the stimulation of that, it was relaxing for her.
I came across podcasts. I came across Nourishing The Mother podcast, across the Motherkind Podcast with Zoe Blaskey. I started listening to women speaking about their experiences of mothering and motherhood, and looking at how to build something that doesn't exist to help meet a need or respond to a gap that you've identified in your mothering experience.
So I started thinking about how that could look in drawing on all of the work that I've done theoretically and conceptually in the space of motherhood studies. To not just be able to teach this work to people in a university setting, which is what I had aspired to do. But I thought, "What if I could take this and just speak to mothers directly on a podcast? What if I could just put it out there and have other people listen, rather than needing to go into a university setting?"
So that sort of started me thinking, and eventually led to the development of my podcast, and then of my business, and offering services for mothers. Then I thought, "Well, I can make a bigger impact if I actually help train the people who work with mothers. So instead of me working with that mother, I can work with the professional, and then she can work or they can work with lots of different mothers."
So that was sort of the pathway that I took. As you know as well, Julia, building a business is not linear, and there are many different twists and turns that come with that. But that was my goal and my focus, was to find a way to work for myself doing something that I love, and to feel as though I'm making some sort of impact.
Julia Jones:
Aren't we so lucky that we can just cut out the middleman, and you can just start a podcast and speak directly to mums? I just think that's such a gift to our generation. I always think, what would my grandmothers have thought to just be able to broadcast their feelings, their experiences, their thoughts? I think it's quite revolutionary to just be able to put that out there. So tell us a little bit about those. How old's your daughter now?
Sophie Brock:
She's six.
Julia Jones:
Six, yeah. So it's been about six years, obviously since you started this journey.
Sophie Brock:
I think I started the podcast when she was two, two and a bit. It was when she started sleeping, I think a stretch of four hours or something in the night, and you feel like a new refreshed person after having hours.
Julia Jones:
"I can take on the world."
Sophie Brock:
Yeah. It's like, "I can do anything now. I've just got so much sleep up my sleeve." And look, I'm still recovering from that now, trying to adjust my expectations of what my body actually needs in terms of rest.
So I actually started the podcast, and I would record downstairs once I got her to sleep. Then I would just pause the recording, because I would need to go up and resettle her often at the start of the night. She'd wake a lot and so I would just then edit it all together.
So it was a lot of working in slices of space early on. I would say that it was when she was maybe three to four, probably closer to four, I felt as though I could start to dedicate more time when she was going to preschool a couple of days a week, predictably. Now that she's in school, this has been the first year she's been in primary school, again, it's adjusting my expectations and the rhythm of what my daily life is, and therefore what is possible for me, or what I envision is possible in my business.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, I love that and then the business just grows as you grow, and adapts. That's the great thing about running your own business is it would be almost impossible to find a job that could suit the different stages of parenthood. So that investment early obviously pays off in the longer term.
What were some of the bigger challenges that cropped up along the way? How did you overcome them? (23:20)
So what were some of the bigger challenges that cropped up along the way? Because starting a business, it really isn't easy. I interviewed the other Sophie from Australian Birth Stories podcast, and she said she started her podcast in her car for that exact reason. The kids were at home and she was just like, "I just needed somewhere quiet where I could shut the door and record." So I think mothers are very innovative and creative. We always find these really unique solutions. So tell me a little bit about some of the challenges, and then also some of the ways that you overcame that.
Sophie Brock:
Yeah, that's a great question. I think for me, a big challenge has been thinking space, because I was very used to when doing my research and my dissertation, having long stretches of time where I can think, and string a thought, and string a thought, and string a thought, and then it leads to something. Then I can put all the pieces out on the paper, and I can move it around.
As all of us who are practiced in caregiving know that it's extremely difficult, near impossible to do that when you're caring for children. I found it really hard to deal with not having predictable slices of time in order to be able to do that and that's for a range of reasons. But that probably was my biggest challenge, was the sleep feeling, and feeling as though I was able to move from one thought to the next, and build some sort of coherence around that.
So how I dealt with that was I actually, I think I enrolled my daughter into childcare before she was actually ready, in hindsight, because I needed some sort of help. I had very little help from my relationships, support network for various reasons.
So I dealt with guilt around that, of going, "What do I need and what does she need?” and how can I patchwork together some sort of response that is going to help both of us a little bit, but sometimes need to prioritize my needs, so that I can care for her in the way that I want to as a mother.
So that was really difficult. She wouldn't eat or sleep at this childcare center. I mean, I think she was 15 months old. I navigated a lot of barriers. I moved her to multiple different places. I would drop her off, drive to the cafe down the street, work for two hours, go back, pick her up, drive her around for a sleep, have my laptop in the car, do a bit more work. I feel really grateful that I had the flexibility to be able to do that, because many mothers wouldn't have that choice. I think in hindsight, I just did the best that I could with what I knew and the resources I had at the time, to give me half an hour to be able to write.
I didn't have really big aspirations when I first began. I wasn't working on launching a course straight away. I was working on writing a blog post, and sharing about that on social media through a number of posts, and building community, building relationships, and building essentially my vision of how things could be. That involves also creating new identity, and pulling on threads of my identity that I felt were in some ways kind of being stiffened or feeling as though they didn't have air. Giving myself space to breathe more into myself. Then that, of course, benefits my mother in as well. So I'd say sleep, and finding those slices of time, and trying to engineer ways to give myself those little spaces of time to do my work.
Julia Jones:
Yeah, I can relate to that so much. I think it is like, childcare, one thing we talk about a lot at Newborn Mothers is that in traditional cultures, anthropologists have found that children would have between eight and 14 adult carers every day. And now we have one. Then you kind of cobble together this hodgepodge of childcare with a backup, for your backup, for your backup, and then it's school holidays, and it all falls apart anyway.
Then the mother's the only one who feels guilty. I'm like, "Where are the other 13 people?" There should be 13 other people who care about this problem and are trying to solve it too. They should feel some guilt that they're not contributing. But anyway, it's just a huge mess, isn't it? So I think it's very relatable. I think childcare is probably really the number one challenge for mums starting a business.
One thing that used to frustrate me, too is that childcare's not tax deductible. So I could buy all sorts of things through my business and not pay taxes on it. I could do training, I could hire staff, I could pay for website design, I could buy business cards. I could even buy clothing. And yet, the childcare was the biggest barrier to working, and it wasn't counted as a cost of work. I was like, "But I can't work without childcare. Why isn't this a tax deduction?"
Sophie Brock:
Yeah, it's a great point. Look, eventually, my daughter also had lots of health challenges for the first few years and then continues to. So money was a massive, massive barrier, and honestly a massive motivator for me in my business. My first goal financially was to be able to afford swimming lessons. "I'm going to be able to make enough money from this program so I can afford swimming lessons and not have to stress about it, and then I can buy myself a coffee when I take her to swimming lessons and not feel stressed." That was kind of my first thing that I really focused on.
Then eventually, I had to take my daughter out of a daycare for various reasons, and she wasn't coping. My mum stepped in and said she was going to pay for a uni student to come to the house twice a week for a couple of hours to give me that space.
She did that for six months. That helped me actually get my business off the ground, launch it, get into developing course programs. Then by the time that six months or so passed, things had shifted, and a space at a daycare had opened up, and things went really well after that and I was able to get more reliable care.
So I think it's also, as we're doing in this conversation, I hope for listeners, speaking to all of the different factors that go into shaping where people see us. There's so many different elements to that, and there's so many different barriers and supports that exist for us. That's why I think it's one thing to be really mindful of is comparing ourselves to others who may be in business or may be mothering. To just know that there's all these different, and often invisible things that are going on behind the scenes that contribute to that.
Julia Jones:
I think that's a really good point. Also, that things haven't always been like this. I'm very fortunate now in my business. I'm in a really great place that we earn plenty of money. I've bought a home. We don't really have to worry about money anymore, which it's such a blessing.
But same. When I started, I was like you. I remember saving up to buy coffee. Being able to go to meet my friends at the park with their babies and not being able to buy a coffee was really isolating. I felt ashamed of that. That was definitely in those early days of starting my business, was a huge motivation that I was like, I want to be able to participate in life. I don't want to be isolated by motherhood because of finances. I refuse that. That was a huge motivation for me.
It's not an easy path and it's not something that we do alone. I might not have 14 adult carers for my children, but I certainly have a huge village of support, both inside my business and in my personal life at home. Family support, paid support, systems and automation, lowering standards. There's 1,000 things that go into making this all work. It's not magic, it's not luck. It's not easy.
Sophie Brock:
Yeah, exactly. I love that emphasis to say in the same ways as we are not meant to mother alone, we are not meant to build our businesses alone either. Holding the ‘and’, saying that actually, there can be a lot we can do drawing on our own agency, and motivation, and insight, and creativity, and innovation ‘and’ also, we are not doing this just off our own labor alone. There's other things that are at play here in supporting us.
Julia Jones:
Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't think people realize... I get a grant from the government every year, and it's a good chance for me to check in with all of that. I have to tell them how many people are in my team. I was really surprised. I think there's seven people who work in my business on a regular basis, and that was pretty amazing to me to actually write that all down.
Sophie Brock:
Amazing. That's amazing. You mentioned this when I interviewed you for my podcast. Actually, also naming some of this to show what can be possible. I think I go back to my story and listening to those early podcasts, those women showed me what was possible, that you can do this. There are avenues where you can dream this up. I think also, being able to at the stage of business that you are now at Julia, and for myself, I'm able to go buy myself the coffees. I've recently just put a deposit down on a piece of land to eventually build a home with my mum, and my daughter, and my sister around the corner.
But I never would've imagined that could have been possible in the very beginning. But it's also like you build on your dreams, and you build on creating pathways for other women to also create their own dreams and to support each other in that. Seeing all of this ecosystem, whilst acknowledging all of the structural, socioeconomic barriers that exist as well.
What do you do now, and where can people find you? (33:40)
Julia Jones:
Yeah, I think that's really beautiful. Beautiful point. So tell us a little bit more about what you do now, and where people can find you.
Sophie Brock:
Well now, I spend the majority of my time working with people who work in motherhood support and postpartum period. So I have my certification program, which is a training in motherhood studies that I run once a year. I also offer mentoring for mother-supporting professionals. I have some self-study courses for mothers and professionals as well. Of course, my podcast, which I was lucky enough to interview you on, Julia.
Those are the ways that people can work with me and where I'm focusing my interest and investing my time at the moment. But as ever, it's always looking at ways to innovate, and how to grow ourselves, and our work, and our thinking. I'm really grateful to be in conversation with you, Julia, and for all you're doing in this space, and for everyone who's taken the time to listen.
Julia Jones:
It's been such a pleasure to connect with you, Sophie. If anyone wants to learn more, they can go to drsophiebrock.com, and we'll pop all those links underneath the podcast as well. Thank you so much.
Sophie Brock:
Great. Thank you so much, Julia.
