Marianne is a mother of four grown-up, home-birthed and breastfed daughters and granny of five beautiful home-birthed, breastfed grandchildren. After a personal experience with breastfeeding practices in a hospital, she became a volunteer for the Dutch breastfeeding association in 1994 and for many years, she led big groups for pregnant and breastfeeding mothers in her home town.
She became an IBCLC in 2008 and launched her private practice, from which she does consultations, book translations (such as James McKenna’s book ‘Sleeping With Your Baby’ and recently ‘Safe Infant Sleep’, and Jill and Nils Bergman’s book ‘Hold Your Prem’), blogging and writing on youth healthcare, advocating for policies that generously take neurophysiological and sociocultural convictions into account. Translating and avid reading widened Marianne’s insights and field of interest, leading her her to Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and subsequently a master’s degree in Medical Anthropology & Sociology.
Combining several fields, she co-founded the initiative ACE Aware NL early 2020, chiming in with similar movements in Scotland and California, US. The aim is to increase awareness around Adverse Childhood Experiences and their impact on adult health and wellbeing. Now that science abundantly shows the importance of sensitive and responsive parenting for overall health and wellbeing, all sectors in society deserve to know what a world of difference they can make in a child's life if they succeed in incorporating trauma-sensitive approaches . Marianne expects to remain strongly tied to this field for the rest of her life.
There is a growing awareness about the impact of Adverse Childhood Events or ACEs and the toxic stress they can create during a child’s formative years. So far much of the research and conversation has focused on identifying ACEs and the negative life-long consequences they can have. How can we reframe the conversation to shift from focusing on reacting to negative outcomes, to creating the caring connections that promote healthy brain development and stress regulation? To feel healthy, people of all ages look for a meaningful existence with loving and caring relationships. In the Salutogenic Model of Health this is called the Sense of Coherence (SoC). When the SoC is under strain, this can cause pain and trauma that both parent and child express in behaviours that are difficult to handle for themselves and others. As innately and intensely social beings, humans actively try to connect to others to build positive, contextualised relationships that support health and wellbeing and create social resources. Therefore, secure childhoods and nurturing social environments are likely to increase lifelong resilience. Looking at health from a salutogenic perspective can help us understand that health and wellbeing cannot simply be depoliticised and decontextualized as an individual responsibility. ACEs are not always preventable, but we have the power to help both parents and professionals create the positive childhood experiences (PCEs) that buffer the negative ones and create resilience.
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