Donna's firstborn did not unfold the way she expected. He was what she called a flat baby, not reaching for his hands or his toes the way the books said he should. She had all the baby contraptions the market was selling at the time, and still something felt wrong.
I'm watching this very flat baby, and I'm like, this isn't right.
She stripped everything back to the floor, her first, incomplete understanding of freedom of movement, and found a secondhand copy of Baby Moves that became the start of a rabbit hole that, twenty one years and a nearly finished thesis later, is still unfolding.
Donna was clear that Pikler practitioners are not hands off by ideology. They are people who have watched, closely and without intervening, the normal range of children's development, a wide range with an early group, a large middle group, and a later group where nothing is actually wrong either. But when a child moves genuinely outside that range, the response changes, and support from other people comes in.
Before any of this, Donna was a behaviour specialist for IHC, working with adults whose behaviour had never been properly understood. That work pushed her further back up the chain, she wanted to reach children earlier, closer to the start of life, so she trained as an early childhood teacher when her son was five, intending to specialise in additional needs from within mainstream early childhood.
Her early training in the UK was about creating the best life for a person. Back in New Zealand, watching centres trying to make children fit in rather than letting them be themselves, she did not agree with it, even while still a student. A year after qualifying, she worked in an area targeted for early intervention and found that children with huge behaviours shifted within six months, not through technique, but through love and connection.
Donna passed her early childhood degree with the highest average of her cohort, ninety four percent. Looking back now, she can see that mark clearly as her own not good enough wound, a drive for perfection rather than presence.
I was up in my head. It was my journey from my own trauma that had pushed me so far up intellectually that I wasn't connected body to head.
Everything shifted when Kimberly Crisp visited the centre where Donna worked. Donna had always called herself a heart teacher, and she cried at the beauty of what she saw. A friend told her she spoke the same language as these people, and pointed her toward Pennie Brownlee's retreat, Dance With Me In the Heart, which Pennie created from what she had witnessed in Budapest.
Donna went in as professional development and came back on a cloud that lasted about three days, a body and nervous system she now understands had been quietly regulated all week through organic food, music, meditation and singing at Tahara, without ever being told that was happening. Pennie introduced her to Pikler properly, and the rest of her career followed from there.
Everyone has love in their hearts, just some people need the steps to find it.
Donna's ten year journey with the Pikler Institute became, in her words, a journey of reparenting herself. Seven years in, she realised for the first time that she had experienced childhood trauma, a discovery that reframed every breaking relationship, every parenting struggle and every teaching struggle she had lived through. She had not believed anything was wrong with her, and finding the root changed everything.
She could not work effectively with children with the biggest behaviours until she had done that work on herself, because those children pushed directly on her own old wounds, and they needed her to be a steady presence, able to tell what was hers and what was theirs.
It takes a healing adult to hear these misunderstood children.
Kirsty's own rabbit hole opened with her first son, who could barely latch at all. Every feed was distressing for both of them, and she was told repeatedly it was simply colic, that he would grow out of it, that his weight gain meant everything was fine. Her instincts said otherwise, and after several opinions someone finally identified a posterior tongue tie, one that stopped him lifting his tongue at all.
That single finding opened an enormous field of learning: possible genetic links, folate versus folic acid, Weston A Price style nutrition and facial structure, and the connection between the tongue, the fascia, the vagus nerve, and digestion starting in the mouth.
The tongue tie thread led Kirsty toward ADHD, Ehlers Danlos hypermobility, and a puzzle over her son's dental problems despite an immaculately clean diet. Eventually she turned the lens on herself, noticed her own tendency to be tightly wound, and found her own tongue told a similar story, prompting her to look at how that tension might be shaping her own nervous system.
She named honestly how she became a little obsessed with the minutiae of what might be wrong, before pulling herself back out again. That obsession can attach to anything, the way you gave birth, vaccination choices, missed milestones, what you fed or did not feed, a vitamin taken or not taken in pregnancy.
It matters, and it also matters not to get really neurotic about it.
Kirsty's landing point: you are whole, your child is whole, intrinsically, underneath every detail about feeding, daycare, exercises done or not done. Come back to the essence of the person, the child, in front of you. Donna tied this straight back to their earlier conversations on delight and diagnosis, the same wholeness sitting underneath both.
You are whole. Your child is whole.
Kirsty added that chasing an end point, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, can cost you the actual living of your life. The journey is the substance, not a flaw to be corrected.
Donna came back to her own 94 percent, this time to say what she did with it. What she had learned from Pennie and Pikler did not match what student teachers back then were being guided to learn, so when mentoring young teachers, she found herself struggling to help them with their assignments. Her gentle solution: she couldn't help with the paperwork, but she could show their lecturers what they were achieving when they came to visit. What mattered, she found, watching her own students in practice, was never the test score. It was the relationship.
Yeah, it's about the relationship. The relationship is all. It's not about a test score.
Donna is based in Pukekohe, Aotearoa New Zealand, and works both locally and online. She calls herself The Relationship Facilitator because her modality, Relational Flow, moves across every kind of relationship: adult attachment work, couples, parenting, and children's big messy behaviours.
Curious where to start? Book a free Zoom coffee chat with Donna.
DonnaStichbury-TheRelationshipfacilitator.as.me/ChatwithDonna
Kirsty Denny of Kirsty Marie Energy is an energetic kinesiologist and home educating mother of neurodivergent children. She uses kinesiology to work with the layers of subconscious stress and conditioning that can impact our ability to align to our truest expression.
When it comes to working with nervous system health and healthy attachment, she believes that it all matters, the physical, the emotional and the spiritual, with healthy relationships with ourselves and others as the bedrock.
