Lauren Pasqua, PsyD, PMH-C is a licensed psychologist and maternal mental health specialist who has spent over 20 years building the clinical infrastructure she believes every family deserves.
Everyone tells new mothers it takes a village. Nobody builds the village.
I've spent my career on both sides of that gap. As a psychologist, I've sat with mothers in the hardest transition of their lives — carrying anxiety, identity loss, birth trauma, and a mental load nobody prepared them for. And I've sat on the other end of the same story: the eight-year-old whose meltdowns run the household, the teen in crisis, the family walking on eggshells. Twenty-plus years of child and adolescent work — including training in DBT-C with the developer of the model — taught me what the research confirms: the two ends are connected. As a mom of three, I've lived the version no credential prepares you for either.
What I learned from both seats is the same thing: the problem was never the mothers. The problem is a system that screens without following through, providers who work in silos with no way to hand a mother safely from one to the next, and a medical model whose attention ends at six weeks — precisely when the hardest part begins.
So I started building. A perinatal mental health practice. A child and family center. A cross-disciplinary provider collective. Training for the professionals who touch a family's life. Consulting for the organizations that employ, insure, and serve mothers. It's all one project, really — closing the gap between what families need and what the system actually delivers.
The village isn't missing. It was never built. But we have everything we need to build it.
Whether you're a mother looking for support, an organization ready to do better, or a provider building the safety net — there's a place to start.