On this month's Meet the Mom, we welcome Brittany Chambers, a mother, infant sleep educator, and advocate for maternal and infant mental health. After the birth of her first child in 2020, she left a decade-long career in the nonprofit world and followed a deep calling to study infant psychology and neurobiology.

She knows firsthand the exhaustion and overwhelm of early motherhood—and the frustration of seeking sleep solutions only to be met with “wait it out” or “cry it out.” Her work challenges mainstream sleep training myths and centers on evidence-based support rooted in biology, connection, and maternal intuition.

Brittany’s mission is to protect the mental health of both babies and mothers by normalizing biologically appropriate infant behavior and helping women reconnect with their inner knowing.

What inspired you to start Good Night Moon Child?

My daughter. She was born in the middle of the pandemic, born into a time and place in our collective consciousness that was wrought with so much fear, panic, and intensity. My husband and I had moved out of a big city to a smaller town nearby to give birth with midwives and bring our daughter into the world in ease, peace, and safety, and we ended up in a hospital, masks-on, signing consent forms to keep our daughter in bed with us – in order to keep the baby that just exited my womb on my body.

It lit a fire in me that still burns. The fire that is the fuel for everything I do with mothers around the world. The fire that keeps me in my truth – in my heart – even when our very disconnected, very confused over-culture tries to convince us to sever our inner-knowing.

"I moved through the first year of my own matresence in deep self-reflection and reevaluated everything in my life."

I moved through the first year of my own matresence in deep self-reflection and reevaluated everything in my life. I left a 10-year career and a six-figure salary to study biologically normal infant sleep under a neuroscientist. I launched Good Night Moon Child (officially) a few months before my daughter’s second birthday. In many ways it was the culmination of everything I’ve done in my life. The weaving of the many worlds I’ve lived in, from my origins as a sleep trained kid to my lifelong proclivity for writing, investigating, and exploring indigenous cultures, to my path as an early childhood educator and an activist. 

What did your path look like from idea to launch?

It looked like trust. It looked like standing at the edge of a cliff and leaping knowing that if my intention was to bring back ancient wisdom in service of moving us back into love that I would be caught. I would be held. 

And I was. 

I started without a business plan, without a following of any kind, and without any guarantee things would “work out”. I left a six-figure salary and the security of a ten-year career to listen to the tug of my heart.

There wasn’t a reality that existed in which I wasn’t doing this work. It was a calling.

What would you like to see change about the way our culture supports new moms?

Whew, I wish I had an hour to sit down and talk to you about this one. Everything has to change. Everything. 

We have such little reverence for pregnancy and birth. For mothers in general. And yet mothers were once the center of society. The seat of wisdom. The seat of a community’s heart and soul. The bringers and sustainers of life. 

So they were protected and revered. We wrapped women in concentric circles of support during pregnancy and beyond to protect new life. Bringing a baby into the world was once sacred.

Now it’s inconvenient. It’s minimized. Optimized. Brushed-aside.

Our super-patriarchal paradigm doesn’t have room for the slowness and stillness and peace mothers need to heal and integrate the profound transformation that is pregnancy and birth.

We are stuck in productivity-and-profit-over-people thinking. 

So instead of implementing and adopting policies that protect parents – that support mothers and babies – we are the only nation without federally mandated paid leave.

Maybe we could start there. But beyond the material and tangible shifts, we need to shift our perspective. We need to remember that infant mental health – and maternal mental health – are inextricably linked. We need to CARE that how we raise our babies is how we raise the world.

So if we desire to heal humanity – if we want to move into harmony with each other, with the earth – we have to start with healing our relationship to pregnancy and birth.

We have to protect mothers and babies. You are outspoken about the importance of nurturing day and night. How do you support your own mental and physical wellbeing when there's a tough night? Can you take us through what the next day might look like?

Radical self-compassion. I take anything unnecessary off my “to-do” list. I lay horizontally on the floor while my kids crawl on my body and play around me. I have a matcha in the morning and then maybe another in the afternoon. I drink Tulsi tea to support my stress system. I move slow. I draw from Dr. Ellen Langler’s work on the power of mindset and I repeat to myself that I am capable and my body is strong even when I am tired. I catch my brain’s attempt to catastrophize and I invite it to, instead, envision a day of thriving. And when it’s logistically feasible, I call in support so I can step away from the intensity of mothering and move into a practice that brings balance back to my nervous system (like yoga, hiking, meditating).

What’s something you’re working on now that excites you?

I’m in the process of designing a program to support mothers out of parts of their life that feel misaligned and back into their life’s work. In addition to all of the sleep, postpartum, and matrescence work I want to do, I want to infuse my years in business and fundraising into helping other mothers coexist in late-stage capitalism without feeling crushed. I want to help invite them to explore soul-fulfilling work, mother-centric entrepreneurship, and whatever else calls to them. And I want to help circulate money back to women who are mothering agains the machine. This is how we move away from extractive capitalism and toward generative commerce – toward mutual aid. Toward shifting resources into the hands of mothers. 

What does success look like for you in this season?

Moving at the pace of my kids. Presence. Peace. An unhurried life. Laying on the floor alongside my daughter as she draws. Holding my son as he sleeps across my lap. Catching my husband’s gaze as he watches our kids kiss and exchanging a knowing smile – the kind that acknowledges the miracle of it all.

What advice would you give a new mom in her fourth trimester?

Go slow. And if that feels scary, go even slower. Push the boundaries of our cultural obsession with productivity and lean into pregnancy’s invitation for softness, slowness, and stillness. 

Connect with your baby while they’re still in your womb. Talk to your baby. Tell them how grateful you are that they’re on this journey with you. Prepare for birth WITH your baby. Include your baby in conversations about birth. Tell your baby you trust them. Tell them you’ve got them. There’s a beautiful body of work in pre and perinatal psychology surrounding the critical importance of acknowledging and engaging with our babies in utero. And if you need support connecting to your babe or your intuition, start by getting in your body. Start by slowing down (see original advice, haha).

And of course, learn everything you can about what normal biological infant sleep REALLY looks like. Try to understand who the human infant *actually* is and what they need in the weeks and months after emerging Earthside. Prepare your house for safe cosleeping even if you don’t think you’ll ever bedshare or cosleep – you’ll thank me later.

Lastly, build an in-person team of support. If you don’t have friends/family who you feel safe with during such a tender time, consider hiring a postpartum DAYTIME doula so you can rest with your baby, heal from birth, and eat nourishing, healing food. So you can cocoon. So you can stay in your body, in your mutual brain-building bath of oxytocin.

What do you want your children to remember about this season of your life?

I want my children to remember this season as an invitation to explore the beauty of being on earth. The joy of curiosity, of discovery, of being in relationship with people of all ages who delight in their presence. The joy of realizing the wonder of the natural world. The comfort in knowing that they are part of something bigger than themselves – that they, too, are nature. Made of stars. Made of the same “stuff” as the rocks and flowers and trees and bees that they love so dearly. 

And I want them to remember this season as safety. Foundational safety in their body. I want them to remember that their parents could handle their fears, insecurities, doubts – all of the emotions. I want them to remember the levity of this season. The unconditional love. The belly-laughs. I want them to remember our faces looking back at them like they are the most extraordinary beings we’ve ever met. Because they are.

"We have to dare to let motherhood REALLY change us."

What’s one truth you’ve discovered about motherhood that you wish more people talked about?

You cannot walk through the portal of birth and motherhood and remain unchanged. It is an initiation, not an invitation. It’s alchemy. And the more we cling to our “old” bodies, our “old” ways of being, our “old” identities, the more we suffer. It is in all of the gripping – all of the yearning for what was – that we create tension. We have to dare to let motherhood REALLY change us. To let it rearrange us. To soften our hard edges. To awaken us to truth: that we’re here to sow seeds of love.