The Maternal Development curriculum
Three pathways form the field's educational architecture, delivered through the Propartum Institute. The Foundations Certificate outline below shows the shape of the first pathway, designed for audio and written delivery in modules of short lessons with learning objectives and reflective exercises. The Advanced Professional and Research pathways are in development, and their course outlines will be published as that work completes.
No courses are currently available. Nothing on this page can be enrolled in yet. This is a curriculum in development, published so the field’s educational architecture can be seen, reviewed, and critiqued before it is taught. The interest list is the way to hear when the first cohort opens.
Foundations Certificate
Open to mothers, professionals, and students. The shared floor of the field.
Foundations of Maternal Development
The field's definition, premises, boundaries, and relationship to neighboring disciplines.
Introduction to Matrescence
The transition of becoming a mother, its scholarship, and its place inside the lifespan field.
Maternal Identity and Selfhood
Continuity, loss, expansion, and the relationship a mother builds with who she is becoming.
Maternal Brain and Cognition
What research suggests, what remains open, and how to speak about the maternal mind without deficit language.
Maternal Embodiment
The lived body through pregnancy, birth, feeding, recovery, and non-gestational motherhood.
Maternal Relationships and Family Systems
Partnership, family of origin, friendship, and community through relational reorganization.
Maternal Grief, Ambivalence, and Rage
The full emotional range of transformation, distinguished carefully from illness and never dismissed as illness.
Culture and the Social Construction of Motherhood
Race, class, culture, migration, policy, and whose motherhood the dominant story was built on.
Maternal Mental Health and Differential Understanding
Working alongside clinical care: distinguishing development, distress, deprivation, and disorder, and referring well.
Applied
Bringing the field into real settings: practice, programs, products, and everyday language.
Advanced Professional and Research pathways
Advanced Professional Pathway
For practitioners who hold mothers in clinical, community, and care settings: deeper theoretical work, lifespan application, trauma-informed and somatic practice, ethical and non-pathologizing language, program design, and responsible use of research in practice. The full course outline will be published here as development completes.
Research Pathway
For researchers, graduate students, and practitioner-scholars building the field’s evidence base: qualitative, longitudinal, participatory, and lived-experience methods, research ethics with mothers, measurement development, and theory construction. The full course outline will be published here as development completes.
Scholars and practitioners interested in shaping these pathways before they are finalized can reach the field through the Funding & Collaboration page.
This curriculum educates. It does not license anyone to diagnose or treat mental illness, and it is designed to strengthen, not replace, collaboration with medical and mental-health professionals.