Jamilia Shani
Founder of Forpartum and the Propartum Institute, two applications of the field. Author of The Missing Map. Proposer of Maternal Development as an interdisciplinary field.
Biography
Jamilia Shani is a mother, doula, maternal-development writer, author, product designer, and technical founder. Her work organizes, expands, formalizes, and applies Maternal Development as a coherent lifespan field: its shared language, domain structure, framework library, curriculum, research agenda, and applied technology.
She is the founder of Forpartum, the maternal wellness ecosystem where the field is translated into audio, stories, reflection, and support mothers can actually use, and of the Propartum Institute, a founder-developed professional education and practice application of the field. She is the author of The Missing Map, a trade book on matrescence and the making of a mother, and the creator of the original frameworks in the Framework Library, The Matrescent Path™ and The Matrescent Brain™ (Motherbrain).
Her practice is grounded in more than a decade of birth and postpartum work and in her own lived transformation. She is not a psychologist, neuroscientist, physician, or licensed mental-health professional, and the field is built to work alongside those professions: drawing on their scholarship, honoring their scope, and referring to their care.
The origin
Built by a mother who went looking for this field and could not find it.
Jamilia Shani entered psychology in 2018 intending to become a developmental psychologist. In 2020, at four months postpartum, she left school while undergoing the very transformation her education never centered.
She went looking for a body of knowledge that treated the mother herself as a developing human being.
Maternal psychology, developmental psychology, matrescence scholarship, Motherhood Studies, maternal neuroscience, reproductive psychology, sociology, anthropology, midwifery, and mothers’ own lived knowledge each held important parts of the picture. The scholarship existed. The insight existed. What was missing was a dedicated interdisciplinary center organized around the development of the mother herself across time.
She left the psychology program. She did not leave the developmental question. She began with the material closest to her: her own transformation and the experiences mothers shared with her. From there, she read across the bodies of scholarship that held pieces of what she was observing. She found pieces everywhere. What she could not find was the disciplinary home that held them together.
She began building the field she could not find.
Founder, Forpartum & the Propartum Institute
Author, The Missing Map
Doula and maternal-care professional, 10+ years
Creator, The Matrescent Path™ and The Matrescent Brain™ (Motherbrain)
Product designer, technical founder, and maternal audio & educational producer
I Went Looking for This Field
I studied psychology because I wanted to understand human development. By then, I had already been working as a birth doula, and I intended to become a developmental psychologist.
I spent two years in psychology school and took many courses in child development. I learned how children develop cognitively, emotionally, socially, relationally, and biologically. I studied attachment, identity, behavior, family systems, and the environments that influence a child’s development.
Then, in 2020, I became a mother.
Four months postpartum, I was still enrolled in psychology school, but I could no longer write research papers the way I had before motherhood. I could not study the way I once had. My attention, memory, energy, body, identity, and daily life had changed. I was trying to meet the demands of school while caring for an infant and undergoing a transformation I did not yet have language for.
I had spent years learning how children develop, yet I could not find a class that explained what was happening to me.
Psychology offered important theories of human development, identity, attachment, cognition, relationships, trauma, and mental health. Other disciplines examined reproduction, family life, gender, motherhood, caregiving, and maternal experience. But I could not find a coherent field that placed the mother’s own development at its center.
The child had developmental psychology. The mother appeared throughout the literature, but often as the child’s environment, attachment figure, caregiver, patient, or source of developmental outcomes. I kept asking a different question:
Where is the developmental study of the woman who becomes—and continues becoming—the mother?
Leaving psychology school was a difficult decision. I had invested two years in my education, I had a clear professional direction, and I still wanted to understand development. But at four months postpartum, I had to acknowledge that I could not continue in the same way. I left the program.
I did not stop studying.
When my son slept on my breast, I read research papers about mothers and motherhood. During naps, late at night, and in the small spaces available to me, I continued searching. I read across psychology, neuroscience, maternal mental health, sociology, reproductive health, feminist theory, motherhood studies, and developmental scholarship. I was looking for language that could explain what had happened to me—and what I had witnessed in other mothers through my work.
I found important pieces everywhere. What I did not find was one disciplinary home capable of holding them together.
Knowledge about mothers existed, but it was dispersed. No single disciplinary center organized her biological, psychological, cognitive, relational, sexual, social, cultural, existential, economic, and spiritual development across the lifespan.
Maternal Development grew from that absence.
It was not created to replace psychology, Motherhood Studies, matrescence scholarship, maternal mental health, neuroscience, sociology, anthropology, reproductive health, or the many scholars whose work made this synthesis possible. It brings these bodies of knowledge into conversation while asking a question that requires its own sustained center:
How does the mother develop as a human being?
Maternal Development is my proposal for where that question can live.