Mercedes Samudio, LCSW is a parent coach, speaker, bestselling author, and founder of the Diversity in Parenting conference who helps parents and children communicate with each other, manage emotional trauma, navigate social media and technology together, and develop healthy parent-child relationships. She started the #EndParentShaming movement and coined the term Shame-Proof Parenting — using both to bring awareness to ending parent shame. Mercedes is on a mission to empower parents in believing in their innate ability to guide and raise healthy, happy children. 

• Mercedes' message and passion and how it’s deeply tied to her own healing and her ability to reconcile healing her inner child and how not being scared to discuss her own healing has enabled her to feel more connected to and assertive of her overall message.
• Dispelling the myth that once you become a parent you’re something/someone else.
• Parent's internal struggles to heal their own childhoods and how we don’t tend to give parents the space to heal, which is the same space we heal intergenerational traumas. 
• Parenting identity is all the stuff that comes with the term parenting that you’ve created and held throughout your life: the parents you had, the people you watched parent, what culture and research says about parenting, what society says about parenting… and why it’s so important to reckon with these messages.
• The ongoing struggle to sit with our own imperfections, to-do lists, navigate parenthood and hold it all everyday and how to manage the complexities of deepened awarenesses. 
• The myth we've bought into: that parenting has to mean something and the guilt, shame and fear that comes with that. 
• Mercedes' book, Shame Proof Parenting, and the journey that writing the book has taken her on. There is no A-Z process of raising a human because there is no A-Z process to being a human. And how the book is starting to shift mindsets. 
• Representation — the parenting world is predominately made up of White women and many modern parenting methods require you to be a part of a culture that sees you. When BIPOC, Adoptive, LGBTQ and Special-Needs mothers try to enter popular modern parenting realms, she may be the only one there, and the only one in her family/community that’s doing it and it can be really difficult to continue on in a space where there is no one else there that looks like you/understands your struggle. 
• We talk about how frustration fueled Mercedes to create the Diversity in Parenting Conferenceand what the conference is all about: if you’re a parenting or mental health professionals who is looking for more skills in how to work with diverse parents and family populations. 
• Deeper messages about why representation matters to help everyone feel validated and seen. 

RESOURCES:

Find Mercedes at shameproofparenting.com 

Learn more about the Diversity in Parenting conference September 13-14, 2019 in Anaheim, CA at diversityinparentingconference.com (early bird tickets available through March 2019).

Join Annie Schuessler and I for the Signature Retreat April 25-28, 2019 at Menla Resort in NY, learn more at