This month, to honour Maternal Mental Heath Awareness Week, which took place 3rd-9th of May, we spoke to Laura McGrath, the founder of Lola&Lykke; a new Finnish brand founded to support mums’ health and well-being.
Lola&Lykke is a new Finnish company which has developed maternity wellbeing e-courses plus is soon to launch maternity wellness action plan. We spoke to co-founder, Laura McGrath, to find out more about the company and what lead to the creation of the business:
Why did you start the business?
I started the business three years ago along with a childhood friend as a result of our own experiences of birth and the postnatal period, which was really difficult for both of us. We both felt that the wellness of a mother is overlooked and the support available to us was minimal. We assumed that due to the good public healthcare system that all the information would be readily available, but there just weren’t enough products or services out there that provided a holistic approach. We had a burning desire to change things and make sure mothers felt well-informed as we now understand how important self-care is when you become a new parent.
What can Lola&Lykke offer to support maternal mental health?
We currently offer an antenatal online education course which we launched in spring this year and focuses on pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum. We also publish a lot of content on the website which is freely available and with May being Mental Health Awareness Month there will definitely be lots of content focused on that. We also have a comprehensive e-guide available and will be launching a podcast very soon so keep an eye out for that!
What do you personally do to maintain good mental health?
For me it is important to have mine own passions, and follow those and make time for yourself. Becoming a new parent can be a really confusing time, but once you have come out of that you begin to understand that you have your own needs. Alexandra Sacks wrote a great piece on this in the New York Times. It is normal to not feel ecstatically happy all the time and it is important to discuss the mental changes you go through. But becoming a parent shifted everything for me and made me realise that it is possible to shift your career and life in a different direction.
What are Lola&Lykke’s goals for the future?
In the short-term, we are working to develop a course for Fathers so that they can share their experiences of what modern fatherhood looks like and also what they can benefit from knowing during pregnancy and when the baby comes, providing both information and peer support. We are also going to be making mental health one of our key considerations, providing more content and building a community. In the long-term we would love to have an app to bring together the building blocks of our mission. It has always been our dream to be a global business and we can really see the need for it on a global scale – looking back 5 or 10 years ago, the market wouldn’t have been ready, but we now see millennial parents demanding change. Women are finally opening up and the institutional approach to parenting, which only focuses on mum and baby being physically alive, is no longer the best outcome – mother’s have to be supported mentally as well.
You can find out more about Lola&Lykke on their website.