Intuitive Parenting · Dr. Frances Malone, ARNP, PhD
A pediatric nurse practitioner and PhD-trained researcher with twenty-five years of clinical experience — for parents of infants, and for parents of children kindergarten through preteen. Two seasons. One clinician who knows both from the inside.
I had kept dying children alive in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. I had managed ventilated infants through transplant at Seattle Children's. I had published NIH-funded research on the physiology of stress in the most fragile children on earth. By every measurable standard, I was one of the most qualified people in the room.
And then I had my first baby. He nursed every ninety minutes around the clock for six months. He had a tongue tie no one caught. I was exhausted in a way I had no category for. My partner would come home and find me in the bath — sometimes for the fifth time that day — because it was the only thing that helped.
I didn't know it then. But I was regulating my own nervous system by pure survival instinct. My body knew what it needed before my training had a name for it.
I built the ZEN of Parenting framework from that floor. It is the support I needed and did not have.
Years later, with my boys older, I was on a different floor. Toddler years, early school years — moments when I could feel myself beginning to spiral. When the noise or the conflict or the sheer relentlessness of it was pulling me somewhere I didn't want to go.
I learned to put myself in timeout. Literally. I would excuse myself, go to the bathroom, sit on the floor, and do what I now teach: feel my body, clear it, come back.
Sometimes I didn't make it in time. Sometimes I became what my boys and I came to call Scary Mama — a name I gave it myself, so they knew I recognized its impact. Some of the most important moments in our relationship happened on that floor. The tears, the holding, the coming back to each other.
This is not a framework I developed and then stood above. It is something I live. The same tools I give you are the ones I still reach for.
Some families start with a course and find it is enough. Some come straight to a clinical audit. Some want the ongoing relationship of membership from the beginning. Every entry point is a legitimate one — these are not steps you must complete in sequence, but options you can move between as your family's needs change.
Most families find the course is the right place to begin. For the rest, every option above is available directly — see consultations to schedule, or visit MalonePediatrics.com for membership.
Whether your child is six weeks old or eight years old, the mechanism is the same. They are reading your nervous system constantly — not your words, your body. ZEN does not mean you are always calm. It means nothing unspoken or unresolved sits between you that your child has to work around in order to be with you.
That is the practice underneath everything I teach — in the infant course, in the behavior course, and in every 1:1 room I sit in.
"This is not a framework I developed and then stood above. It is something I live. The same tools I give you are the ones I still reach for."
— Dr. Frances Malone, PNP, PhD