Hold the Roots, Change the Route: a parenting program. A mother, father and child sit together at a table with a journal open, above the program's four pillars: Roots, Routes, Relationship and Resilience.

Stomach drops. “But where are you really from?”

Why This Program Exists

The Question We Kept Being Asked

"I love the idea of gentle parenting. But it doesn't sound like how I was raised, and I wasn't raised badly."

Almost every parenting program available today is built on the same foundation: Western, individualist attachment theory, developed largely from research on white, middle-class, nuclear-family households in the UK and US in the mid-twentieth century. The science inside it is real, children genuinely do need a secure base, attuned caregiving, and repair after rupture. That part isn't in question.

What's in question is what happens next: most programs quietly assume that the way those needs get met, one primary caregiver, a nuclear household, praise-and-consequence discipline, independence prized above interdependence, is the only correct delivery mechanism. For many of the families we work with, that assumption doesn't match how they were raised, how their own parents were raised, or the values they're actively trying to pass on.

Hold the Roots, Change the Route was built because "choose attachment science or your culture" is a false choice. This program teaches the science in full, and teaches it alongside, not instead of, the cultural inheritance you're bringing into the room.

Your child needs a secure base. Your family gets to decide what that looks like.

Throughout this program, "Roots" refers to what you've inherited, the parenting wisdom, values, and practices carried through your family and culture, often across migration, displacement, or generations of adaptation. "Routes" refers to the path forward you're actively choosing for your own family, which parts of that inheritance you're keeping, which you're consciously reworking, and which new practices you're adding, informed by developmental science. Neither is more "correct" than the other. The work is in the weaving.

A Note Before You Begin

This Isn't a Template

This program deliberately does not assume a single "non-Western culture" to speak on behalf of. The families we work with come from vastly different backgrounds, and this program is designed to be filled in with your specific culture, migration story, and family history, not a generic stand-in for it. Where we use examples, they're composites drawn from patterns across many families, not any one person's story, and they're offered as illustrations of theprocess of weaving roots and routes together, not as a script to copy.

This program is neuroaffirming and non-behavioural throughout. You won't find reward charts, sticker systems, or compliance-based discipline strategies here. Those approaches, whatever culture they come from, tend to teach children to manage adult approval rather than to understand or regulate their own internal states. What you will find is a genuine, side-by-side exploration of what secure attachment requires, and how your own family and culture already offer real, valid ways of providing it.

Program Structure

Seven Sessions

Session 01

Both Can Be True

Orientation: why this program holds two things at once
Session 02

Your Roots, Your Routes

The parent's own story, before the child's
Session 03

Attachment Without the Import

The developmental science, decoupled from its cultural packaging
Session 04

Two Value Systems, One Child

Regulation, respect, and discipline: held together, not traded off
Session 05

Talking About Race and Belonging

Racial socialisation as part of secure attachment, not separate from it
Session 06

The Village as Secure Base

Beyond the parent-child dyad
Session 07

Your Family's Map

Navigating systems, and bringing it all together
The Program

Hold the Roots, Change the Route

A Parenting Program

Hold the Roots, Change the Route is a seven-session parenting group built on the published Roots vs Routes model. The model explains why a family is where it is. The program is what the adults in the room do about it.

The full program runs over seven sessions. To take part, book a place in the next group.

Two ways to take it
In a group · Seven sessions Join Hold the Roots, Change the Route The program as it is designed: seven sessions alongside other parents working through the same questions, at the same time. Book a spot in the group → One to one · At your pace Work through it in family therapy The same material, taken session by session with your own therapist, shaped around what is actually happening in your family. Book family therapy →
Hold the Roots, Change the Route · Seven Sessions

Ready to take part?

The full program runs over seven sessions in a small group. Tell us a little about your family and we will send you dates, pricing and what to expect.

Enquire About the Program → Read the Framework
The Framework

Our model is published, read the full framework here.

Anoshe Therapies works on Wadawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung Country, and on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. We deliver online across many other Countries, and we acknowledge the Traditional Owners of each of them.

We pay respect to Elders past and present, and to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who continue to hold knowledge about family, kinship and belonging that long predates anything we practise.

Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

Everything on this site is built on our published model. Read the full framework here.

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