L'école Porter la Vie, since its foundation in 2007, has for mission to transmit the art of carrying children and to make it accessible to as many people as possible.
Babywearing instructors trained by our school throughout Quebec have asked that for a network to be created. We needed a collaborative space for the promotion and accessibility of skin-to-skin and babywearing practices. This is how l'école Porter la Vie worked with them to set up the BabyWearind National Insitute.
Philosophy
- Babywearing is a precious family tool: it favourises harmony while obtaining joy, simplyfying everyday life, all while supporting the child in it's global developpement.
- It is essential to keep babywearing simple and accessible!
- We consider that the parents are the experts when it comes to their child.
- We encourage safe practices while babywearing all while gratifying and promoting autonomy. Our workshops have for mission to equip the parent so that he or she can recognize the proper carry for them and their child.
- We aim to coach each parent in what they wish for and make sure that the parent is ready to experiment with their child, all of this while offering them the most up to date information in the world of babywearing.
The founder
Janie Vachon-Robillard discovered babywearing in South America as a child and learned it self-taught with her first two children in the absence of resources in this area in Quebec in the early 2000s.
Her studies and university internships in perinatality (BAC midwife UQTR 2003-2007) will reinforce her convictions about the fundamental benefits of babywearing for both children and parents and the interest of making it more accessible to Quebecers.
She began to transmit the art of babywearing in response to popular demand in 2003 and made people in Quebec discover the pleasure of wearing with slings, then eventually with baby carriers from all over the world.
In 2007, she consolidated her baggage in babywearing by following the first professional babywearing training course given in Quebec by the International Peau à Peau Association. Then, she founded Porter la vie, a non-profit project whose profits are reinvested for the transmission of babywearing.
Since 2009, she has been offering her own professional training in Quebec in order to meet the demand of perinatal workers and future babywearing instructors; training that she shares and refines since then thanks to the collaboration of the participants.
In 2016, she trained at the Canadian Babywearing School and participated in an important international babywearing conference “Bond” in New York. In 2017 and 2018, she traveled to Europe to meet French, Belgian, German and Italian babywearing schools and enrich her approach.
In 2018, she co-founded the Institut national du portage des enfants (INPE), which she chaired for two years before taking over as general manager. In 2019, she set up the Accès portage program there.
She is the author of the Petit manuel du portage published by the INPE in 2021.
