Dr Brenda Heyworth is a child and family psychiatrist who’s transformed her knowledge and experience into a parenting approach that makes sense. She’s developed a ‘Jungle’ analogy for understanding children’s emotions and behaviour with implications for understanding adults as well.
An entertaining speaker, her presentations and workshops are popular amongst parents, foster carers, teachers and guidance officers. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she brings humour and practical strategies to the serious issue of children’s behaviour.
Dr Heyworth graduated from the University of Newcastle with a Bachelor of Medicine in 1994 and is a Fellow of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (R.A.N.Z.C.P.) with further qualification in the specialised field of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
She’s provided personalised advice for thousands of families since setting up her private practice on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland in 2004. Fascinated by the complexity of the human mind and body, she is excited to live in an era when scientific understanding of the brain can support our understanding of that most personal of experiences: our emotions.
She is a wife and a mother who cherishes time at home with her family, harvesting tomatoes from the vegetable patch and helping her husband replant the rainforest around their hinterland home. She enjoys the native wildlife that visits the garden each morning before heading off to meet the ‘jungle’ wildlife at work. Over the course of her career, she’s met plenty of monkeys. She even admits to having been one herself before adding with a smile, “But don’t we all have a little monkey on the inside?”