About
WELCOME
It’s an honour to meet you, I’m sorry for the difficult circumstances and heartbreak that have led you here. My hope is you can experience the love, care and support you need to heal your beautiful heart and live well. I offer you this with the deep, heartfelt knowing that comes from being an involuntary childless woman too.
My personal story includes deeply desiring motherhood, 10 years trying to conceive (including IVF), leaving the clinic and struggling to find appropriate support. It was devastating, and I knew there must be other women just like me.
After years of healing and growth, I gathered up over 35 years of professional experience as a counsellor, group worker and community education facilitator, and founded the Empty Cradle, a healing and support service for women transitioning to permanent involuntary childlessness.
The Empty Cradle offers online counselling, groups, courses, programs, resources and the power of a loving community. These tender, practical and evidence- based services are designed to help you to heal your heart, feel confident and worthy, nurture connections, explore meaning and purpose, and competently navigate the identity reconstruction and existential life transition from potential mother, to thriving as a childless (or childfree-not-by-choice) woman.
I’m not pretending that’s easy, because for over a decade, I’ve worked exclusively with women navigating the trauma, grief and renewal of involuntary childlessness, and I’ve learned one heck of a lot along the way. I’ve also seen it’s possible to learn how to carry the heart break, expand into our complex, multi-faceted selves, form beautiful connections and live meaningful lives, without our own cherished kids.
Finally, I have an academic interest in women’s transition to permanent involuntary childlessness and our flourishing as adult women. I’m a licensed Gateway Women Reignite Facilitator and a World Childless Week Ambassador based in the Asia/Pacific Region.
If you’d like to connect further, you can subscribe to my newsletter, reach out by the contact form on this site, book in a complimentary, exploratory zoom chat.
We can also find me on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIN
Currently, you can find more of my public work here.
Looking forward to connecting with you and sharing this experience together.
Sarah Roberts
Founder, Counsellor & Trainer, The Empty Cradle, Australia
featured in
Channel 7
ABC Australia
MamaMia
That's Life
Flight Centre
Fertility Society
Daily Mail
ABOUT THE EMPTY CRADLE
The Empty Cradle is a healing and support service for women transitioning to permanent involuntary childlessness.
We support you to grieve the loss of motherhood and thrive as older, childless women. As a childless woman myself, I have deep compassion for the challenges and heartbreak this can entail, and honour every woman’s story as precious and unique.
The Empty Cradle offers online counselling, groups, courses, programs, resources and the power of a loving community. These tender, practical and evidence- based services are designed to support you to heal your heart, feel confident and worthy, nurture connections, explore meaning and purpose, and competently navigate the identity reconstruction and existential life transition from potential mother to thriving as an older childless, or childfree-not-by-choice, woman.
If you’d like to connect further, you can subscribe to my newsletter, reach out by the contact form on this site, book in a complimentary, exploratory zoom chat.
We can also find me on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIN
Currently, you can find more of my public work here.
Looking forward to connecting with you and sharing this experience together.
Together we learn to carry the loss and live well as an older childless woman.
The Empty Cradle offers healing and growth opportunities for women coming to terms with permanent involuntary childlessness.
This means we do not represent women who have chosen to be childfree or mothers. Total respect, you’re awesome, but we need our own space to be seen, validated, and allow space for our hearts to heal. Cause sadly, some of our wounding can stem from when you don’t or can’t get it.
But we also want to stay in loving reciprocal adult relationships where we can.
THE EMPTY CRADLE supports women, who had hoped to be mothers, to grieve the loss and craft lives of connection, meaning and joy.
If we had one wish, it would be for every woman to know the joy of meeting their baby. But if you’re here it means you are facing a certain kind of grief, one that we know and understand. For whatever you’re facing…for whatever you’ve endured… we’re here to support you if motherhood doesn’t happen.
We hold space for you to understand and grieve the losses, makes sense of things, deal with difficult emotions or complex social situations, perhaps even broken relationships. We help you to renew and find yourself again, and craft a beautiful life with or beyond childlessness.
However you got here
We support you to grow (and perhaps even flourish)
As a mature adult woman.
THE EMPTY CRADLE OFFERS
Individual counselling and mentoring for involuntary childless women
In person and online group workshops, webinars, courses, and group programs with additional individual support
Community education, conference presentations and public speaking
Media articles, podcasts and other resources
In-service professional training & consultations for the ART sector, general clinicians, counsellors and therapists
Public speaking and conference presentations
Other (as requested)
ABOUT ME, SARAH ROBERTS
FOUNDER, THE EMPTY CRADLE
Hello you,
Welcome to this website
I am so sorry that things haven’t or are unlikely to work out as you wanted around motherhood
My hope for you is that you can find the info, the care, the healing and the wisdom you might need to heal your heart and live well with involuntary childlessness.
I know it can be a really dark, hard, painful and isolating journey.
And I also know that you’re not alone
And that it’s do-able.
I know, because I did it too
And there is a time when my younger self probably didn’t believe that I could, can or did.
The Empty Cradle seeks to support and guide you through this experience as well.
To do this, I have re-purposed my professional skills, lived experience and further study / academic inquiry, to craft services and programs that are designed to heal your heart and live well, or in spite of, permanent involuntary childlessness
Come join us, as we work this out together
Come join us, as we work this out together
Warmly, Sarah
Find us on
We look forward to connecting with you.
FEATURED
Services and resources
Any questions?
Feel free to email The Empty Cradle directly.