A career dedicated to improving how we understand and talk about mental health, wellness, and the path to parenthood.
Get to know Riley Blanton, MS, LCMFT, PMH-C
Perinatal mental health has been the foundation of her career, but it’s not the whole picture. Through therapy, writing, speaking, and education, Riley works to make the information she’s learned more accessible to clinicians and the public, and contribute to deeper conversations around mental health, parenting, and family life.
Over the past 6 years, her work has expanded beyond the therapy room into published writing, conference presentations, guest lectures, and educational resources that center around her experiences as a successful business owner, mother of 5, and advocate for reproductive rights. While each platform reaches a different audience, they all serve the same purpose: helping people better understand mental health and how it goes hand in hand with the way we live and work.
Riley’s focus has always been on how mental health, parenting, and wellness are understood by the masses, and why the way we talk about them matters.
Featured In
- Pregnancy and postpartum
- Postpartum planning for couples
- Perinatal OCD
- Perinatal, infant, and child loss
- Infertility and fertility challenges
- Disability parenting
- Foster care and adoption
- Termination for medical reasons (TFMR)
- Abortion support
- NICU parenting
- Birth trauma
As a therapist:
- The adjustment to parenthood
- Reproductive decision-making
- Trauma and family systems
- Life transitions and grief
- Wellness resources and product reviews
- Therapy modalities and interventions
- Parenting and family life
As a content writer:
Areas of Focus
While she has years of clinical experience and ongoing advanced training in perinatal mental health, Riley’s unique understanding of this work is also rooted in the life she’s built outside of it.
In the spaces between full-time clinical work and content writing, she completed her Master’s of Science degree, became certified in perinatal mental health through Postpartum Support International (PMH-C), and built her own therapy practice from the ground up (which now operates virtually across two states, KS and MO, with two physical locations in Wichita!). She also balances this with raising five children and continuing to develop educational content through writing, teaching, and continuing education courses for therapists.
Along the way, she’s also navigated her own personal experiences of perinatal loss, as well as the foster care system and adoption process, which have informed her ability to support clients and fellow clinicians within the nuances of reproductive mental health.
The experiences that shaped her perspective
Over the years, Riley’s work as a therapist and business owner has shaped how she thinks about accessibility in mental health care. For her, it has meant building a values-aligned practice where decisions about staffing, services, and specialties intentionally support both clients and clinicians, rather than scale alone. That structure allows her to prioritize behind-the-scenes support for her team, reducing burnout and, in turn, improving client care. Riley is consistently assessing whether her practice, Holding New Therapy, is upholding the values they set, both internally within their team and across the community as a whole.
This people-first approach includes offering services that actually reflect the needs of the community. For instance, Holding New Therapy is working to expand the definition of reproductive mental health to match the skills of their team, with a therapist specializing in family reunification therapy after foster care and separation, and another therapist providing bilingual services, expanding cultural accessibility and services that prioritize social justice.
Her experiences within the practice continue to shape how she thinks about this work, not just as a specialty, but as something deeply connected to access, systems of care, and the real lives people are living inside of them.
Her experience as a
therapy practice owner
- Master’s of Science from Friends University
- Licensed Clinical Marriage and Family Therapist (LCMFT)
- Specialization and certification in reproductive and perinatal mental health (PMH-C)
- Owner of Holding New Therapy, a perinatal-specific private practice in Kansas and Missouri
- Founder of Kansas Reproductive Therapy Center, a company providing on-demand continuing education courses for mental health providers
- Creator of Postpartum Brain, an online perinatal resource hub
- Published writer and contributing author with features in Health.com, Parents.com, VerywellMind, VerywellFamily, and various publications
- Conference speaker and university guest lecturer
- Former Communications Director for the Kansas State Chapter of Postpartum Support International
- Former adjunct professor of Psychology at Friends University
For a complete overview, please download her CV below.