About: Christie Lazo

Christie Lazo

Christie Lazo immigrated to Canada with her family at the age of 7 from Lima, Peru and currently resides in the Toronto area. She is a dedicated mother of one and a career-driven digital marketing strategist by profession, with more than 10+ years in the communications industry specializing in higher education. Additionally, she is a decolonization, equity, diversity and inclusion educator with an expertise in parent and childhood education.

Christie Lazo is currently completing her MA Degree is Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Learn more about her research below.

As a community organizer, Christie is the founder of “Diversity in Dufferin County“, where her goal is to celebrate and nurture diversity, equity and inclusion within Dufferin County, and a founding member of the Dufferin County Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Community Advisory Committee (2020-22).

She is the host of the Vida With Christie Podcast which educates and supports parents in raising aware and empowered children. Christie began podcasting in 2018, prior to the “big boom” of podcasting in 2020, as she recognized the potential in the medium and wanted to share her parenting insights beyond blogging. The Vida With Christie Podcast reaches international audiences and is recorded in both English and Spanish. Through the episodes, Christie shares her experience breaking intergenerational cycles throughout the many aspects of parenting and as an individual for be a better parent to her child. In addition, Christie speaks with experts with academic, professional and lived experience within the episodes to share a variety of insights within the parenting space.

We as parents have the incredible super power of influencing the future with how we raise our children.

Christie Lazo

During her downtime, Christie prioritizes spending time with family, travelling home to Peru, playing video games with her daughter, or checking out a trendy new restaurant with her husband. As self care, she loves to cuddle up with her Aussiedoodle fur-babies while sipping on tea and reading a good book or binge watching the latest streaming releases. 

Research

Christie Lazo’s research interest is in the pedagogical approaches of decolonizing motherhood and achieving liberation through breaking intergenerational cycles. As her academic interests stem from her own lived experiences, Christie is influenced by an autoethnographic research approach, with first-generation millennial and Gen Z immigrant parents as her primary demographic.

Christie is a trauma-informed researcher who examines intergenerational cycles of parenting and how one generation impacts the next, with a specific focus on the cycle breaker millennial (and Z) generations. Specific to her life experience, Christie explores the bi-cultural aspects which trigger many first generation immigrants to self-reflect, (un)learn, and more with the purpose of being parents to their children who focus on their mental health and well-being, while raising aware and empowered children. All while recognizing that many, if not most, of the traumatic parenting practices applied by previous generation have a deep colonial foundation.

We are no longer raising obedient and submissive children.

Christie Lazo

The millennial generation has subscribed to gentle, positive and other similar approaches to parenting without recognizing that many of the practices and thoughts behind them come from Indigenous approaches to parenting. While many of these more gentle parenting practices are presented as “new findings”, they are simply un- and decolonial ways of parenting.

Through practicing decolonial parenting methods, and breaking intergenerational cycles, we are able to heal our wounds and those of our inner child. As we completely this work, Christie’s theory is that we actively practice and reach liberation within one self and through this liberation is extended to our communities and beyond.

Academic Achievements

Current

Christie Lazo is currently completing her MA Degree is Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto. Christie’s academic research interests are in the pedagogical approaches to decolonizing motherhood and achieving liberation through breaking intergenerational cycles.

Past

Christie Lazo holds an Honours BA Degree in Communication Studies and Sociology and a Certificate of Proficiency in Spanish Language from York University (Toronto, Canada). Her research interests expanded from consumer culture and Latinx representation in the media to immigrant cultural sociology and migrant rights.

Her Honours BA Degree was followed by a Post-Graduate Certificate in Publicity and Public Relations from University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies.

Previous to her university experience, Christie graduated from Algonquin College (Ottawa, Canada) with a Law Clerk Diploma.

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