Every new mother thinks her baby is the most beautiful child. But through my most objective lens, I can attest that Atlas Graham Henshaw, the five-month-old son of Laura Henshaw, co-founder of wellness platform KIC, is a good-looking boy. Blue, saucer-like eyes, a peachy complexion and rosy cheeks. It’s a face that any proud mother would, probably, share with the world.
A quick scroll through Henshaw’s Instagram, which has 346,000 followers, reveals Atlas in several adorable moments. There he is with her husband, media agency founder Dalton Henshaw, and the family’s golden retrievers, Bill and Ben. And there’s Atlas visiting Henshaw at KIC, the company she co-founded in 2015 with best friend Steph Claire Smith; at the family’s holiday house on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula; and breastfeeding at home in Melbourne’s inner south-east.
Since his birth last December, Atlas has blended into 33-year-old Henshaw’s public life. “I share a lot of my life online – like probably most of it, sometimes too much,” she says, laughing. “Nothing is off limits.”
That’s about to change. After this Mother’s Day cover shoot for Sunday Life, Atlas will go “dark”. Like many parents in the social media age, Henshaw and Dalton have chosen to no longer show their son’s face online until he’s old enough to decide for himself.
“Obviously with AI and security and privacy, we thought a lot about whether to show his face at all,” Henshaw says. “I don’t want people to recognise him when he’s old enough to talk and understand more than he can now.”
It’s a significant adjustment, and she knows they won’t always get it right. “It’s hard because you take a thousand photos of them … he’s such a huge part of my life.”
Atlas’ last hurrah, at least for a while, is also a chance for Henshaw to talk about KIC’s latest chapter and her changing role there since her son’s birth. Last month, KIC, which began as an online platform, opened its first fitness studio. It follows Henshaw’s decision last year to step back from being the company’s chief executive and move into a strategy-based role.
The decision to step back, while not linked to her pregnancy, made Henshaw scared that she’d “lost part of my identity” in the transition. “I definitely felt like I was more worthy with that title [CEO],” she says. “So that was a lot for me to process.”
At the time, Henshaw, then seven months pregnant, felt herself “pushing away from” motherhood, fearing she would “lose myself and the person I’d built over 32 years, who I’d finally grown to love”. Towards the end of her pregnancy, Henshaw’s concerns multiplied. How would she cope with the lack of sleep and forced slowing down? Would she experience postnatal depression?
“I felt so lost in those days and I was like, ‘Oh my god, what is it going to be like when I have a baby and this is my day?’” she says, gesturing to the domestic scene around her.
She needn’t have worried. Motherhood, she says, has “exceeded every expectation”. And she’s learnt to embrace the “nothingness” of early parenthood, from reading with Atlas at the local library to just staring at him for hours. “Having a baby is a life-altering experience, and it has been the thing that’s finally enabled me to sit and feel content,” she says.
In this vein, for Henshaw’s first Mother’s Day there will be no fancy restaurant lunch, just quality time with Dalton, 32, and Atlas at the beach and taking part in a fun run. “Motherhood has made me feel even more aware of time and how finite it is,” she says. “All the mundane things are what makes it magical.”
For more than a decade, Henshaw’s life has been anything but mundane. After meeting Smith in 2013 when the two were modelling, they created an ebook of nutritious recipes to counter the culture of disordered eating they’d encountered in the fashion industry and on social media.
From there, Keep It Cleaner, as it was known then, evolved into a fitness and wellness app which boomed during the pandemic. There have also been grocery products, which will return later this year under the KIC brand, live events and podcasts. The fitness studios – the first of which is in Cremorne, in inner Melbourne, with plans to expand to other states – is just the latest innovation.
At a launch event for the studio, Henshaw arrives full of pep, her chocolate-coloured hair pulled into a high, bouncy ponytail. It’s her first proper workout since having Atlas, and, she admits later, it was hard. After taking a few months off exercise, she’s started running again, “for 20 minutes” once or twice a week.
Mum’s helping me become a better mother because I see how present she is with him.
Laura Henshaw
She’s taking it slow, practising self-compassion towards her postpartum body and fitness. “I was so hard on myself during pregnancy, more around not being as productive,” she says. “And then when the doctor put him on my chest, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I grew this.’ No wonder I was so tired.”
Until quite recently, Henshaw wasn’t even sure she wanted children. In 2024, she created a seven-part podcast, Do I Want Kids?, canvassing her fears around childbirth, and how motherhood would impact her identity and relationship with Dalton, who took Henshaw’s surname when they married in 2021 (Atlas’ middle name, Graham, is Dalton’s former last name).
Henshaw also appears each week on KIC’s main podcast, KICPod, plus its pregnancy and baby spin-off, KICBump. She says recording so much audio content has given her more confidence to share her opinions, something she drew on when her decision to give birth via elective caesarean blew up online after sharing it on the podcast.
“People were so angry at me,” she says. “I thought it was crazy. I was like, ‘You will never meet my baby. You’ll probably never meet me. You’ll never meet my obstetrician. It’s not going to impact you at all, right?’”
She stands by her decision. After Atlas was born, she learnt that his umbilical cord was twice wrapped around his neck, meaning an emergency C-section would have been the most likely outcome had she tried for a vaginal birth. Despite this, she says her “wonderful birth experience” has sometimes led to feelings of guilt, especially given that one in three Australian women report experiencing birth trauma. “It makes you feel like you can’t share as much,” she says. “I’m sure a lot of women feel like that.”
But if Henshaw has taken a clamshell approach to postpartum life, it doesn’t show. Since having Atlas, she has spoken on the podcasts about everything from equitable parenting to sex while caring for a newborn, including performing a hilarious impersonation of a vibrator. So, does she run the topics – especially the more intimate ones – by Dalton? “No,” she says, laughing. “He doesn’t listen to the podcast, which is a great thing.”
Henshaw’s decision to return to work part-time six weeks after Atlas’ birth has meant life is a happy blur. “That did feel quite overwhelming at the time,” she says of leaving Atlas early on. “Everything I’ve done for the first time after becoming a mum has been hard. And then the next time it’s a little bit easier.”
Indeed, on the morning of our interview, Henshaw answers the door of the family’s 1880s split-level terrace in her maternity bra – a mobile breast pump in each cup. She’s collecting enough milk so that after our chat, she can leave Atlas with her mother, Julie, and speed off to the studio to record the podcast.
Henshaw, the eldest of three sisters, speaks of being close with her mum (her parents divorced when she was 12). “Until I’d seen Mum be grandma, and also experienced motherhood myself, I don’t think I appreciated what she did for me,” she says.
Leaving Atlas with Julie is like sending him “to university”, she says. “She just talks to him all day. Mum’s helping me become a better mother because I see how present she is with him, and I’m not always like that.”
Parenthood has also shifted Henshaw’s relationship with Dalton, and she tells me that the couple sit down each Friday to rate their week and plan the next, especially prioritising time for themselves. Like many new parents, finding time for each other is often the first casualty, a subject she and Smith have discussed on the podcast. Having kids, she says, is “like putting your relationship in a pressure cooker”.
Occasionally, harsh words are exchanged. “You’re touched out, you’re overstimulated,” she says. “Dalt and I are both working, and we have this plan in place, but it’s never gonna go 100 per cent.”
She points to Smith, whose children are aged five, and 11 months, as someone who has helped her through some of the tougher days. “Our friendship – I don’t think it’s ever been stronger,” she says. Smith was the first in their circle to have children, and it took Henshaw becoming a mother herself to realise she “hadn’t empathised with her in the way that I wish I had. And that’s been hard.”
Asked what type of mother she hopes to be, Henshaw pauses. Then she says she wants to show Atlas you can have a career and “do big things”, and teach him to believe in himself. And, like many Millennial mums, she’d like to spend less time on her phone. “I just want to be a good mum. And I don’t even know what that means yet.”
Fashion editor: Penny McCarthy. Hair: Keiren Street using Wella Professional. Make-up: Linda Jefferyes using Dior. Fashion assistant: Jade Myriam.
Stockists: Christensen Copenhagen; Max Mara; Nature Baby; Viktoria & Woods; Zara.
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