
Summertime, Summertime
Almost every day, I ended up feeling like it wasn’t summer at all. And I missed it. I missed the break and the carefree window of time we get together once a year. I kept finding myself thinking about how the girls are now solidly in what is referred to as the ‘nostalgia bump’, which is the window of time where the core memories that define your childhood are established. When they are older, they will have memories from when they were under age 6 or 7, but those will be much fewer in comparison to those that are set between ages 8 and 15. All those memories of summer for me? Nostalgia bump. Favorite songs from when you were a kid? Nostalgia bump.
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The Village People
Despite what the internet tells us, you are not supposed to be everything to your kids. Children benefit from having a variety of adult models in their life, each serving a slightly different purpose and meeting a different need. The kids who do the best in the long run are those that have fostered connection and relationship with adults outside their family. This can be tricky for parents to accept because even if you are the actual expert in the thing they need help with, they may not want to hear it or accept it from you. The same words coming from a different adult may be heard and absorbed more readily, specifically because there is more distance in that relationship. The dynamics, expectations, and emotional vulnerability is not the same as it is within the parent/child relationship, and that is ok! It isn’t personal (even if might feel that way). Rather, it is a reflection of the fact that your child wants you to remain their parent – their cheerleader – their soft-landing place. Not their teacher, or coach, or even their therapist.
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Who Needs Sleep?
There is an old Barenaked Ladies song that goes: “Who needs sleep? Well, you’re never gonna get it!” When my kids were babies, and I was up every 90 minutes with one or another child, I sang that song to myself on repeat in some bizarre masochistic ritual. My uncle would sing it to me as a silly way to comment on the sheer exhaustion of those first few years. Even now, being awoken in the middle of the night triggers my husband in a way that only makes sense if you are a parent to kids who can struggle with sleep.
It seems like sleep is the holy grail of parenting young children. As a pediatric psychologist with two decades of experience I have had plenty of referrals from desperate parents wanting help to get their child to sleep on their own for the whole damn night! I also know firsthand the exquisite torture that is a child who struggles with sleep. Each of my girls has had their difficulties with sleep, and I have definitely twisted myself into physical pretzels to ensure they would find their way to the land of nod. I vividly remember spending the last six weeks of my pregnancy, laying on the floor with my hand through the crib rails to help soothe an agitated baby because of how much trouble she had with self-soothing.
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You’re Crushing It
There is this idea in psychology that I’ve written about called the good enough mother. DW Winnicott coined the term and it is worth revisiting. Being a good enough parent doesn’t just mean being accepting of your mistakes, it also means being accepting of your innate humanness. Being human includes being wounded. In order for us to abandon the pressure we get from society to do more for our kids, be better parents, cherish every moment, or take a time machine and redo those first few years, we have to accept that our wounds and imperfections are what make us good enough for our kids.
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A Change is Gonna Come
The discomfort that change brings doesn't have to overwhelm, even though it feels uncertain.
Unpredictable environments cede self-doubt, since our brains will seek an explanation for the uncertainty and in the absence of an answer our minds turn inward. Again, this is particularly true for children and teenagers, who do not yet have a fully formed sense of self that is secure or strong enough to push against creeping self-doubt. Little kids and teens are still figuring out who they are and how they influence the world around them, with a strong lean toward believing that they have undue influence on their world. This ego-centric perspective is extremely adaptive in a lot of ways for childhood and development, but it puts children and adolescents at risk of becoming insecure when in unpredictable environments.
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Digital Underground
Technology has been developed to activate the pleasure centers of our brains, which is why it works so well. When we are upset our brains release cortisol, the stress hormone, along with other neurotransmitters that make it difficult to think clearly, problem solve, or even use language effectively. The hard work of soothing that distress metabolizes those chemicals, and ultimately releases others that allow us to feel more centered and secure. It also establishes new pathways in our brains for how to settle when upset, how to problem solve in the face of frustration or disappointment, and how to get to calm again. When we use technology, our brains fire pleasure chemicals which quiet everything else and ultimately rob us of the opportunity to develop any new pathway whatsoever. It also prohibits us from traveling the pathways that already exist in our brains for coping, making those less effective.
Now, to be clear, it is not to say that sometimes we need a shortcut to calm – we do. Mostly it is about using this shortcut judiciously and strategically so that is effective, while not undermining the necessary learning required for healthy emotional development. Just like with the learning curve for driving, we expect there to be a learning curve with technology, but we can’t expect our kids to start on that curve until their brains are ready. The rules and limits we have in place now help to set the stage for putting them on that curve ready to learn. It’s a way to leverage Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development…
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The Care and Keeping of Mommy
This desire to keep things steady and consistent is rooted in the idea of routines being inherently calming to our minds. We know that our brains are hard wired for predictability and are more readily soothed when we can anticipate what’s coming. This opens the door for greater emotional regulation and increased resiliency. It’s particularly true during times of turmoil and distress – the more things stay the same, the easier it is to tolerate the things that are different. It’s a version of Piaget’s assimilation and accommodation.
As I was preparing for my time off, I had these ideas about routine at the forefront of my thinking. I focused almost exclusively on working to keep the girls’ lives as consistent as possible, which includes having them see their mom as strong and capable. I was concerned though, because I knew I was not going to be myself…And then I realized that there is just as much value in having them see me as needing help, as being vulnerable – things that I don’t show them very often, or ever…
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Dance With Somebody Who Loves You
Parenting books don’t talk about moments like this; when your kid is in need of your emotional support and yet your well is running dry.
I tend to sing when stressed. The sillier and more outlandish the better. It is the fastest way for me to discharge my negative energy and get back to center. So that’s what I did as my daughter was sobbing, “MOMMA!!” over and over. I began to sing Bohemian Rhapsody, changing the words to match the situation that was happening in front of me. My daughter didn’t immediately find it as regulating as I did, but as I started to hug her tightly and dance with her – dipping her periodically, she stopped crying and I could feel her relax in my arms. Then that made space for us to talk a little bit about what she could do to help herself.
So, what do you do as a parent when your child needs help to soothe and you are just not feeling it?
The truth is that you focus on yourself for a moment. You find ways to quickly and efficiently fill your tank so you can make it to the next rejuvenation station. Things like taking a breath…from your belly not your shoulders; or naming your feelings; or narrating your problem-solving ideas (“Mommy is super stressed right now and feeling a little bit overwhelmed so she’s going to take a few breaths to try and get back into thinking brain.”), all serve to rapidly increase your capacity to cope temporarily. You can also take a couple deep drinks of water, do a 10-30 second dance break – with or without music!, or sing your favorite song since these do the same thing while also activating higher cortical areas of your brain. My Bohemian Rhapsody mashup is another example of how you can make it your own and add a touch of humor to the mix, enhancing the calming effect…
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The Right Answer
I just came from a classroom Valentine’s party and it was incredibly heartwarming to see all these elementary students get excited about making paper heart ornaments and playing Valentine’s bingo. The care and joy they showed while distributing the goodies and cards they put together for each other stood out against the backdrop of conflict and animosity that is running rampant in our larger world. I found myself lingering in the room, reluctant to leave, knowing that there was likely some new devastating piece of information waiting for me in the real world beyond those doors…
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The More, The Merrier
Children crave connection and acceptance. They look to their caregivers to help inform the way they think about, feel about, and see themselves. If they feel consistently loved, accepted, and cared for by their parents (and other caregivers), they feel secure with themselves and in their world. That’s true no matter how many kids there are in your family, if your house is a mess, you yell more than you would like, or you need to give 768 reminders to your 10-year-old to put their shoes on. As a parent it can be so easy to lose touch with this foundational concept, and the distance from it can seem to drift further away every time your family grows, yet its simplicity is what I love about it…
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Get In The Zone
In its basic form, the Zone of Proximal Development is the space between what the child is currently capable of on their own, and what they can do with support/guidance from an adult. It suggests that children are able to acquire new skills by working with, or even observing, an expert (typically the parent, but it can be a teacher, sibling, friend, anyone really) as long as that expert starts from the child’s current strengths and capabilities. If you start at too advanced a level you are outside the zone and you’ll lose the learning opportunity. The relationship and connection you, the expert, has with the child allows you to know what they can do already, so you know where to start...
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I’m Good Enough
At baseline, it is HARD to be a parent, this increases with each additional child or stressor you add into your life. It is difficult to feel sure of yourself, especially in the midst of the day-to-day chaos and frenzy. It’s a real challenge to feel as though what you are doing with your children is the ‘right’ thing when so many of the dilemmas you face are a mosaic of right and wrong, good and bad.
One in three women struggle in the postpartum adjustment period with formal postpartum mood disruptions (depression, anxiety, or OCD), while up to 85% of women have experienced postpartum baby blues. If you expand out beyond the postpartum period (meaning beyond that first year post birth), how many parents struggle to feel confident and secure in their role? In 2024, the Surgeon General indicated that parental stress is a public health issue impacting the health and well-being of children as well as their parents, so we know that it is a considerable number of folks struggling…
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Morning Rush
I know the advantages of planning and execution of steps toward a goal, both from my personal life and also from my training as an educational psychologist. So, providing concrete supports to my kids for what we call executive function, has been a priority for me as a parent. It has also helped save my sanity on more than one occasion. Executive function is an umbrella term for a bunch of different skills that reside generally in our frontal lobe. It includes things like goal setting, initiation of tasks, organization and planning (of time, tasks, etc.), impulse control, and flexibility (of thoughts, emotions, responses). It improves with age, meaning that toddlers and preschoolers have basically nonexistent executive function while teenagers have more developed brains and thus more developed executive function skills. My kids are neither age, and so they fall in the ‘emerging’ zone of executive function. Their brains are still working on growing into the prefrontal cortex and expanding sophisticated neocortical functionality. What that means for me is that they still need regular reminders and scaffolding for how to transition between activities, to ignore the sparkly distraction in front of them in favor of the bigger goal, or how to regulate their emotional experiences so they can stay focused and on task…
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He Belongs With Me!
Transitional objects are quite common in childhood and incredibly adaptive. It comes out of the work of British pediatrician DW Winnicott (well, he was a pediatrician who later became one of the first male child psychoanalysts of the early 20th century). There are a lot of things that Winnicott said that remain important, however the piece that is most relevant here is his idea of the Transitional Object. Essentially, these are things that a child assigns meaning to in order to aid their movement from wholly dependent to more and more independent from their parent. It is a representational object that is assigned meaning – usually of the way they feel when with their parent - and allows for comfort and soothing when alone. Toddlers will often use this psychological tool with abandon, becoming highly attached to any old thing (hello sticks, rocks, wrappers). As children get older they will frequently let go of many of them (literally and figuratively!) but tend to hold on to one or two ‘special’ transitional objects…
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A New Year
New Year’s has long been my favorite holiday. There’s something so appealing about the promise of a new start; a clean slate. With so few obligations attached to New Year’s, it’s like a treat after the intensity of the holidays that immediately precede it. I happen to adore holidays like that – those that carry little to no weight of obligatory tradition.
For me New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day stand out as a marker for how we want to walk into the new year. If I am honest, I kind of have this feeling at the start of every month (if I am really honest, I feel a small version of this every day…). The idea that we can begin again. Fresh. Clean. Anew. I am so drawn to that concept. Maybe the appeal is being able to shed the burdens that have been rubbing callouses, or maybe it’s the promise of the possibility of what CAN be…
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Making Spirits Bright
As I sit here in the quiet of the early morning, twinkling lights on the tree, paper snowflakes hanging from the ceiling, a lush mantle, a bin full of Christmas books for my girls to read at their leisure, and tiny scraps of wrapping paper strewn around the floor, I have come to realize it has always been important to me to build traditions and foster memories that are gilded in magic. Childhood is a time of such wonder and curiosity, and the holiday season leans in to these in a major way. It is wonder that allows kids to be open to new things, to explore. And exploration offers new perspectives. This year I can feel the power of that wonder more acutely. My oldest child is approaching the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence, while the others are right behind her. We know that our time is limited for when our girls shift into becoming part of the magic, not just recipients of it. I find that I have mixed feelings about this change. There is something so incredible about being a magic maker for your family, however it is equally incredible being surrounded by magic. The first Christmas I had without magic, and the way I longed for it, still stands out in my memory. It wasn’t that I was upset about understanding the reality, I just longed for the time when magic was my reality. I suspect this is a piece of what drives me to protect it so fiercely for my girls…
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The Kindness of Strangers
It always takes me by surprise – the small kindnesses of strangers. The way it can just touch the most vulnerable part of you in exactly the tender way you needed. My daughter got hurt at school and I had been holding all of these feelings about it – fear, anger, worry – without fully realizing it until the scheduler at the doctor’s office offered me the exact right moment of kindness. I felt the tears rise and the waves of emotion roll through. This woman likely had dozens of calls with parents this morning, and she could have passed over the moment without the tenderness offered. Yet she didn’t and in so offering that small kindness allowed me to heal the papercuts on my heart. I realized that for those of us that didn’t grow up surrounded by compassionate support, or those that were raised without the understanding that who we are is all we need to be loved, these small kindnesses by strangers are true gifts. There is that old saying “If you can be anything, be kind”. For me, this is what that translates into. Being kind in an unsolicited way tells the recipient that they are exactly right as they are. They are good enough – just because they exist. Everybody craves this, but for those of us who did not grow up with this message, it is a salve for a wounded heart.
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Story Time
How do you begin to recount a moment in time?
Is it the images, the sounds, the feelings you now associate with that story? Is it the visceral experience that is conjured upon reflecting, or when you come across a reminder? So many lifetimes pass us by in the meantime and yet so many memories are there ready to transport you back to that moment.
It happens to all of us too. We are reminded of an event long ago and the memories are filled with the feelings that were present at the time, whether they be pleasant or less so… and the feelings help remind us of the roundness of that experience. They offer us glimpses back into the past as well as brief reflections of who we are now. We all have these stories, these constellations of memories that have shaped our individual sense of self. The healing comes from telling these stories and learning from them.
The experiences that we have shared since March 2020 have served to shape our collective selves. There is still so much healing to be done, so many stories to tell and remember, that it can be hard to know how to begin – or where. So, start small and with people that support you. Give voice to your experiences so that the story resides not only in yourself but is offered up to others for the sake of learning – learning how you changed; learning how you persevered; learning how you got better at something or learned to stay away from other things; learning how to be more you.
If you share your story, you share yourself…and you may just find the healing you deserve.
The Best of Intentions
It’s something isn’t it?
To set an intention with the most hopeful outcome desired. To have goals for yourself or your life and strive for that ideal result. And yet, all too often we fall short, just missing that mark and then we are faced with a choice – do we celebrate the effort or chide the missed bar? It seems that so often, for so many, and at an increasing rate, the intentions we set, the goal markers we place, slide ever further from attainment, taunting us to doubt ourselves. To see ourselves as failures for not hitting the target.
Imagine what it would feel like to claim victory in these moments. To realize you weren’t going to reach your goal, and still ring the bell for how hard you worked to get as close as you did. To honor the courage and strength you mustered to move yourself a few paces along the path, even if the view didn’t change in as striking a way as you had initially hoped.
Close your eyes and allow yourself to be filled with the joyfulness and pride that could offer in such a vulnerable moment.
This is what belief in oneself feels like; what it means to have resilience and connection to inner strength. You can get there…you already have a secret cache of it hiding somewhere in your psyche. The challenge is excavating strategically enough to break through the vulnerable parts without breaking down.
When you set your intentions for this season, or consider your goals for this next chapter, be aspirational, be realistic, be courageous. Most of all though…know that you are victorious regardless of the outcome. All because you challenged yourself to grow, and took action to make that a reality, in whatever capacity you could.
A Change Is Gonna Come
Change…it is ever present and a constant in most of our lives. Yet, somehow we all have a visceral response to change in our environment. For some, change is seen as exciting and full of opportunity or hope. For others, change - no matter the kind - is seen as scary and full of uncertainty. The thing about change that makes it so full of feelings is that it forces us to confront the limits of our control on our world. That, in turn can be immensely challenging for some us, thrilling for others of us. The way in which we position ourselves in relation to control/power offers hints as to how we will navigate changes in our world.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to control your immediate environment. Indeed, having a measure of control - a measure of power over what happens in our life - helps us feel the world is a predictable place on which we can rely. This predictability is inherently soothing to our brains and thus ourselves. The more we can feel we have a say in what happens in our life, the more confident we feel about effecting positive outcomes in said life and ultimately, the more we believe we can rely on ourselves. The thing is, that this idea of control, of power, of self-reliance and being able to have a say in how our life goes…it is way more about mindset than anything else. It is our interpretation of the events in our life that leads us to feel we are directing or being directed, since we all know it isn’t easy to actually control the world around us...
Now, it is not as easy as just thinking differently…but it kind of is as simple as shifting your thought process. Moving away from seeing change as scary and full of danger. Rather, trying each time to approach change with openness; giving yourself reminders of why this change will help you move closer to your ultimate goals - or maybe encouragement that it will help you continue on a path away from problematic patterns; beginning to believe that you will be able to manage the inevitable ripples that come with any shift in a life’s path. All of these adjustments to your mindset can allow for a different way to be in the face of change and open the doors to even more opportunity. Over time it becomes our new mindset and our mindset can become our worldview. This has a significant hand in how we interpret the moments we experience…ascribing joy, pain, hurt, excitement, or any other emotional valence to our life.
So, what do you say? Maybe the next change that rolls into your life will be the one that you will approach with greater acceptance. Now, that is a change to look forward to!