Articles & Resources
Stories from moms who have been there, interviews with experts, and the latest research to help you love motherhood even more!
5 Expert Tips to Help You Cope with Negative Thoughts!
2. Do Not Fight The ANTS
Do not think about a pink elephant. No matter what: do not think about a pink elephant. Close your eyes and do not picture a pink elephant. Try it. Impossible right? No matter how hard you tried to avoid thinking about a pink elephant you still thought of it, and pictured it in your mind. ANTS work the same way. The harder you try to fight them, the more they seem to take over. Instead of fighting these thoughts, therapists suggest allowing yourself to have the thought, but reminding yourself that it is just a thought and nothing more. Allow the thought to pass through your mind, acknowledge it, and then try to move on.
Use This Easy Strategy To Cope With Anxious Thoughts
Use this Strategy To Cope With Anxious Thoughts Let me tell you a story of a day when I was feeling anxious. As I was driving in my car, I was thinking about all of the things I had to do. I had to get groceries, remember to buy milk, feed the baby quickly, arrive...
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How To Raise A Securely Attached Child
In the simplest form, attachment means love.
Loving your child best, meeting their needs, and showing up for them every day. It’s as simple as that. So yes, I have a formula fed, sleep trained baby who has a secure attachment.
Let’s quit the mommy shaming and understand that each of us is walking our own journey in motherhood. We all have different kids, so parenting is going to look different. Instead, let’s encourage each other to be loving and kind to ourselves and our children!
This Is Infant Loss
Today, we are sharing a raw and real story of infant loss. This may be a trigger to some of you, so please only read if you are emotionally able to. We are sharing this story to help create awareness, so that the mom reading this who has been through infant loss knows she is not alone, and so that the family who is supporting a loved one going through loss knows what their loved one may be experiencing.
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How To Stop Yelling At Your Kids and Feel More Calm
How To Stop Yelling (And Other Knee-Jerk Reactions) Help me stop yelling at my kids, help me have less knee-jerk reactions, help me stop reacting in the moment. Many people ask me how to stop repeating behaviors that seem to happen automatically. To do this, a level...
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Postpartum Struggles – Could It Be My Thyroid?
With all of the physical, mental, emotional, and lifestyle changes happening postpartum, it’s no wonder thyroid disease in new moms can go unnoticed.
Being a new mom is exhausting. Between sleepless nights, anxieties about raising a baby, and hormonal fluctuations – the struggle is REAL. Perhaps you are recovering from a C-section, having persistent breastfeeding challenges, or battling unexpected postnatal mother or baby concerns (such as infection or colic). Maybe you are trying to navigate what your maternity leave is going to look like, live far away from family support, or are planning when to go back to work. I mean, who wouldn’t be tired?
But in addition to the adjustments that come with having a baby, you may be struggling on a different level. You could be feeling down, exhausted, brain fogged, having difficulty losing weight, struggling to produce breast milk, or even experiencing hair loss.
What Every Exhausted Parent Needs To Know
When you are an exhausted parent, you will receive lots of advice such as you should exercise more, eat better, fix your child’s sleep problems, pay a house cleaner, take vitamins or just get by with coffee and wine. The problem with some of these suggestions is that when you’re exhausted anything extra feels like too much. You are also often very critical of yourself and all the things you perceive you are not doing. For this reason, these suggestions can feel like criticisms.
One tip I regularly share with exhausted parents is the importance of self-compassion or as I prefer to call it self-kindness. Self-compassion means giving yourself the same kindness and care you’d give a friend. Leading self-compassion expert, Dr Kristin Neff, developed self-compassion therapy when she noticed the negative impact her self-critical behaviour had on her wellbeing and performance. Dr Neff’s research has demonstrated that being kind to yourself helps you do better in life and achieve your goals.
This Parenting Tip Will Change Your Life
Of all the things I learned in my training as a clinical psychologist, there is one tip that works best with kids. I learned a lot over the 6 years of training about development and cognitive science but this tip is the one parents need most. This tip helps you change any behaviour better than any other. It can be universally applied to any problem behaviour and better still, this tip is backed by science.
It’s a tip I offer a lot in my clinic and it’s one I use in my home. You can bet that when a problem behavior crops up with one of my children it’s because I haven’t been using this science based tip. Noticing behavior you like starts a positive feedback loop between you and your child and encourages your child to want to work with you.
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Use the PAUSE Method to Help Children With Anxiety
As parents, we would do anything for our kids.
We want them to be happy, carefree, and to love childhood. This is why as parents having a child with anxiety can be so difficult. We want to reason with them, to tell them that their worries are not founded in truths, and that they should just let these worries go. We want to help our children with anxiety know that they are safe and okay.
If you are parenting a child with anxiety, you may find that logically explaining to your child why they don’t need to be worried isn’t helpful. It might feel like everything you are doing isn’t making a difference.
The research behind this says that during times of anxiety, there is a rapid dump of chemicals that goes into your child’s brain for survival. The prefrontal cortex (the logical part) of your child’s brain gets put on hold, while their emotional brain takes over. Basically, this means is that it is VERY HARD for your child to think logically when they are anxious. This is why, when you are trying to reason with them, nothing seems to stick. They aren’t ignoring you!
Instead of reacting to your child’s worries by saying “that won’t happen” or becoming anxious with them, I want to encourage you to try to Our Mama Village’s PAUSE method.