I’m going to try and keep this post short and to-the-point. A handy toolkit to ease the stress of mothering, regardless of the “brand” of mothering (working, stay-at-home, by fathers, you name it). This is a summary of the gems that emerged from my appearance this week with Mallika Chopra and Sarah Ripard at the California Women’s Conference. The audience loved what we shared, so I wanted to share it more widely.
First, why do so many of us tend towards feeling overwhelmed with the stress of mothering these days? Since humans are by nature meaning-making creatures, it helps a great deal to shine a light of context on any problem. In this case it helps us to not feel crazy, or incompetent, or alone in our suffering!
Here are The Big Three as I call them: overarching reasons for what seems like an epidemic of anxiety that thrums at the heart of parenting: (more…)
Authoritative parenting takes a longer view and is marked by the parents’ decisive yet respectful leadership role and their focus on connection, and builds an ever-deepening bond of loving trust between them and their children. It features the parent as a calm, loving authority figure who is grounded in his or her life, which is not balanced on the child as its fulcrum. 
One of the most frequent questions I get is, How do I get my child to listen to me? What lingers in the roots just beneath this question is, How do I get her to respect me? The two are intimately entwined. As so often happens with Life’s sticky questions, sometimes we can unstick things a bit by turning the question around: rather than How can I get my child to listen to me, we can get far more traction with How can I make myself more “listenable”?
