As we approach Mother’s Day, I want to take a moment to reflect on spirit of this holiday which exists beyond the greeting cards and the Sunday brunches. My daughter is 7 this year, and I’ve been searching for ways to help this holiday bring lasting and meaningful...
3 Ways to Practice Positive Parenting
Parenting is a beautiful, rewarding, and challenging undertaking. It’s easy to second guess yourself as a parent, and you sometimes wonder if you are doing all you can to give your child the love and guidance she needs. The good news is that we all have the tools we...
Parent Strategy Sessions
Does this sound like you? You know in your heart you’re a good parent. Sometimes you wish you had a little more patience, a little more confidence. You feel like you could use a few new parenting tricks up your sleeve. You want to become the parent you know you can...
Love, Process, and Letting Go: What I Learned as My Daughter Made Valentines
“It will take one hundred years!” I said a bit (okay, a lot) immaturely to my 5 year-old daughter mimicking her usual phrase. She wanted to trace, cut out, decorate, and write names on 19 homemade heart-shaped valentines for her nursery school classmates. Wanting to...
Parenting: Are You a Fixer or a Guide?
It seems to me that well-meaning parents lean towards one of two strategies (but often do both): being a fixer or being a guide. Neither is wrong. Like I said, these are what caring parents do. The trick is getting the right ratio of guiding to fixing, and knowing the...
Beyond Postpartum: The Surprising Benefits of Being a Mom
Writer and mother extraordinaire, Lynn Shattuck, recently wrote a great piece for her blog reflecting on her postpartum experience. It was hugely popular because it hit home for many women. It brought back some memories for me, too. It took me a few weeks to regroup...
Allowing Ourselves to Feel
Note from Hannah: I'm pleased to feature this guest post by Jennifer Barbour of anotherjennifer.com as part of the New Perspectives Series on mental health, wellness, and just being a human. Enjoy! I could feel my eyes start to sting as I fought back tears. Should I...
Hopes for Myself as a Mother
It’s an odd place to get parenting advice, but the best story regarding mothering I ever heard was from Penn Jillette on Marc Maron’s podcast WTF. Penn talked about how his mother’s philosophy was that she loved and cherished her children for who they were, from the...
What Does it Mean to Be Self-Assured?
Can being self-assured help us to go boldly into unknown life territory? This is a question I've been thinking about lately. But what does it mean to be self-assured? To me, it seems like a very desirable quality, something to cultivate in oneself and in our children....