9 Blogs to Help You Navigate Difficult Parenting Moments
Being a parent is a hard job, and unfortunately it doesn’t come with an instruction manual.
For most of us, what we learn about parenting is what we observed from our own families, and maybe some professionally recommended books here and there. But there are so many parts of parenthood that we may not even realize what we need to know until we need to know it.
We know how hard it is to be a parent, and how isolating it can feel to need help but not know where to go for it. As a jumping off point, we’ve gathered all of the parenting resources from our blog to date, and put them together here for you, as a mini parenting resource toolkit.
To support your child’s wellbeing:
Anxiety is a common feeling that we all experience from time to time. However, sometimes that feeling starts to overwhelm and interfere with our daily lives–that’s when it becomes an issue we need support managing. Navigating this with your child or teen is hard! You may not be sure if their behavior is “normal” levels of anxiety, or if they’re showing you that they need help.
Sometimes when anxious, children may begin to avoid certain triggering situations and events, such as peers, teachers, or school itself. The avoidance then serves to maintain the anxiety and to worsen it over time. As a parent, how can you help your child break free of anxiety, out of their mind and into their life? If you’re looking to help your child or teen manage their anxiety in a healthy, productive way, check out:
Similar to anxiety, it can be hard to identify the difference common child and teen behavior, mood changes, and depression that needs treatment. And when you’ve recognized that your child or teen does need help, it may be hard to know where to go. It’s natural to feel overwhelmed, wanting to support them but not quite sure how. For this, we’ve organized 26 different resources for parents whose children are struggling with depression:
Parenting a child with chronic pain is challenging. Not only is it difficult to see your child in pain, but parents often feel helpless, stuck, and unsure of what to do to help ease the pain and mitigate its impacts on their child’s life and daily functioning. For instance, children with chronic pain often begin to miss school, become socially isolated, and feel increasingly depressed and anxious over time. So how can parents help support their children get back to life and functioning even in the face of pain? Start here:
To support your own wellbeing:
Dealing with parenting stress and anxiety is necessary for so many parents, but many don’t have the resources or the time to make changes to cope. It’s not right that parents are spread so thin, and there should be more protections for parents and families coming from our government–and there are a lot of people out there working toward just that. As change comes slowly, parents feel forced to do it all, often not knowing how to rely on their communities to fill in the gaps, which leaves them stuck with bandaid solutions to help lower stress levels–so they can get up again and do it the next day. If you’re struggling with parenting stress and anxiety, we’ve mapped out a few coping skills to help you not feel so drained:
Parenting can already feel like driving somewhere new without a map–when you add in managing chronic pain on top of that, it can be hard to find resources that speak to your experience. The trouble is, when we feel isolated, asking for help becomes harder, when it’s often the very thing we need to do. Working with a therapist can help you manage the potential isolation and grief that comes along with having a chronic illness, and work with you as you gain confidence asking for help and leaning on your support network. Here are some tips for how to manage your role as parent while being realistic about how chronic pain impacts your life:
One of the seven tips to help with parenting stress is to rely on your community. We need community to survive so many things, and parenting is no different. It’s increasingly hard to raise a family without help from your community, whether that be family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, or someone else. But how do you go about cultivating that community? Here are a few tips to start:
To support the wellbeing of your parent/child relationship:
Effective communication is harder than we may think it is! It’s not how we typically learn to listen and communicate. In fact, most of us usually listen in order to respond instead of in order to really hear what the other person is saying. And while it is not usually intended to be harmful or malicious, it can cause misunderstandings, miscommunication, and feelings of being ignored, or resentment. This is especially harmful in conversation with teenagers who rely on you to be a safe space for support! Here’s a guide on what effective communication with teenagers looks like, and tips on how to cultivate it: