This post was written by Karen Libber Fishbein, LCSW. She is a therapist and mother who lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two daughters.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Surgeon General declared parental stress an urgent public health issue. He discussed the “dizzying pace” of the world as one of the main factors behind this stress.

As a mother of daughters ages eleven and almost nine, this statement certainly resonated with me. I find that I’m frequently feeling stressed, run down, and frazzled as I manage many of the components of day-to-day life.

I rarely felt this way before having children.  

When I think back to my childhood, I don’t recall my parents being under this level of pressure. Though it was still stressful parenting at that time (the 1980’s), parents didn’t have to contend with the intricacies of the present-day digital world. Many of the strategies that worked well for parents decades ago in the analog world no longer work in the world we inhabit today. That leaves parents who are trying their best to stay afloat feeling confused, overwhelmed, and burned out!

When our daughters were two and five, the stress levels of modern parenthood were more than my husband and I could bear, and they began to negatively impact our marriage. We began couples therapy at that time (this was spring of 2018) in the hopes that our relationship struggles would improve. We ended our therapy in the spring of 2024, and what transpired over the course of the six years we were in treatment is truly miraculous. 

Not only did the couples’ journey dramatically improve our marriage, it also trickled down to the kids. Once the marriage was stronger, the girls’ behavior, moods, and general well-being improved.

Children, particularly those who are sensitive and empathic like both of our daughters, can sponge off of their parents’ mental states. If the parents are in pain, the kids may take on this pain unknowingly. 

The best way I can describe the process of couples therapy is that it’s a highly emotionally charged excavation of years of pent-up resentments and relational challenges. It is not easy work to do, but it is important work. For us, many sessions invoked painful feelings and realizations. My husband and I each had no idea how much unprocessed emotion had built up over the years.  Unsurprisingly, many of these relational struggles predated our relationship with each other and were directly associated with childhood attachment patterns.  

Couples therapy provided a safe space for us to explore all of these dynamics and it helped each of us to understand how they impact our present lives. 

Today our family unit feels healthier and much more stable than it did prior to engaging in couples therapy. While an improved family system doesn’t take away the stress of modern parenthood, it certainly makes it easier to weather the storms. I’m a firm proponent of both individual and couples therapy and believe both can be vital resources during the trials and tribulations of parenthood. After receiving both forms of treatment myself, I can honestly say that the couples work has had a more profound, lasting impact on the family system than did the individual work alone. 

One of my favorite seasoned therapists, Dr. Irvin Yalom, wrote an inspirational book called “The Gift of Therapy.” I read it a couple years ago and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the practice of psychotherapy. I titled this article “The Gift of Couples Therapy,” in the hopes that it may inspire anyone, particularly parents, who may be ambivalent about the idea of therapy to pursue couples therapy. The therapy that my husband and I received has truly been a gift, and I’m hopeful it will help our family going forward and for generations to come.  

7 ways to find community while parenting.

If you have just had a baby—or if you have had several—and you feel lonely, it is ironic to say, but you are not alone.

Mothering—or parenting if you are not a mother—can be very lonely.

When they are first on parental leave, and later, on holidays and weekends, parents often find themselves on their own for long stretches of the day with their babies. And as much as they love their babies, it can be hard.

The routine—feeding, changing, dressing, playing, putting down for a nap—can become tedious. A parent can long for a break or some adult companionship.

As Lucy Jones says in her book Matrescence, there is a reason you feel this way.

We are not meant to parent alone.

From the time we were non-human primates, and on through the millennia of human existence, parenting was a group activity. Aunts, uncles, cousins, older siblings, grandmothers, and others helped with parenting. They were there to take a baby, watch a child, discipline a teenager.

Parents did not stay alone in their caves or huts or houses while they were taking care of their babies and children.

We are not wired for parenting alone.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a cultural anthropologist, writes about this in her book Mothers and Others. She says that we are “heir to an ancient legacy endowing (us) with a penchant for cooperation” (p 65). Our primate ancestors, Homininae, were different from other primates in this way.

It is Hrdy’s hypothesis that Homininae grew up depending on a large range of caretakers.

Among current-day hunter-gatherer populations studied by the anthropologist Mel Konner, Hrdy says, babies are held at least 25 percent of the time by members of the community other than their mothers. When not hunting or gathering, Konner observed that babies were passed around from person to person, being kissed, sung to, bounced, entertained, encouraged, and addressed in conversational tones for long “conversations” (p. 76).

Among modern-day Central African peoples who forage for food, mothers share their babies with others in the community right after birth and during their infancy and toddlerhood. Among two such groups, the Efe and the Afa peoples, after babies are born and before the mother’s milk comes in, newborns are comforted by other women in the community by being allowed to suck on their nipples—whether the women are lactating or not. Similarly, babies are fed by lactating women until the mother’s own milk supply comes in.

In the Efe community, babies average 14 different caretakers in their first few days of life.

Similar patterns of shared caretaking of infants have been observed in traditional societies all over the globe.

Mothers in other societies, including our own, need this too—maybe not 14 people—but someone to hold and comfort her baby when she’s exhausted after childbirth, someone to nurse her baby while she waits for her milk to come in, someone to fill in if she’s having trouble with nursing. And what mother does not long for others to show her exactly how to nurse? Or someone to hold her baby close when she needs a break?

In our culture, babies are sent to the newborn nursery to lie in plastic isolettes while their mothers rest after delivery. Newborns may go hungry for hours while their mothers wait for their milk to come in. Some babies become dehydrated because their mothers want to nurse but don’t have sufficient milk supply. Many women suffer alone, wondering if they do have enough milk or if they are nursing correctly.

In our culture, despite the fact that there are doulas and lactation consultants, women are largely alone with their newborns and young infants. They are alone to figure out how to nurse and how often to nurse and when to wean and how to wean and well, just so many things. This is extremely hard—and unnatural!

So, what can expectant parents—and parents in general—do?

Here are some important steps to take:

1. Build community before your baby arrives. Identify family members who you get along with. Reach out to them and let them know that you think you will need their help after your baby is born. You may not know yet what kind of help you’ll need, but just start the conversation. No matter how you feel prior to your baby’s birth, you will need help afterward….and in the coming years. Once your baby arrives, ask those family members who seem open to it for help for the hours you need it – whether each day or each week or on an occasional basis.
2. Look for help outside your family: join childbirth classes and parenting classes, if not for other reasons, then to make some friends in your area who will have babies the same age as your own. Other parents are a valuable resource. Parents need to get together when their babies are little—not for the babies’ sake, but for their own. Having someone to break up the monotony of the day, or the weekend, to sit with or walk with, to exchange information with, or to complain to is absolutely necessary.
3. Starting when your baby is young, join whatever local community center is available, if you have the resources to do so. The local YMCA, church, synagogue, etc. will have classes you can join and they often also have daycare, where a baby can stay for an hour or more while you take a class. Having a break now and then – even if just for a one hour exercise class – is crucial.
4. Take your baby to the library story hour, the infant music class, a swim class, or a parenting group. Again, you need to get out of the house and meet other parents. As your baby grows, he/she will enjoy the stimulation—but you, as the parent, are the one who really needs it.
5. Advocate for better resources for parents in your community.
6. Keep reaching out to family members once your baby is a toddler. You still need help, even if it is a new kind of help, different from what you needed at the beginning.
7. Start some group activities for parents, babies, and children if you can’t find any. It isn’t hard to put together a little parenting group or to plan a daily or weekly meetup at a local playground – even if you just start with one other parent.

Even following all these suggestions will not replace the real 24/7 community every parent needs – but they are a beginning.

Because parenting is challenging in any circumstance, but it is excruciatingly challenging when you feel that you are left on your own to do it all.

References

Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mothers and Others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding

Jones, Lucy. Matrescence

How we got here and what to do about it.

When I was a child, long, long ago, after the age of two or so, kids just ate what everyone else was eating at dinner. They didn’t have a choice.

But something has changed in the last few decades. Children, especially young children, often only want to eat mac and cheese or pasta and butter and many parents are providing these.

Many parents feel that they just can’t figure out what to put on the table. They don’t have time to prepare a variety of options and they’re afraid that their children won’t eat what they provide.

I have been wondering what has happened to family eating habits and why it has happened — so I decided to read some of the scholarly literature on the subject of children’s food preferences to see if I could find any clues.

And I will tell you this: there is very little I could find.

But what I think is that children’s eating habits have changed as a function of the changes in parenting practices. We have evolved from parenting in an authoritarian manner – up through the 1950’s – to parenting in a more “child centered” fashion.

Of course the influences of psychoanalysis (on Benjamin Spock among others), developmental psychology, progressive educational theories and “pop psychology” have a great deal to do with these changes.

And we are now at a point that we now find ourselves in the age of “gentle parenting” where rules and limits are discouraged.

However – I think we have gone too far.

And this includes at the dinner table.

We now ask children what they want to eat and we let them eat it while looking at our phones – rather than providing them with a meal that we are going to eat with them.

We now encourage kids to eat in their strollers and in the car and, well, really anywhere they are.

And, as a result, many kids they may not be all that hungry at meals. Meals are not the major source of nutrition anymore.

So, let’s take a closer look: when we ask children what they want to eat, are we giving them a choice they really need to make? Are we making life harder for ourselves? And are we actually helping our children’s development?

Because we know that too many choices are not good for young children. In fact, we know that children feel safer when there are fewer choices and more rules and limits. This has been proven by the studies on authoritarian versus authoritative parenting (Baumrind et al, 1967, 1981, 1989; Steinberg, 1989, 1991; Lamborn, 1991, etc.)

From this literature, we know that children need to understand what their parents expect of them and they need to know what the consequences are if they do not do as their parents expect.

And it used to be that kids knew they were expected to at least taste what was on their plate at dinner – if not to clean their plates entirely.

Of course this does not mean that kids liked this. Children often hated these rules.

But some rules actually make sense.

Recent research has shown that it often takes many exposures to a new food for babies and children to come to accept – or even like – that food.

Parents do not need to give up when a baby turns her head from the spoon or when a child says “ewwwww”.

Perhaps we have given children too much choice. When we say “What do you want for dinner” or “Do you want McDonalds or pizza?” we are opening the door to their limiting their food choices to only their most favorite and well known foods.

So, what is a parent to do?

Research shows that the best thing parents can do is to present a large variety of foods from infancy on and to model eating a large variety of foods — including fruits, vegetables, a variety of protein sources, and some fun foods. In other words, it is better to make a variety of things available for dinner and not give in to the child’s desire to have mac and cheese every night.

Yes, kids, especially young kids often like bland foods – or as some parents say, “white foods”, like pasta and rice and bagels. And this makes evolutionary sense. The aversion to bitter taste has been linked to survival as poisonous plants are often bitter. And the preference for sweet foods has a similar evolutionary advantage as mothers’ breast milk is sweet.

However, research has shown that early exposure to a variety of flavors including bitter tastes can help a child to tolerate them.

A number of studies indicate that the introduction of vegetables and fruits into an infant’s diet as soon as they start to eat solid foods is extremely helpful in getting them used to these tastes and in choosing to eat these foods as they become toddlers and young children.

And the research also shows that while it may be easier to stick with just breastfeeding or bottle feeding for the first year, adding what are called complementary foods (foods that complement the breast milk or formula your baby receives) helps to promote a wider variety of food choices for these babies as they grow.

Some researchers even believe that there is a sensitive period for accepting new food tastes. These researchers found that children who were introduced to fruits and vegetables early (around 4 months for fruits and around 6 months for vegetables) ate more fruits and vegetables between ages 2 and 4 than those children who had not been introduced early (Coulthard et al.).

The same thing goes for textures. After introducing pureed foods (at around 5 months), it has been found that introducing slightly lumpy foods (around 6 months) and then foods that need a little chewing (around 7 months) is helpful in the long-term acceptance of foods with various textures, including complex ones. From 6 to 12 months, babies learn to use their tongues to move food around their mouths, and they need experience with foods of various textures in order to do so. Of course, parents need to sit with children of this age while they eat in order to observe whether they are having any trouble with swallowing these varied textures (Gisel et al.).

One study actually found that children introduced to lumpy solids later (after the age of 10 months) had more feeding problems when they were 7 years old. These 7-year-olds were also reported to eat fewer portions of fruit and vegetables than those who had been introduced to lumpy and textured foods earlier. In fact, those infants who were introduced to complementary foods by 6 months ate more green, leafy vegetables, tomatoes, and citrus fruits at age 7 than those who were introduced later.

Another factor that affects children’s eating habits are their parent’s own eating habits and attitudes towards food.

In regard to parental behaviors and how they affect children’s food choices, it has been found that parents who are less consistent and less predictable in regard to what and when they eat tend to have children with more chaotic eating habits. And it turns out that the more parents are inconsistent or erratic in their eating schedules, and the more their diet varies between healthy and less healthy options, the worse the influence on their children’s eating patterns (Ventura et al.).

In particular, the relationship between mothers’ eating habits and children’s eating behaviors has been studied. ​And it has been found that mothers who restrict their own eating can actually promote overeating in their children, especially in their daughters. Girls who were already overweight at 5 years of age whose mothers tried to restrict their eating had the highest tendency to eat when they were not hungry. And Birch et al. showed that mothers tend to increase control after ​their daughters gain weight but not ​so much after their sons gained the same amount of weight.

Limiting snacking between meals to one snack between breakfast and lunch and one snack between lunch and dinner has also been found to be best once the child is old enough to eat just three meals a day.

Moreover, providing snacks that are not composed of nutrient-dense, high-calorie ingredients is preferable. So this means that those big brownies and cookies from Starbucks are definitely not the best snacks to offer on a regular basis. Try providing yogurt and fruit, some peanut butter on pretzels or apple slices, some raisins or a couple of small cookies, a glass of milk and some fruit slices, and see how it goes.

This is a lot to digest, parents – but evidence shows that starting early with all sorts of tastes and textures, providing lots of variety at meals, persisting with getting kids to taste new foods, being aware of and addressing your own eating habits, and cutting back on high calorie snacking can be best for everyone in your family.

References

Ventura AK, Birch LL., Does parenting affect children’s eating and weight status? Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act, 5 (2008), pp. 15-27

Blossfield I, Collins A, Kiely M, Delahunty C. Texture preferences of 12-month-old infants and the role of early experiences. Food Qual Prefer. 2007;18:396–404

Coulthard H, Harris G, Emmett P, the ALSPAC team. Long term consequences of early fruit and vegetable feeding practices. Public Health Nutr. 2010;13(12):2044–51.

Baumrind, D. (1967). Child care practices anteceding three patterns of preschool behavior. Genetic Psychology Monographs, 75, 43–88.CASPubMedWeb of Science®Google Scholar

Baumrind, D. (1971). Current patterns of parental authority. Developmental Psychology Monograph, 4(1), part 2.Web of Science®Google Scholar

Baumrind, D. (1989). Rearing competent children. In W. Damon, (Ed.), Child development today and tomorrow (pp. 349–378). San Francisco : Jossey-Bass.Google Scholar

Steinberg, L., Elmen, J., & Mounts, N. (1989). Authoritative parenting, psychosocial maturity, and academic success among adolescents. Child Development, 60, 1424–1436.

Steinberg, L., Mounts, N., Lamborn, S., & Dornbusch, S. (1991). Authoritative parenting and adolescent adjustment across various ecological niches. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 1, 19–36. Child DevelopmentVolume 62, Issue 5 p. 1049-1065

Susie D. Lamborn, Nina S. Mounts, Laurence Steinberg, Sanford M. DornbuschFirst published: October 1991https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1991.tb01588.: 299Patterns of Competence and Adjustment among Adolescents from Authoritative, Authoritarian, Indulgent, and Neglectful Families.

Maccoby, E., & Martin, J. (1983). Socialization in the context of the family: Parent-child interaction. In E. M. Hetherington (Ed.), P. H. Mussen (Series Ed.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 4. Socialization, personality, and social development (pp. 1–101). New York : Wiley.

Gisel EG. Effect of food texture on the development of chewing of children between six months and two years of age. Dev Med Child Neurol. 1991;33:69–79.

Kirby S, Baranowski T, Reynolds K, Taylor G, Binkley D. Children’s fruit and vegetable intake: socio-economics, adult, child and adolescents in the United States. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 1995;150:81–6.

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Baumrind, Diana.  Adolescence; Roslyn Heights, N.Y. Vol. 3, Iss. 11, (Fall 1968): 255.

American J of Clinical Nutrition DISCUSSION| VOLUME 78, ISSUE 6, P1068-1073, DECEMBER 2003Download Full Issue

St-Onge Marie-Pierre, Keller Kathleen L., Heymsfield Steven B Open ArchiveDOI:https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/78.6.1068 Changes in childhood food consumption patterns: a cause for concern in light of increasing body weights2

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652302600X