Covid-19 has created an anxiety stew that even the most relaxed parents can’t avoid. When kids catch on to the fear it becomes an even bigger struggle to keep a semblance of normal life. Here are some tips for helping the entire family work through anxiety.
This isn’t the time to implement your dream of recreating Little House on the Prairie, unless that comes easily to you and helps all of you feel better. Reassess frequently, and if what you’re doing is creating more power struggles, don’t be afraid to toss it and start over.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain a contagious calm without filling your own cup. Even as we isolate, we need each other.
Without connection, it’s easy for our fear to grow as exponentially as the Covid-19 infection rates.
A Growth Fostering Relationship is marked by the Five Good Things. Coined by Jean Baker Miller in her transformational book, Toward a New Psychology of Women. These are the qualities of a relationship that creates fulfillment and counters inauthenticity and inequity. They include:
We are excited to announce a call for posters for our second annual Relational Summit: Learning Together.
No matter how much confidence she exhibited while offering home remedies for infant constipation and baby food recipes, she struggled with uncertainty. The matriarchal totem is full of mamas making mistakes while making meaning. I’m grateful for their wisdom.
What skills will we take into this unknown? If our kids will be growing up in a revolution, what do we need to teach them?
It’s a paradox. Our connection will help soothe our anxious brains, but it can’t work if it can’t first see what is there. The first work of that connection is seeing the anxiety/rage/discomfort/whatever and letting it be there. It can’t be trying to suppress, fix, or avoid it. But once we have that acceptance of what is, that authentic connection in the midst of struggle, there’s enough solid ground for calm to take root. We have to risk the fast shallow breaths to get to the good deep ones.