20 articles found
The return to work after parental leave is a milestone that most parents approach with a mixture of feelings that are difficult to hold simultaneously...
A 3-year-old who slams a cabinet has almost always seen a cabinet slammed. The pull, when this happens, is to correct the child — "we don't slam thing...
The first morning back at work after parental leave is one of the strangest days of an adult life. You drop off a small person who fundamentally chang...
Before the baby, success probably had a familiar shape: the title, the salary band, the project that landed, the next promotion. After the baby, you'l...
The first three years of motherhood are a particular kind of intense. Your body is the food source, the comfort source, the safety source. You're neve...
The arrival of a first child is a monumental life event that ripples through every aspect of your existence. Yet while pregnancy is discussed at lengt...
Before your child was born, you had an identity. You were a person with a name, a profession, interests, relationships, a way of moving through the wo...
The world treats twins as a category before it treats them as people. From pregnancy onwards — "are you having the twins?" — the language collapses tw...
The stories a family tells about itself — over breakfast, in the car, at funerals, at bedtime — are not background noise. They are doing real psycholo...
A father at home with the children isn't unusual any more — roughly one in seven primary caregivers of pre-school children in the UK and US is now the...
Every family has a culture—a set of assumptions about how people should relate to each other, what matters most, and what good parenting looks like. S...
The "terrible twos" is one of the most widely known phrases in parenting culture, and one of the most misunderstood. The developmental psychology behi...
Some parents who have navigated the two-year period and noticed a calmer period at around 30 months are surprised to encounter a second wave of develo...
"Who am I?" sounds like a question for philosophers, but children answer the basic version of it before they're three. The sense of self — the foundat...
Most postpartum mental health conversations focus on depression. That focus is necessary, but it leaves a gap: the majority of new mothers don't devel...
You expected the rush of love at first sight, the deep fulfilment, the sense of having arrived where you were always meant to be. You got something me...
The version of motherhood you absorbed before becoming a mother — from movies, your own mother, social media, friends who only posted highlights — alm...
If 18–24 months is where many parents say "this is the hardest age," 24–36 months is where they say "I can see the light." The intensity is still ther...
The self-esteem industry has done children few favours. The generation raised on trophy-for-everyone participation awards and "you're so special" prai...
"I love him completely and I also miss who I used to be" is one of the most common, least-discussed sentences in early parenthood. The cultural script...