Parent Wellbeing
You are allowed to not enjoy every stage
Some phases of parenting are genuinely harder and less rewarding than others. Saying so out loud is not a confession of failure.
Yuki Tanabe
Contributing writer, Things Parents Know
Yuki writes about parent wellbeing and the parts of yourself that get postponed.
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14 articles
Parent Wellbeing
Couples after children: the maintenance nobody schedules
Relationship satisfaction reliably dips after a first child. Knowing that in advance changes what you do about it.
Running a Household
A house with children will be untidy, and the fight is about which mess
Tidying competes with everything else that hour could do. Deciding which surfaces you actually hold is more useful than trying to…
Parent Wellbeing
Broken sleep is a health problem, not a test of character
Fragmented sleep does a different kind of damage from a merely short night. Treating it as something to be endured stoically is the…
Parent Wellbeing
Going back to work: the first six weeks are the worst of it
The return is a logistics shock, an identity shock and an emotional one arriving simultaneously. Almost all of it improves, and…
Parent Wellbeing
Single parenting is not two-parent parenting with someone missing
Most advice quietly assumes a second adult somewhere in the house. Removing that assumption changes which strategies are even…
Parent Wellbeing
Fathers and partners get postnatal depression too, and get asked about it less
Screening and services are built around the birth parent. The other adult often has no appointment at which anyone asks, and the…
Running a Household
The document drawer no family sets up until it needs one
Every household eventually needs a document at short notice, usually on a day that is already going badly. The filing takes one…
Running a Household
Two children, two places, one adult with a car
Most family transport problems are not about distance. They are about two commitments that overlap by fifteen minutes, repeating…
Parent Wellbeing
The hobby you dropped is harder to restart than it was to stop
It went quietly, one cancelled session at a time, and the gap left behind is not obvious until years later. Getting back to it…
Parent Wellbeing
Comparing yourself to other parents is a sampling error
You are comparing your entire experience, including the parts nobody sees, with the edited fragments other families let you see.…
Parent Wellbeing
Working from home with children in it is two jobs sharing one room
The arrangement is sold as flexibility and frequently delivers two roles performed simultaneously and badly. The fix is structural…
Parent Wellbeing
The hour after bedtime is the one you keep stealing from yourself
It is the only part of the day that belongs to nobody else, which is exactly why it gets stretched until it costs more than it…
Parent Wellbeing
Parenting your children and your parents in the same decade
Two sets of needs arrive at once, and neither is negotiable. The households that manage it are the ones that stopped treating it as…