Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most, and Raise Happier Kids
256
Mommy Guilt: Learn to Worry Less, Focus on What Matters Most, and Raise Happier Kids
256Paperback
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Overview
This book encourages parents to let go of unobtainable (and ill-advised) goals in favor of parenting philosophies that concentrate on the whole family.
Parents today try too hard to be superhuman, often sacrificing their own well-being -- and relationships with friends, family, even their spouses -- to meet the ever-increasing demands of their children's lives. Of course, such efforts inevitably fall short, and parents blame themselves.
Mommy Guilt presents the results of an original, never-before-published nationwide survey of over 1,300 parents -- 96% of whom reported they felt guilty about some aspect of parenting. The most common include:
- yelling,
- family time,
- work choices,
- school,
- and sports.
This eye-opening book offers straightforward principles for handling these and many other common issues -- as well as for dealing with everyday challenges that frequently add up to feelings of guilt. Through practical, tried-and-true tips, anecdotes, quizzes, and worksheets, Mommy Guilt illustrates how moms can fend off the guilt and focus on what really matters.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780814408704 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AMACOM |
| Publication date: | 04/08/2005 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d) |
| Age Range: | 17 Years |
About the Author
"Julie Bort (Fort Collins, CO) is an internationally published journalist with substantial expertise and experience in survey research.
Aviva Pflock (Loveland, CO) is a certified parent education and child-development specialist, as well as a grant writer and administrator.
Devra Renner (Centreville, VA) is a clinical social worker with over a decade of experience working with children and their families in school, community, home, summer camp, and hospital settings."
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 3
THE SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF THE MOMMY GUILT-FREE PHILOSOPHY
1. You must be
willing to let some things go.
2. Parenting is not a competitive sport.
3. Look toward the future and at the big picture. Don't become overly hung up on the here and now.
4. Learn when and how to live in the moment.
5. Get used to saying yes more often and being able to defend your no.
6. Laugh a lot, especially with your children.
7. Make sure you set aside specific time to have fun as a family.
Mommy Guilt-Free Principle No. 1: You must be willing to let some things
go
By the time we bring home the bacon and fry it, clean the kitchen, put away the laundry, help with homework, and tuck the kids in, all most moms want to do is crawl into bed alone—to sleep. Let's not forget the bills, the miscellaneous phone calls, and, of course, our spouses. Reading about it is exhausting, let alone accomplishing all these things. Human beings were not designed to toil endlessly. We eventually become sloppy, inefficient, and grouchy. This is why so many of us continually make that oh-so-short leap from asking our children to do something to screaming at them—and from screaming to a nice bout of Mommy Guilt. Yelling at the children was named by two-thirds of Mommy Guilt survey respondents as a prime cause of regular guilt. While no mother is so perfect that the occasional tantrum never bubbles up from her soul, it is possible to eliminate yelling entirely as a parenting style. (We'll show you how in Part 2 of this book.)
The point is this, if you found out you had only six months to live, would you spend that time defending the carpet against spots? Or would you spend it enjoying your family? We'd guess that filling your ears with the laughter of your children would take priority over rubbing out the chocolate stain on the living room carpet. Still, a serious illness notwithstanding, it is never easy to prioritize things in your life. After all, if everything on your list weren't already some kind of a priority, it wouldn't be on your list at all. Yet mastering the "letting go of things" is one of your premier tools for fending off Mommy Guilt. This alone can lead to such contentment with your parenting work that you float through most of your days feeling like you're doing a darn good job of it all. Furthermore, this feeling can be used as a flotation device to help everyone in the family feel happier and more content.
The safety guidepost: You, as a parent, are responsible for providing a safe environment in which your child can grow and learn. The first trick to helping you prioritize is to ask yourself this question, "In what way would my child be harmed if I didn't do this task right now?" If the answer is, "not much to not at all," you've just found an item that can easily be dropped down the priority totem pole.
Housework is an ideal example. In our survey for this book, 59 percent of participants reported feelings of guilt over not keeping up with the housework. So please, hear this: It is perfectly fine for your house to look as though children live in it—even when guests drop by! You can have toys on the floor, snacks out on the table, and shoes piled up near the door. While we've got loads of advice in Chapter 8 on managing specific housework tasks, for the sake of example, let's use a housework situation to show Mommy Guilt-Free Principle No. 1 by applying the safety guidepost.
You had completed a top-to-bottom cleaning of your family room last night
at 11 P.M. It is now 7 A.M. and in the twenty minutes your children have been
awake, they have had ample time to destroy the room. You see empty food
containers on the couch. They dragged a box of toys up from the basement and
dumped its contents on the floor, thereby mixing up several box games. Something
brown and sticky is now on the wall (chocolate?). To complicate matters, friends
are dropping by later this morning, something that both you and your children
have been looking forward to for days. You had planned on using your time in the
morning to prepare a picnic meal.
You flash back to the night before, where
you braved exhaustion and gave up your precious before-bed reading time to clean
this room. The kids hardly notice you standing there, ears red from anger, as
they watch cartoons and walk past the mess to grab more food from the pantry.
You begin to yell. You tell the oldest to start picking up the toys, making sure
to put all the pieces back in the proper boxes. He starts to comply but then
pouts and stops. Meanwhile, you begin frantically scrubbing the wall and picking
up food containers, grumbling as you clean. The kids have moved from passive
resistance to arguing with each other and with you. They soon dissolve into
tears. By the time your friends arrive, you are frazzled—and although you feel
justified—you also feel guilty for yelling.
After dinner the night before, you reminded your kids that in order to
have a play date, they promised to help you clean the family room. You had given
each kid an age-appropriate task, along with clear instructions on what they
were to do. While the group of you cleaned the room, you excitedly talked about
how much fun the play date would be. Your kids, of course, got constantly
distracted from their tasks and needed your help to complete their cleaning
portions, but eventually they succeeded and you could do your task, which was
vacuuming. In the end, they felt proud of their work on the room and you heaped
praise upon them.
All of that pride was forgotten by the morning. It is now
7 A.M. and in the twenty minutes your children have been awake, they had ample
time to destroy the room. You see empty food containers on the couch. They
dumped the toy box on the floor, and you spot a brown sticky mess on the wall.
You are tempted to start yelling, but instead you take three deep breaths to
calm yourself. You make a mental note that next time they have a play date, you
will set up activities for them to do that will help ease them through their
excited waiting period without digressing into destruction. You would like to
make the kids clean the room again, so that your friends don't think you live
like pigs, but you realize that yesterday's cleaning took a couple hours and if
you don't get cracking on making the food, you won't have a picnic to take with
you.
So, you ask yourself, is any of this mess harmful? The brown goo seems iffy so you prioritize cleaning that yourself. The toys are not in the walking path, so you opt to let them stay out—they'll be dumped out as soon as your guests arrive anyway. Your kids can certainly carry their own food containers to the dishwasher. Game plan in place, you step in front of the TV, turn it off and say, "Remember how nice this room looked last night? We need to fix some things before our guests arrive."
Table of Contents
"Foreword
Part 1 Introducing Mommy Guilt
Chapter 1. The Pitter-Patter of Guilt
Chapter 2. When You Hear the Mommy Guilt—Tune It In or Turn It Off
Chapter 3. The Seven Principles of the Mommy Guilt-Free Philosophy
Chapter 4. Giving Birth to Guilt
Chapter 5. The Start of First-Rate Parenting Choices (and the End of Second-Rate Childhood Habits)
Part 2 The Stuff of Guilt
Chapter 6. Yippee! Guilt-Free Yelling
Chapter 7. Throttle Down That Tone of Voice, Part Two
Chapter 8. A Parent's Guide to (Almost) Stress-Free Housekeeping
Chapter 9. The Guilty Gourmet
Chapter 10. Family Time and the Fair-Fight Zone
Chapter 11. Husbands as Fathers
Chapter 12. School-Yard Guilt
Chapter 13. Working on Guilt
Chapter 14. Do You Have a Case of Mommy Guilt—or Is It Stage Fright?
Chapter 15. An Extraordinary Guilt
Chapter 16. Other Issues That Cause Guilt
Part 3 Building on Your Mommy Guilt-Free Foundation
Chapter 17. Time: How to Make It, How to Take It, and How to Spend It, Guilt-Free
Chapter 18. Guilt-Free Pleasure—Time with Your Spouse
Part 4 Appendices
Appendix A. Take the Mommy Guilt Survey!
Appendix B. Helpful Hints: Food Staples to Keep in Your House
Appendix C. Emergency Guilt-Relief Guide
Appendix D. Additional Reading"
What People are Saying About This
"Helpful hints and a hopeful message for self-doubting mothers: Get Over It! Guilt is the most useless emotion in the world."
—author, The Price of Motherhood and If You've Raised Kids, You Can Manage Anything
"Mommy Guilt is a book whose time has come. The seven principles of the Mommy Guilt-Free Philosophy are clearly and precisely stated and the language empowers moms with children between the ages of two through twelve and even beyond."
—Associate Director, Barnard College Toddler Center; author, Parenting Your Toddler
"This volume provides overstressed parents with developmentally appropriate guidance, information, and activities, all designed to increase the joys and satisfactions of being a parent in today’s world."
—Associate Clinical Professor, Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine