Feelings Are Contagious: Book Excerpt from The Confident Parent by Jane Scott, MD, with Stephanie Land
Excerpted from The Confident Parent: A Pediatrician’s Guide to Caring for Your Little One – Without Losing Your Joy, Your Mind, or Yourself by Jane Scott, MD, with Stephanie Land. © 2016 by Dr. Jane Scott. TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
Most people intuitively know that depression can severely affect the way parents interact with their children, but many assume that our stress and guilt is merely our own cross to bear, a consequence of modern-day parenting that may not be great for parents’ mental or physical health but is tolerable so long as it doesn’t affect our kids. Except it does. All that stress, fatigue, or guilt you might be carrying bleeds into your interactions with your children. A mother who is tired of being “on” is not going to be as attentive, patient, or even as much fun as one who regularly gets time to herself to rest, exercise, pursue her own interests or have an adults-only lunch with friends. If you resent work as a necessary evil separating you from your child, your children will eventually feel that way about work too, and once they are old enough they will do everything they can to keep you away from it for as long as possible. Anyone who has ever started the day off trying to wrench his or her leg from a screaming child’s grip knows what I’m talking about. Children can sense when Mom and Dad feel bad about the choices they are making. Working and nonworking moms who fret every time they leave their child in someone else’s care are sending a subliminal message to their children that they really aren’t safe unless their mothers are right by their side.
It would be more useful to teach children from the beginning that work is a natural part of adult life, and something that in the best of cases is to be enjoyed, not dreaded or resented. Ideally, all working mothers would have the same attitude as Kate in Australia, who works as an EMT: “Working makes me a better parent. I make a lot more of the time I do get with [my daughter] and make sure we do a lot of fun things together. I think the time apart is good for us.”[i] How empowering to give your child the confidence to know that she can have a good time without you, and that you will always come back for her. Infants who learn these lessons early become toddlers who aren’t plagued with fear and worry whenever their parents aren’t around.
So having a life beyond your kids is good for you, and it’s good for kids. It’s also good for your relationship with your partner. You have to take the time to focus exclusively on each other, and not just occasionally, or you risk forgetting what it was that drew you together in the first place before kids. Just as children respond negatively when stress and anxiety pervade a home, they react positively when it’s filled with happiness and harmony. A home that’s run by parents who are still in love, who enjoy being together whether alone or with their children, is a great incubator for happy kids. And it’s a great incubator for parents, too, preparing them for the time when once again it’ll be just the two of them. For it’s not just our parenting standards that have risen; our expectations for what we should expect and achieve in all chapters of our lives has increased.
In a New York Times article on why couples over the age of fifty are divorcing at higher rates than at any other time in our country’s history, author and director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families Stephanie Coontz said, “We expect to find equality, intimacy, friendship, fun, and even passion right into what people used to see as the ‘twilight years.’ ”[ii] But meeting those expectations takes effort. “It’s not something you can put on the back burner while you raise your kids, for example, and think it won’t scorch somewhere along the way.”[iii] Whether you’re spending time alone or with your partner, think of the moments you take for yourself as preventative medicine for a happy marriage that wards off the harmful effects of empty nest syndrome.
[i] “Working makes me a better parent”: Kate G., personal interview, February 2015
[ii] In a New York Times article: Sam Roberts, “Divorce after 50 Grows More Common,” New York Times, September 20, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/fashion/weddings/divorce-after-50-grows-more-common.html?_r=1. 
[iii] “It’s not something you can put on the back burner”: Ibid.
JANE SCOTT is a trained pediatrician and neonatologist now working in the private sector, developing medical devices to help infants and children around the world. Before training at Duke University, Dr. Scott lived in England and Ireland, as well as the Australian outback and the South African desert. She has four children of her own, born on three continents, and now is a doting grandparent. Learn more at http://confidentparentbook.com/.
