Hey y'all, I made a mistake in my last blog post.

In order to help your child "fall back," you need to make their bedtime, naps, and meals LATER, not earlier.

My apologies for the confusion! (And thanks to Eleni and Bethany for calling it to my attention!)

One of my clients' biggest struggles with parenting is holding boundaries. You set a rule in place but then your child asks for an exception and you say no but they keep on asking and getting increasingly upset and then you start to second guess yourself.

"What's the big deal? It'll take me two seconds. I would be really mean to say no to something so simple. I don't want my child to be traumatized by lack of response." 

You give in and fulfill the request and, surprise surprise, your child has yet another request, two minutes later, that is against the rules. You start to feel resentful. Your child starts to whine. You snap. They cry. You feel terrible.

Rinse and repeat.

If something like this happens in your home, don't feel bad. You are not alone.

Children are really, really good at testing boundaries and therefore, pushing our emotional buttons. 

Would it make you feel better to know that it's actually the job​ of young children to test boundaries? That that is their way of understanding the world? And it is your job to hold those boundaries, to show them, over and over again, that the grown ups are in charge.

When you don't do that, your child will test boundaries even more, seeking that safety from you even more. Though for sure your child will never say, "Thanks for not giving me that cookie before dinner. I really feel safe now." 

Here's an example of how to set a nighttime boundary.

Let's say your child has a habit of calling you back to their bedroom multiple times each night after lights out. You find yourself getting increasingly frustrated and short-tempered about these nightly callbacks, because they are interfering with your opportunity to eat dinner and finally unwind from the long day. 

Step one: Set the boundary. A boundary is something you will do, not something you need your child to do.

In this example, setting a boundary would look like saying, at bedtime, "listen, lights out will be the last chance to talk to me. I'm not going to come back after that. Is there anything you need now, before I go?"

A boundary is not, "I need you to not call me back to your room anymore after lights out, okay?" That boundary is relying on your child to act a certain way. Boundaries are only ever about our own behavior. 

Step two: hold the boundary. You kiss your child goodnight and leave the room. A few minutes later your child starts to call for you, saying she is thirsty. She has apparently forgotten that there is a bottle of water next to her. 

You feel your body start to react to the stress. You really want to respond and just quickly go to her and remind her that there is a bottle of water next to her, but you told her you wouldn't come back.

Your brain thinks things like, "What's the big deal? It'll only take one minute. What if she's dying of thirst? I'm being really mean by not just telling her that. Also, it would be so quick to give her the water and if I don't respond, she could call to me for an hour."  

Then your conscious brain says, "Wait, Abby and I practiced for this. She's not dying of thirst. She has water next to her and a truly thirsty person would remember that. She is seeking connection and testing a boundary. This is a normal thing for a child to do. It's my job to hold the boundary anyway, even when it feels mean. She needs me to stay strong, even when it feels terrible." 

3. Step three: manage your emotional reaction. You label your response as a stress response, remind yourself that your child is not in physical nor emotional danger, and focus on straw breathing.

You lay your hands on your chest and tell yourself, "It makes so much sense that I am feeling stressed." You allow the stressful response without reacting and changing your behavior. You do not go to your child. Even as her calling gets more urgent. You feel compassion for her but you do not change your own behavior. You keep breathing. Eventually she falls asleep. 

4. Reconnect. ​In the morning, when her OK to Wake Clock turns green, you greet your child affectionately. You talk about what happened the night before, with compassion, not as a way of teaching her to change her behavior, and not as a way to assuage your guilt. “You really wanted me to come last night. I guess you forgot that your water bottle was right next to you, you silly goose! Was that hard for you? Can I give you a cuddle now?”

5. ​Reinforce consistently. The next night, before lights out, you remind your child of the boundary. "Remember, after lights out, I won't come back. Is there anything you need before I leave?" 

You don't make it a problem if your child tests the boundary even more vigorously than the first night. You know that this is actually a common reaction to a new boundary, even more testing. You have a plan in case your child leaves her room, another boundary, to return her to her room. You don't feel angry or resentful of your child testing the boundary. (At least, not consciously!) You keep on managing your emotional reaction without changing your behavior. 

After a few nights of consistency, evenings have gotten noticeably easier. You realize that the nighttime calling -- which had been going on for months before our work together -- has mostly subsided. You no longer dread evenings. 

You also realize that you had to pass through that “river of misery” in order to have your evenings back. You realize that you didn’t need your child to change, but you needed your own thoughts to change.

You see that it was only after your thoughts changed that your child’s behavior changed. Your child actually needed you to give yourself permission to hold a boundary in order for her sleep to improve. 

​Where do you have trouble holding boundaries with your children? What are you making that mean about them, or about you? Schedule a free sleep consultation or a free life coaching consultation -- depending on the type of boundary -- with me and let's help you shore up your resolve so you can have the peaceful parenting experience you dream of. 

As a (former) NICU nurse and pediatric nurse practitioner, I'm pretty passionate about vaccines.

But in case you aren't as confident, here's the latest details on the safety of the COVID vaccine for pregnant and breastfeeding people from "your local epidemiologist Katelyn Jenner," a PhD, MPH, biostatistician, epidemiologist, and parent to two children.

If you want to read her article yourself, go for it.  

And if you want the TLDR, it's this: The COVID vaccine is both safe and effective for pregnant and breastfeeding people, and evidence suggests that some protection crosses the placenta to the unborn child. 

My slightly longer summary:

• The COVID vaccine helps prevent miscarriage.
• Also, COVID+ patients have an increased incidence of preterm birth and stillbirth, and their babies are more likely to be admitted to the NICU. (So preventing COVID decreases these things.)
• Pregnant people with COVID are more likely to need intensive medical care than non-pregnant people.
• A meta-analysis found that the COVID vaccine reduces the risk of miscarriage by 15%. 
• Studies have not found mRNA or spike antibody to cross the placenta. 
• Despite that, studies have found that infants under age 6 months receive some protection against COVID when their parent was vaccinated in pregnancy. 
• No study has found the vaccine to pass into breastmilk. 

So if you were on the fence about getting (another) COVID vaccine while pregnant or breastfeeding, Katelyn Jenner and I both recommend it. (I suggest you take her word much more seriously than mine. Though I am a pediatric nurse practitioner, I am not an epidemiologist nor specialist in COVID.) 

I shared a blog post about my eating and about helping my clients feel feelings without eating them. I said that I had recently been falling into frozen cookie dough as a way to avoid negative emotions, and how, as I allowed myself to feel my negative emotions, my frozen cookie dough habit went away. 

My friend Andrea commented that she doesn’t do this bc she is not a participant in diet culture – she gave it up for Lent.

I flushed with shame when I read this. Am I complicit in diet culture and therefor a bad feminist?

I have given this a lot of thought ever since. Does helping my clients achieve their eating, fitness, and weight loss goals make me complicit in diet culture and thus a bad feminist?

Here’s why that’s a NO.

1. I don’t ever tell clients what their weight, size, BMI, or any other indicator should be. I don’t even ask what they are.
   
   
2. I don’t talk about what I eat or don’t eat with my children or in social settings. I don’t want to help perpetuate “diet talk” as a way for female or gender nonconforming people to connect with each other.
   
   I talk to my children about how I love getting stronger and I love seeing them get stronger. They eat sugar daily but not all day long. I never criticize this.
   
   I model body acceptance with them. They have never heard me implicitly or explicitly criticize my body or anybody else's.
   
   
3. My goal in my work with my clients is number one, to love their bodies. Starting now. Not when they achieve their goals.
   
   Partly because we never do well with achieving goals when our motivating emotion is disgust or hatred. And secondly because life is too short to hate anyone, never mind our selves.
   
   
4. My second goal with working with these clients is to help them identify what emotions they are feeling when they eat those foods they wish they wouldn’t.
   
   In almost every case, there is an emotion driving them that has nothing to do with hunger.
   
   Usually, it’s a repressed negative emotion: sadness, loneliness, frustration, grief, anxiety, burn out, and shame.
   
   Then we get to work on processing those feelings so we can release them. We make space to feel all the feelings we most want to avoid. Often times, just allowing those feelings decreases the desire to eat those unwanted foods.
   
   
5. I don’t tell my clients what to eat. If they ask, I share the most accurate science, which is that the calories is/calories out model of eating is dead wrong. It makes people feel terrible about themselves when their bodies inevitably return to their homeostatic set point or even worse, when their metabolism is slowed by calorie restriction.
   
   We talk about controlling insulin instead.
   
   
6. I use an adapted version of “intuitive eating,” which I think is pretty progressive. I don’t tell clients to eat a certain amount of food, and never encourage weighing and measuring food.
   
   Instead, I encourage them to eat mostly healthy foods and listen to their hunger and fullness cues.
   
   It’s true that some intuitive eating advocates would say, I guess, that if your body craves 5 bowls of Cap’n Crunch, that you should eat it.
   
   But I disagree for the following reasons.
   
   
7. Highly processed foods are designed on purpose to fool our bodies and create ever more desire and reliance on those foods. This is no different than cigarette companies designing products that create addiction to them. These companies want our money and our dependence and will stop at nothing to achieve it. 
   
   This is anti-feminist, pro-racism, pro-poverty, and against everything I believe in.
   
   
8. Apart from the companies having a malicious intent to create dependence in order to make more money, we also know that on a biological level, our bodies are not designed to contend with regular, massive spikes in our blood sugar and insulin.
   
   I always think about this in terms of squirrels. If we left out packages of Ding Dongs and Twinkies where squirrels could find them, you bet they would scarf them down.
   
   Does that prove that squirrels need Ding Dongs and Twinkies?
   
   No. It’s obvious that when animals eat those processed foods, we can see it’s unhealthy and undesirable. But when thinking about us humans, we have been trained to think “everything in moderation.”
   
   Why are the rules any different for human bodies versus animal bodies?
   
   In truth, I don’t advocate an abstinence-only approach to certain foods to my clients. Instead, I encourage them to plan ahead for treats.
   
   Do you need to have dessert every night for now? Great! Let’s plan for it. What about two cookies every night after dinner? Would that work for you?
   
   If they want to eat it less often than that but plan for a treat on a special occasion, awesome.
   
   What I love about this is taking control back over addictions and compulsions and deciding ahead of time what brings pleasure to our lives, and deciding accordingly.
   
   
9. And finally, and most powerfully: a body that is in pain, a body that suffers from disease, a body that doesn’t last as long as its owner would like, a body that can’t keep up with its offspring… that is not feminist. That is not anti-diet culture. That is just sad.
   
   I want to empower my clients to feel their best. I want them to be able to move freely and painlessly. I want them to live long enough to achieve all their goals. I don’t care what they look like. I don’t care about their weight, their BMI, their body fat percentage, or what they look like in a bikini. (“What is a bikini body? A body wearing a bikini.”)
   
   I just want them to feel good and to love themselves wholeheartedly starting today. 
   
   

I am a healthcare provider and a feminist and a coach and I don’t see any contradiction in those things. 

​Would you like to eat more intentionally, more in tune with your long term goals? Are you ready to feel good about yourself again, starting on day one of our work together? Awesome. I promise you it's possible. 

​Schedule a complimentary life coaching session and let's get you living your best life, starting today. 

I’m going through a really painful experience right now.

I have been slowly learning through coaching that the fastest way through the pain is to lean in and really feel it.

This is not how I have lived most of my life.

Most of my life, I dedicated a lot of energy to not feeling pain. I would read or watch movies or call friends or especially, eat. Anything to avoid the terrible feeling that I thought might actually kill me. 

But you know, the pain just oozed into other areas of my life instead. 

So I decided to just take this past three-day weekend to just lean in and feel the pain.

The best way I know how to do this is -- through a lot of study -- is to just feel it in the body. To put your hands on your chest and breathe deeply and say, “I am sad, this is sadness, it makes so much sense that I am feeling this.”

It’s important to not get bogged down in the story but to try to just feel the negative emotion in the body. To become "the watcher." To truly focus on the visible sensation of the emotion.

For me, my sadness feels heavy and dark like rain clouds. My shoulders are weighed down so heavily, as if I’m carrying a yoke with heavy buckets hanging down. If feels like trudging through deep mud. It's so exhausting. 

I can't make it hurry up but I can just allow it and even welcome it. Trying to rush it doesn't work because pain is savvy and knows when I have an agenda to feel better, and it resists. 

So now I just say, “okay, it looks like this is the time I am supposed to feel like sh*t.” 

Of course, I can’t do this all day long, every day. But a quiet holiday weekend is a good time to do this. I am actually pretty proud of myself for making time for it. This is not my busy New Yorker way of living, but Mexico is slowly seeping into me. 

So I let myself feel HORRIBLE on Friday.

I lay in bed most of the day and just leaned into the sadness. It felt terrible.

I let the kids have some extra screen time, which didn’t feel great, either, but necessary. I forgave myself in advance for that. 

I practiced the thought “this is the time when I’m going to feel bad.”

I reminded myself that I’m okay. I’m safe. This feeling won’t hurt me.

And only super recently have I learned: this feeling won’t last forever.

It sounds so stupidly obvious but it wasn’t for me: every time I felt bad, I was sure it would last forever. That was why it was so terrifying to feel bad! What if I never felt it again? Surely allowing pain would allow it to take over forever?

Nope.

The funny thing was, after just one day of feeling s*itty, I actually felt a lot better! It was crazy. Without even trying. 

The next two days were actually reasonably happy. 

But now, two more days later, I am feeling sh*tty again.

Here we go, ‘round the Mulberry bush.

So I’m not trying to make myself feel better.

I am forcing myself to work, because I feel better when I work. I also got up early and worked out, because that also makes me feel better -- endorphins are magical. And I tried to be extra kind and patient with my children even when I was anxious, because likewise, it makes me feel better about myself.

But I am reminding myself that this is temporary. By allowing and even allowing the sadness, it will pass through me as quickly as it can. I can’t rush it, but at least I am not slowing it down.

If you’d like help learning how to experience your sh*tty emotions so you can move through them and be released to happier emotions again, set up a complimentary life coaching call and experience the transformation. 

I promise it's a lot easier than it sounds! 

And if you are dreading sleep training because of how sh*tty you fear your child and you will feel, schedule a free consultation for that, too. The process of feeling sh*tty is exactly the same, I promise.