There are some consistencies in many of the new waves of parenting advice. Many tend to focus on emotional wellbeing and rely on parents to do some heavy lifting in the co-regulation department. We’re all for kids growing up emotionally intelligent, but our work is with parents, so we started to wonder what would happen if we decided to love ourselves the way we try to parent our children. Below are some principles borrowed from several different modern parenting styles and how we can apply them to our own lives.

Hope is born of struggle and challenging times. You need hope on your worst days and not your best. Hope is more than simply wishing things were different or pretending things are better than they are. Instead, it acknowledges and is grounded in the reality of the moment to look toward the future.

Cheryl Beck, one of the foremost researchers into birth trauma defines it as an event happening during labor or delivery involving actual or perceived threat of significant injury or death to mother or baby in which the birthing person experiences intense feelings of fear, helplessness, loss of control and horror.

The important takeaway from that definition is that the trauma is in the eye of the beholder. What is a traumatic birth might not sound traumatic to the doctor, friends, or family. The subjective experience matters not just the outcome. Anyone telling a mom, “at least…” or “could have been so much worse…” to try to minimize the experience can sit themselves right down. Even a birth with good outcomes can be traumatic depending on how it was experienced.

Around this time every year, we start to spend most of our time talking to clients about how difficult the holidays can be.

But the busyness and burdens of this time of year are just one piece of the puzzle as to why you might find yourself in a bit of a holi-daze. This season is a perfect storm of impossibly high expectations and triggers. The nature of tradition means that we are surrounded by reminders of previous years. Many might bring up pleasant nostalgia, but others can thrust us back into painful ghosts of holidays past.

They say holidays make you feel like a kid again, but what if parts of your childhood aren’t something you’d like to relive? Our brains rely on our past experiences to determine how to respond to our present circumstances. Is it any surprise that after we spend weeks eating familiar food, watching the same movies, and hearing those same songs in every store that we find ourselves feeling a bit like our childhood selves?

There’s a saying that a parent never stops worrying about their kids no matter how old they get. In our experience this is true—babies, kids, teens, and young adults—we hear worries about them all. Assuming parents are in this for the long haul, it’s incredibly important to find ways to hold worry in ways that are healthy and manageable rather than dipping into anxiety.