WHITEFORD PARENT SUPPORT BLOG

Do you ever feel like the people you love the most get the absolute worst of you? You’re busy all day long giving your best to whatever is in front of you and by the time you get home, you’ve got precious little left in the tank.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the benefit of the doubt. In times of stress, when we are coming from a sense of scarcity, when life feels like a zero-sum game, or when the odds feel stacked against us, it is so easy to assume that the person who just cut us off and made us miss the light somehow did it TO us.

If there was one skill, I could give the human race (or more realistically, instill in my children), it would be
the ability to hold multiple feelings or beliefs at the same time.

This statement is true in many contexts. In fact, I will probably start several blog posts with this sentence. Today, though, I’m thinking about parenting books and advice. They can be incredibly helpful tools. They can also be a source of personal shame when, again and again, they don’t work for your child.

A new school year is starting which means new people, a new round of settling in, learning new rules and expectations, and building a working relationship with your child’s teacher and school for the coming year.

I find one of the hardest things in life can be recognizing a truth I wish weren’t true.

We need to have a conversation about grief.

Today, on my way to work, I was listening to latest episode of We Can Do Hard Things. It was an interview with Julia Louis-Dreyfus (LOVE her!) and they were talking about inner voices.

My name is Natalie Whiteford. Welcome to my blog.I grew up an only child in California, went to college back east, got my PhD in Clinical Psychology in Colorado, married the man I fell in love with at 16, and had 2 beautiful boys 2 years apart, all before the age of 30.