"Write Off" Maternal Stress
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research that hits home
There is robust evidence that maternal stress is detrimental to children’s health, not to mention that of the mothers themselves. This begins even before pregnancy, with some studies showing differences in health of infants and children when mothers have experienced adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) as children. A myriad of other studies show that prenatal maternal stress can impact everything from respiratory status to memory in children. The bottom line is that maternal stress has a direct impact on children’s health, and while this sort of feels like telling the most busy person in your social circle they “really need to slow down,” I feel it’s important to share because many women are far more tuned into the needs of their children than their own needs. Through biology or training, we’ve learned to put our children first: after all, that’s how the species survives. Except, it turns out that we might be damaging our children by not caring for ourselves. If self interest doesn’t motivate you, hopefully that little tidbit will. Now you just need to find the time, the money, and someone to watch your kids ;)
This begets an important question: what does self-care mean for mothers? Is eating ice cream from the carton on the couch while binge-watching Sex and the City equal to meeting the US recommendations for physical activity? While I don’t have an answer to that specific question (and I strongly, and somewhat sadly, suspect the answer is “No”), I can illuminate some relevant research findings. As a writer and compulsive journaler (copyright, me), I was particularly interested in the role that reflective journal writing played in helping mothers address stress. First, a note: there seems to be much more evidence on the role of journal writing for mothers who are contending with illness or disability in their children--unsurprisingly, as this represents a whole new level of stress beyond the already stressful job of mothering young children. For example, journaling has been shown to be effective for reducing stress and improving maternal-child interactions in families of children with autism (Whitney, 2015). In a separate study, journaling (called “narrative writing” in this study) was effective in reducing maternal stress in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), to the tune of a nearly 60% reduction in stress levels (Kadivar, 2014). (A separate study, over a longer period of time, found essentially no change in stress after either a narrative writing or art therapy intervention for mothers of infants in the NICU (Jouybari, 2020) and length of intervention may be one factor in this difference.) However the Kadivar study’s findings are reiterated among 62 mothers of children undergoing stem cell transplant for cancer over a one week intervention (Farahani, 2017).
Photo by fotografierende on Unsplash
How Journaling Works for Me
It’s possible that journaling provides only short-term relief in stress for mothers in these seriously stressful situations. However, my personal experience is that very long term journaling has immense benefits in stress reduction. In fact, my desire to write a book is, in part, a reaction to the experience of trying to raise young children while working full-time and being driven by my personal concerns to learn more and more about childcare and family support in this country. My blogging is often reflective of my personal parenting experience and the stresses that go along with it. But even more important, I think, is the role my Work Journal has played in coping with more “typical” maternal stress. I first wrote about my Work Journal here but below are some ways that long-term journaling through the Work Journal have helped me cope with stress.
Provides an opportunity to plan for the upcoming week
Self-care:
It gives me the opportunity to plan for things like actually taking a lunch break and exercising. Even if they don’t always happen, they sometimes happen, and that’s better than nothing.
Identify changes in routine and plan for them:
This allows me to look ahead and see if I have an upcoming late night event or an especially early morning, which in turn lets me notify others and plan when other things will get done.
Allows time for working toward long-term goals:
It’s too easy to get caught up in the constant fires at work and home, and long-term goals often get left in the ashes. Having an advance plan for when I will work on long-term goals and big projects let me produce YouTube videos, start an email listserv, and begin research projects at work all related to childcare and early childhood development. There was no time in my schedule or line in my contract for these things; they were projects I felt passionate about and so I had to carve out time for them.
Reduces the sense of Never Being Done
Allows me to see accomplishments great and small, many of which are simply forgotten in an uber busy week.
Often, I’d find myself down about how “little” I’d accomplished in a given week, only to write in my Work Journal a list of 25 things I’d gotten done. What can I say? Short term memory suffers with lack of sleep.
Allows me to think strategically about the pieces of a larger project and set aside time for them.
As a younger woman, I had almost no capability to go from here to there--in other words, to go from the start to the end product of a big idea or a big project. I’m a pretty focused worker, so one strategy I used to overcome this fault was to simply plow through projects with great intensity. As a working parent--and especially one who works quite far from home--this just isn’t an option any longer. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go because daycare charges a dollar a minute after closing time. Plus--having been the last kid at lots of things--I just don’t want my kids to be those kids.
Allows me to note future projects and ideas.
A lot of brilliant (pat, pat) ideas can get lost in the shuffle if they’re not recorded somewhere. I record them in my Work Journal. (I also have a personal, OG paper journal.)
Alerts me to Themes
In fact, becoming interested in childcare, mothers, and family is something of a “left field” field step for a pediatric physical therapist (except, as we’ve just discussed, it’s not at all, because maternal health and child health are inextricably linked.) After months (years?) of journaling I finally saw all these themes dovetailed my expertise and my lived experience. Once I saw these themes, I was driven to turn to published research to see if my experience was echoed in others’ experiences. I wanted to know how childcare impacted children and how all stakeholders--including teachers, mothers, fathers, children and extended family--were faring in the early childhood years and why. This opened up a new line of research for me at work and was a game changer for both my career and my stress levels, as I learned I was not alone.
Provides the opportunity for Insight
In many instances, such insights led to solutions. Seeing a problem spelled out (often many times) allowed me to study it (One simple example? I was so impatient with my frazzled children at daycare pickup that I often spoke sharply or yelled or was just a big, fat meanie. The long commute beforehand and their particular habit of becoming wilder the more tired they are weren’t things I could really adjust, but one thing I could adjust, I realized, was that I was often hungry and thirsty at this time. Solution: I started packing a late afternoon snack.)
It provided direction.
As a specialist in child development, education, and rehabilitation, it eventually dawned on me that advocating for children and families was calling to me. My own suffering--when I separated from my kids at daycare, or got a phone call from daycare to pick up a sick kid only a half hour after commuting over an hour to get to work, or watching talented, kind teachers leave my kids’ lives because of poor wages, benefits, and treatment--was not suffering without reason. It weighed on me not just for personal reasons, but precisely because this is my field and these are populations about whom I care deeply.
It allowed me to cut myself some slack.
Seeing everything in writing allowed me to realize how much I was accomplishing on both work and family fronts. It is a common strain among working parents that you feel you’re doing bad at everything. In black and white, however, I realized that most of the time I was doing pretty darn awesome at both.
Avoided Conflict
Suffice it to say that a lot of adjustment had to occur in our early years of marriage and parenthood (which overlapped pretty much exactly, as our first child was a honeymoon souvenir). There were a lot of things about shared work and shared responsibility and lack of support that I told my journal rather than tell my husband to his face. Some cards I probably held to my chest too long, but as my husband is a person who must come to his own realizations, I think it may have also helped us stay married during some pretty tough years. New parents are often quite isolated—despite also never, ever being alone! Old friendships often don’t work anymore because, let’s face it, screaming babies are inappropriate at bars. But everyone needs someone to talk to. In somewhat “dry” social years, my journal was (and remains) a listening ear and a source of friendly advice.
Do you journal? How do you deal with the stress of being a parent or caregiver? Share your story in the Comments section below.
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