Be The Village

What does it mean to be “the village”?

What does it mean to be "the village” — to not just long for connection with other people but to actually show up and build those kinds of relationships and, along the way, create community for yourself and other people?

Here’s what it means to me.

It means investing the time needed to truly get to know another person: to establish intimacy and build trust.

It means looking for opportunities to make life better for that person in some small way, like passing along a message of encouragement on a day when that person’s encouragement stores are running low.

It means being open about my own struggles and my own hunger for community. When I am brave enough to open up about what I want and need, I encourage other people to do the same.

It means daring to make the first move when it comes to establishing a connection with another person. At a community event that I hosted in Fredericton, New Brunswick, last month, participants talked about how much courage it takes to approach someone you don’t know to say, “Hey, do you want to be my friend?” The thing is…most of the people in the room were feeling the exact same thing. They were all afraid to make the first move and they were all desperately craving friendship and community. We concluded that some sort of “speed dating for friends” event was desperately needed to help people make these kinds of connections. (I don’t know about you, but I’d be all over that kind of an event.)

I think we need to talk about this more — why so many people are feeling so lonely and so isolated and what practical things we can do to rebuild "the village" in our communities. This is something I’m going to be talking about all summer long. I hope you’ll follow along and join the conversation, too, by sharing some of your own experiences in not just finding but being the village.

This post was originally published in The Villager, Ann’s free twice-monthly newsletter about building community and finding common ground in a rapidly changing world. You can read back issues of the newsletter here and sign up for a subscription at the same time.

What Makes for a Happy Mom?

Looking for the recipe for a happy (or happier) mom? Ann Douglas has a few thoughts to share on what actually contributes to happiness in mothers.

Wondering what actually contributes to happiness in mothers (as opposed to what the all the guilt-inducing messages about motherhood might have you believe)? This is a key theme in my brand new book, Happy Parents, Happy Kids, and it is the focus of my parenting column for CBC Radio this weekend. Just in case you aren’t able to tune in, here are a few highlights from some noteworthy research about what does — and doesn’t — make for a happy mom.

What moms love most about motherhood

Believe it or not, motherhood isn't just another word for misery. We moms actually derive a lot of enjoyment from motherhood and, not surprisingly, what we enjoy most about being moms is actually spending time with our kids.

As psychologist S. Katherine Nelson and her co-authors put it in a groundbreaking study entitled In Defense of Parenthood: Children Are Associated with More Joy than Misery, which was published in Psychological Science back in 2013: "Taking care of children provides parents with more happiness, on average, than their other day-to-day activities."

So far from being the source of misery, time spent with our kids is actually the good stuff in most mothers' lives.

What moms love least about being moms

Of course, that kind of begs the question: what is it about motherhood that moms love least?

The research is pretty clear on this point, too. It's all the other stuff: the stuff that gets in the way of these moments of connection with our kids. All the feelings of anxiety, guilt, and being overwhelmed that are pretty much baked into the experience of modern motherhood, in other words.

Parenting isn’t just hard. It’s almost impossibly hard. And for reasons that have little to do with parenting.

One way to manage those less-than-happy feelings is to rewrite the stories you’re telling yourself about what it means to be a good mother.

This is something I spoke with author and registered psychologist Vanessa Lapointe about recently, while I was researching my CBC Radio parenting column. Here's what she had to say: "The idea of being happy really begins with going kind of deep down within ourselves and beginning to tell ourselves a narrative or a story about our our life about ourselves as mothers, about our children, about our partners, about the world that we live in….that we concoct a story that works for us rather than a story that works against us."

So acknowledge that things are hard and then work at rewriting the script in your head — the one that tries to tell you that you're not a good enough mom.

Of course, a mindset shift isn’t going to be enough to move the happiness dial in a major way for a mom who is feeling really crushed by the demands of work-life imbalance or who is feeling frustrated by the fact that she seems to be shouldering a disproportionate amount of the parenting load.

And, as it turns out, these two factors are really key ingredients in the recipe for maternal unhappiness. So if you’d prefer to whip up a batch of maternal happiness instead, it’s pretty clear what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to switch up the recipe a little.

Reduced work-life conflict = happier moms

Research conducted by the US-based Council on Contemporary Families highlights the fact that parental happiness levels increase in the presence of policy that makes it less stressful and less costly for parents to juggle the competing demands of work and family.

When things aren't working well on that front, mothers in particular tend to experience a lot of guilt. A 2017 study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found, for example, that mothers experience significantly higher levels of "work-interfering-with-family guilt" than fathers do.

The good news is that access to quality affordable childcare is a complete game changer for moms, allowing parents to juggle the competing demands of work and family more easily. It helps to minimize work-life conflict, encourages greater equity in couple relationships, and eliminates the so-called motherhood tax (the fact that mothers are penalized in the workplace in terms of both income and opportunity because they still tend to be the ones in their families who take the lead when it comes to caring for children).

So better family policy that actually reflects the realities of what's happening in Canadian families in 2019 is definitely a key ingredient in the recipe for a happier mom. And it may explain why childcare is showing up on the wish lists of a lot of moms this Mother's Day. I actually spotted a hashtag on Twitter this week that declared #childcarenotchocolates. I don’t know about you, but I loved that so much….

A more realistic job description for the position of “mother” = happier moms

If you've always had a nagging suspicion that being a dad tends to be whole lot more fun than being a mom, well, it turns out that science is on your side. A 2016 study conducted at Cornell University concluded that mothers report "less happiness, more stress, and greater fatigue" during the time they spend with children than fathers do.

The job description for “father” is still a whole lot more forgiving than the job description for “mother.”

At the root of the problem is the fact that the job description for "father" continues to be a whole lot more manageable than the job description for "mother." There are more flexible and more realistic models of what it means to be "a good dad" as compared to "a good mom" — even in 2019. These stubborn gender norms conspire to make life harder for moms and dads alike which, I should add, means any person of any gender who happens to step into either of those prepackaged roles.

How does this play out in real life? Well, for starters, mothers tend to spend more of their time with their kids taking care of the hands-on, hard work of parenting, freeing dads up to enjoy more of the fun stuff.

And really, who wouldn't enjoy the fun stuff of parenting more?

There’s no one-size-fits-all motherhood experience

Of course, it’s important to acknowledge that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all motherhood experience — just as there’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all anything. Some moms do have a tougher time than others. Some kids are easier to parent than others. Some stages of motherhood are easier and more enjoyable than others. (Spoiler alert: The preschool years tend to be the motherhood sweet spot.) And some parents are at increased risk of parent burnout (which is more likely to occur when parents have sky-high expectations of themselves).

It’s okay to be a gloriously imperfect mom. In fact, it’s more than okay!

So taming your own expectations of what’s realistic and possible for you in your life right now may be the most important ingredient in the recipe for a happier you. And that starts with celebrating the fact that moms don't have to be perfect. It's okay to be a gloriously imperfect mom. In fact, it's more than okay. By giving your child the gift of a gloriously imperfect mother, you're teaching your child something really important: that none of us have to be perfect in order to be worthy of love. And what a gift that message is for any child to receive.

So here’s to ditching the guilt and embracing the joy this Mother's Day.

Ann Douglas is the author of numerous bestselling books about parenting and the weekend parenting columnist for CBC Radio. Her two most recent books are Happy Parents, Happy Kids and Parenting Through the Storm. A passionate and inspiring speaker, Ann delivers keynote addresses and leads small group workshops at health, education, and parenting conferences across the country.

Related reads:

• The Secret to Good Parenting? Lose the Guilt

• 49th Shelf: A Short History of Parental Guilt by Ann Douglas

• What Moms Really Want for Mother’s Day

• CBC Radio Parenting Column: Ann Douglas on What Makes a Mom Happy

My Most Memorable Mother's Days

Sometimes Mother’s Day is sad. Sometimes motherhood is sad. Here’s what you need to know if your heart is broken this Mother’s Day.

When you’ve been a mother for as long as I have (nearly 31 years, but who’s counting?), special occasions like Mother’s Day can start to blur together. It can be tough to try to figure out which child gave me which ceramic handprint on which particular Mother’s Day — unless, of course, the kindergarten teacher who supervised the handprint-making activity had the foresight to scrawl my child’s name on the back of his or her creation. (Thanks, teacher!)

But while most Mother’s Days tend to run together in my head — happy times spent in the company of my husband and my four kids — some Mother’s Days have proven to be a bit more memorable than the rest, for reasons both happy and sad.

Take Mother’s Day 1988, for example. I was 38 weeks’ pregnant and both hugely pregnant and hugely impatient to give birth. I couldn’t wait to meet my baby. I couldn’t wait to become a mother. I was excited and nervous about what lay ahead — and very conscious that my life would be radically different the next time Mother’s Day rolled around: I would actually be someone’s mother.

That was a Mother’s Day high point — a day spent in delicious anticipation of the birth of a much-wanted baby.

But I’ve experienced some Mother’s Day low points, too, years when I wanted to skip the day entirely because it was too painful to think about motherhood at all.

Take Mother’s Day 1997, for example. I was reeling from the stillbirth of my fourth child the previous fall. Or Mother’s Day 2003, when I was trying to make sense of the sudden and unexpected death of my mother just a few months earlier. On both of these occasions, I found myself going through the Mother’s Day motions for the sake of my other children while waiting for the day to end so I could forget about Mother’s Day for another year.

Sometimes Mother’s Day is sad.

Sometimes motherhood is sad.

When you love someone intensely and deeply, with all your heart, you leave yourself vulnerable to grief and pain and loss. Whether you’re a mother who has lost a child or a child who has lost a mother, the loss is searing and life-changing.

The upside of that pain, of course, is joy — joy that can find its way into your life again.

I remember the intense joy I felt on Mother’s Day 1998 — seven months after the birth of my youngest son and nineteen months after his sister was stillborn. As I cradled him in my arms and looked into his soulful little eyes, I savoured the fact that, on that particular Mother’s Day, I was basking in the sunlight of gratitude and happiness rather than shivering in the shadows of grief.

If you are a mother whose heart is breaking this Mother’s Day, here’s what you need to know:

• You are not alone (even though it may feel that way). Other women are grappling with the same difficult mix of emotions as you are on this day that is dedicated to all things motherhood and moms.

• And not every Mother’s Day will be as painful as this one. We’re a resilient bunch, after all, after all. You will find joy in your life again. And you deserve to feel that joy.

Ann Douglas is the author of numerous books about pregnancy and parenting including Trying Again: A Guide to Pregnancy after Miscarriage, Stillbirth, and Infant Loss and, most recently, Happy Parents, Happy Kids and Parenting Through the Storm: How to Handle the Highs, the Lows, and Everything in Between.

Spoiler Alert: The College Admissions Scandal is Actually About Economic Anxiety

I’m amazed how much time I spend thinking about the economy these days -- and how often I find myself writing about it and/or speaking about it, too. It’s gotten to the point where I feel the need to inject a note of explanation a few minutes into my Happy Parents, Happy Kids parenting presentation: “Hey, parents: if you’re starting to wonder if you accidentally stumbled into an economics lecture by mistake, please bear with me for a couple more minutes. I’m about to connect the dots between what’s happening in the economy and what we’re experiencing in our lives as parents: all the feelings of anxiety, guilt, and overwhelm.” At that point, I proceed to talk about the many ways that economic policy decisions spill over into our daily lives as parents in often-messy ways -- and in ways that only serve to make parenting so much more difficult and more stressful.

I think we need to be doing this more often -- connecting the dots between economic policy and what we’re experiencing in our day-to-day lives. Because when we fail to take into account the many ways that economic decisions impact on our lives and experiences, we fail to pick up on the real story -- what’s actually driving people to behave in extreme, seemingly illogical, and/or self-defeating ways.

Take what happened this past week, for example. One of the biggest news stories of the week was about the US college admissions scandal: how wealthy parents have been trying to rig the system in order to give their children an unfair advantage at college admissions time. Needless to say, the majority of stories were fuelled by a tidal wave of outrage at those parents. But, in the majority of cases, the stories failed to grapple with the bigger picture: why even incredibly privileged parents feel such tremendous pressure to try to rig the admissions process on behalf of their kids.

So why are those parents feeling that pressure? The answer, of course, is economic anxiety. While these super-wealthy celebrity parents may not be worried about losing their home or being unable to put groceries on the table (the kind of stuff that tends to come to mind when most of us think about “economic anxiety”), they’re worried about a loss of status. They dread the prospect of watching their children tumble downward into the ranks of the merely garden-variety wealthy as opposed to the super-wealthy, for example. In other words, the economic anxiety is real for these parents, even if their worst nightmare scenario (“My kid might have to settle for an upper middle class life!”) is the stuff of which parental fantasies are made for the rest of us. After all, at a time when precarious employment is on the rise, a more typical dream might be considerably less lofty (“My kid has a full-time job with benefits and he can even afford to pay his own rent!”)

This whole opportunity-hoarding phenomenon is something I wrote about in the previous issue of my bi-monthly newsletter newsletter The Villager -- and it’s a point I made again this week in an interview with a reporter from GlobalNews.ca. I hadn’t expected the reporter to include my comment in her story, given that the piece she was writing was focused on how the college admissions scandal is likely to affect the lives of the young people affected, but, to my surprise and delight, she did:

Douglas says we should be looking at why parents feel this immense pressure to assist their kids in the first place. She says today’s economic realities and “dog-eat-dog” world makes parents do everything in their power to help their children get ahead. “All parents are feeling that pressure right now, it’s not limited to any certain economic group,” [Douglas] explained. “Until we grapple with some things that are happening on the economic and cultural level, I think we are being really hard on the parents who are engaging in this behaviour because it makes so much sense… in terms of the pressure they’re feeling.”  

I think we need to be talking a lot more about this stuff. I, for one, will certainly be continuing to do so, even if my efforts leave a few parents scratching their heads, wondering if they accidentally stumbled into an economics class instead of a parenting presentation.

I’ll be doing so because looking at the bigger, structural factors that are making life harder for parents is the path forward to a happier and healthier future for families and communities.

In other words, this conversation matters a lot.

What Parents Love -- and Hate -- About Parenting Books

This may seem like a strange thing for me to write about the very same week that my latest parenting book is hitting the bookstore shelves, but there’s actually a very logical explanation. I just finished drafting an email to a group of parents who had responded to a survey of mine on this very issue. You see, back when I was just starting work on my new book, I had invited them to offer their best advice on what makes a parenting book helpful, not harmful. And, let me tell you, they definitely came through for me.

Here’s what I learned from them about what makes for a great — or a not-so-great — parenting book.

They told me that they were looking for parenting books that are diverse in every conceivable sense of the world: parenting books that reflect the fact that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all experience of parenting—or even a one-size-fits-all definition of family. Here’s how one parent put it: “Share recipes for good parenting, but make it clear that parents can—and should—substitute different ingredients in order to create their own special recipe for parenting: one that may be different from yours, but that’s still amazing.”

Ann Douglas is the author of Happy Parents, Happy Kids, which was published by HarperCollins Canada this week.

They urged me to steer clear of pat solutions and quick fixes—and to recognize that “not everything works for every family — and that’s okay.” They also cautioned me to avoid giving parents the message that “they’re doing it all wrong.” Parents are already feeling anxious and guilty enough, they explained. What they need is more kindness and compassion and less judgment.

They challenged me to grapple with some really big-picture issues. Issues like the lingering affects of trauma (and how that affects both parents and kids); the many ways that public policy makes parenting harder; race; class; gender; neurodiversity; and the challenges of parenting in a rapidly changing and often very scary world. Above all, they urged me to confront my own privilege and to challenge myself to write for a range of readers, not just readers with experiences similar to my own: “Talk to a diverse range of parents! Not just people like you!” they said.

“Parents don’t have to be perfect. No one gets parenting right all the time." - Ann Douglas, Happy Parents, Happy Kids

They spelled out what they loved about parenting books they’d read — and what they just plain hated. The books that they loved were books that taught them something: books that provided them with new insights and strategies that they could apply to their lives as parents and that were kind, compassionate, and real at the same time. And, as for the books that they quickly tossed aside? Those were the books that tended to serve up impossibly high ideals: “Parenting is messy and exhausting and just plain hard sometimes. Reading about the perfect parent or the perfect kids just feeds that sense of failure,” they said. They also urged me to bring my own glorious imperfection to the table. “We need to throw out the idea of the perfect parent. And parenting book authors need to acknowledge the limitations of their own parenting abilities and knowledge.”

As you will see if you happen to read my book, I took the parents’ comments to heart. In fact, if you take a moment to skim through the book’s introduction, I think you’ll spot their fingerprints on every single page. (Or at least I hope you will.) I am grateful to these parents for inspiring me to write the bravest parenting book that I am capable of writing: a book that isn’t afraid to connect the dots between what’s happening in our communities and what we’re experiencing in our own families—and to talk about what would actually help to make things better for parents and kids.

Ann Douglas is the author of Happy Parents, Happy Kids, which was published by HarperCollins Canada this week.