Post Traumatic Parenting

Postpartum can be tough. Whether you are a new parent or you already have children, you have never done this pregnancy before, you have never adjusted from one baby to two and from two to three. That’s why postpartum recovery might look very different for every one of us. Postpartum shakes, not feeling the rush of maternal love, or feeling incompetent and unsupported, it’s all part of the postpart...

Do you worry about how to protect your kids from online dangers, from predators to porn? As Post-Traumatic Parents, we are especially aware of how dangerous the world can be! In this episode, Kristen A Jenson, from Defend Young Minds, helps us explore how to protect our kids in the digital world. We talk about her books, like Good Pictures, Bad Pictures, her journey towards being a kid safety crus...

Is shame the hardest part of Post-Traumatic Parenting? Shame and trauma go together, and shame and parenting do, too. Dr. Patti Ashley, author of Shame Informed Therapy, website https://pattiashley.com/ is the expert on this. We talked about how shame is a sense of not being enough, no matter how well we’re doing, and how trauma leads to shame. Most crucially, we talked about what to do about it....

Post-Traumatic Parents know what helpless feels like, and we don’t want to inflict that feeling on our kids. We don’t want to parent coercively. But the behavioral approach to parenting seems to be the only game in town! Is there a way to help our kids learn emotion regulation or coping without sticker charts? Dr. Mona Delahooke https://monadelahooke.com/ has a parenting plan that combines Polyvag...

Post-Traumatic due to divorce? You’ll want to hear what Dr. Ann Buscho has to say. She’s a psychologist and an expert in “Nesting,” a form of divorce where the kids stay home and parents rotate in and out.  Her book, The Parent’s Guide to Birdnesting, is a roadmap to the only truly child-centered divorce possible. You can find her and her book  at https://drannbuscho.com/ Here’s my review of her b...

Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of Indistractable. Distraction is familiar to us Post-Traumatic Survivors and Thrivers, right? It’s part of our recovery. As PTPs, we struggle with time management and distraction.  Reading Indistractable changed my life – and my conversation with Nir – even more so! His insights on attention and the post-traumatic brain are fascinating. He makes a crucial distin...

Part II of my interview with Dr. Kelly Odenweller, a professor of communication at Iowa State University. To read my Psychology Today blogpost about Dr. Odenweller’s research on Mommy Wars, click here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/targeted-parenting/201910/have-we-weaponized-parenting Here’s what we talked about – as two working moms who research this: Helicopter parenting Mommy Wars an...

As long as we’ve been momming, we’ve been mom-shaming. The Internet just lets us do it on a grand scale. In this installment, I talk with Dr. Kelly Odenweller, a professor of communication at Iowa State University. Turns out, mom-shaming is predictable and quantifiable. Specific types of moms are shamed for specific types of behaviors, and some moms are more universally shamed than others. Post-Tr...

Are you passionate about doing parenting right, and desperately afraid you’ll mess up? Parenting Perfectionism is common for us Post-Traumatic Parents. Problem is – the burning desire to parent perfectly can mean…. burning out. In this episode, we talk to groundbreaking researcher Dr. Moïra Mikolajczak, who discovered parental burnout is a thing. This episode explores the implications of her resea...

Welcome to the Post-Traumatic Parenting podcast, where we explore the intersection between having a traumatic childhood and how that impacts our parenting today. In this episode, Dr. Koslowitz introduces herself and the backstory of the Post-Traumatic Parenting community. If you’ve ever had the thought: “How can I parent? My childhood was so messed up?” or “I don’t even know what’s normal to expec...