I always wanted to be a daddy. I just never knew how much it would change me.
I always wanted to be a daddy. I just never knew how much it would change me. |
This Father's Day, we meet Thiago Queiroz, a dad who has been absolutely on fire for supporting other fathers in his native Brazil since his oldest of 4 children was born a decade ago. |
Some days, I feel like I do a pretty good job of balancing my career, my family, and myself. Other days, it feels like I'm falling desperately behind and failing on all three counts. |
I thought I kept my car clean and tidy. |
We want to celebrate our child's unique traits, but sometimes their differences can be worrying. |
My partner and I had asked all the big questions as we got ready for the birth of our son. We'd prepared ourselves both physically and spiritually for what we expected to be a smooth, beautiful childbirth assisted by our midwife. |
One of the many reasons parents find their way to Nurturings is that they're seeking a community and Nurturings can connect them to local parenting groups. |
Love opens us up, wide open: no armor, no defenses. We're naked and vulnerable when we're in love. Love is powerful. It's not just cupids and chocolates and diamonds. |
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“More recently, in April of 2021, Proceedings for the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) published a study that looked at the long term effects of Kangaroo Care. |
Social support was associated with a new mother’s confidence, which was further related to less postpartum depression. |
Insecurely attached children showed more resentful opposition toward their mothers than did those with secure attachments. |
Regardless of the quality of non-parental child care, children from low-quality home environments had more behavioral problems and children from high-quality homes had fewer behavioral problems. |
High-quality parenting was predictive of greater academic and social skills for all children, but particularly children with a difficult temperament. In addition, high-quality non-parental child care predicted fewer behavioral problems in children with difficult temperaments. |
Post-deployment programs that address parenting would be helpful, especially for families with children from birth through age 5, as this age group is particularly vulnerable to changes in attachment patterns. |
While it is well known that traumatic or extended separations negatively impact child development, even week-long separations that occur within the first two years of life have lasting consequences on child behavior. |
Infants with night-wakings were more likely to be boys, be breastfed, have a difficult temperament, come from a large family, have a depressed mother, be in a single-parent home, and/or attend fewer hours of non-parental child care; however, this tendency for more night-wakings tended to resolve by 18 months. |
In solitary sleep arrangements, mothers were more involved in nighttime parenting than fathers, and breastfeeding was related to less father involvement. More father involvement early on predicted fewer night-wakings by 6 months. |
Child sleep problems are based more on culturally-influenced parental perceptions than actual biological reasons, and nighttime sleep issues tended to be perceived more problematic than daytime naps. |
More research is needed to identify normal sleep patterns in breastfed versus bottle-fed infants, in toddlers, on weekdays versus weekends, and as related to gender and ethnic differences. What is known is that children sleep longer at night and experience fewer night-wakings and daytime naps as they develop. |