Joy Fixes for Weary Parents: 101 Ideas for Overcoming Fatigue, Stress, and Guilt — and Building a Life You Love

How can parents stay joyful when they work two jobs and spend their weekends at doctor appointments? When they’re late for work or the toilet overflowed again? How can they stay positive when they’ve had no free time or less than 4 hours of sleep? When there’s pee on the carpet or they haven’t had a real conversation with their partner in a week?

In Joy Fixes for Weary Parents, family therapist and parenting blogger Erin Leyba shows moms and dads the strategies, thoughts, and tools she’s developed over her years of counseling families that will help them stay joyful — in spite of everything. In 101 short simple chapters, this book integrates diverse frameworks and tools from mindfulness, Internal Family Systems therapy, solution focused therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and life cycle perspectives naturally without being obvious or preachy. It illuminates concepts through examples and stories. Using these methods, parents can reorient themselves to a state of calm, humor, and peace — a second consciousness — and stay focused on their priorities. They learn ways to use joy as a focal point, a destination, and as fuel for their relationships.

Many people believe that parenthood is a naturally peaceful time, but the studies around it are quite alarming. In an article in the journal Demography, researchers Rachel Margolis and Mikko Myrskyla reported that having a child can have a negative impact on happiness of both mothers and fathers, with the most significant impact being about the “continuous and intense nature of childrearing.” Their study of longitudinal data found that parents reported exhaustion, sleep deprivation, depression, domestic isolation, and relationship breakdown. About 14% of new mothers have postpartum depression and about 1 in 5 mothers have anxiety. Studies over the last 13 years by the Gottman Institute suggest that between 40 and 70 percent of couples experience “stress, profound conflict, and drops in marital satisfaction” after having a baby together.

These disturbing findings emphasize the urgent need for parents to be fiercely deliberate about building emotional wellness and joy in parenthood. While parents can rarely change their circumstances, they can benefit immensely from the strategies outlined in Joy Fixes for Weary Parents. It will help them remain good-humored, cope effectively with stress, and nurture close relationships with loved ones, all of which will lead them to experience an abundance of joy during this magical but uniquely demanding time.

Joy Fixes for Weary Parents will assist parents in becoming experts at caring for themselves and being good to themselves. It will help them do the things they love, reward themselves, and gain awareness of their unique qualities and abilities. It will show them how to release guilt, embrace humility, and bring compassion to themselves in the face of their mistakes and weak spots. It will help parents follow their intuition, be assertive, and act with honesty and integrity. It will give them tools to appreciate the beauty and grace in their lives. It will provide parents with ways to cope with difficult feelings and to remain grounded in the midst of stress. It will help them slow down, simplify, and create better balance in their lives. It will also give parents crystal clear ideas to proactively bring harmony, kind communication, passion, and love to their most important relationships—the ones with their children, their partners, their parents, and their friends.