Progressive muscle relaxation isn’t just for adults—it can be a playful and powerful way to help kids manage stress, too. By turning relaxation into games—like blowing bubbles with slow breaths, dancing like stiff robots and floppy noodles, or squeezing toes in the mud—we can teach children how to notice the difference between tension and calm. The best part? When parents join in, kids don’t just learn the skill—they feel the calm spread through the whole family.
Today I am reflecting on the relationship between healthy eating and sleep. This morning, I was listening to the audiobook “The Sleep Prescription” by Aric A. Prather, Ph.D. I’ve been slowly working through his sleep “class” in HeadSpace and decided to listen to his audiobook as I work to improve sleep both for myself and for my clients. I’m just on day 2 at the moment, but this quote really struck me.
“Carb lovers, pay attention here: carbs are an interesting case. Studies have unearthed that while most carbohydrates will actually help you fall asleep faster, only certain types will help you stay asleep. Simple and sugary carbs (think pizza, white bread, bagels, pasta) can cause more wake ups throughout the night. In contrast, complex carbs (again, these are the more high-fiber foods like sweet potatoes, oatmeal, and whole grains) can stabilize your sleep patterns—possibly, Dr. St-Onge theorizes, because they also stabilize your blood sugar.[11]” Excerpt From The Sleep Prescription by Aric A. Prather, PhD https://books.apple.com/book/id1608147733 This material may be protected by copyright.
Lately I have discovered that my waking glucose levels are consistently in the pre-diabetic range. I have been using the Stelo non-prescription continuous glucose monitor and reading books like Good Energy by Dr. Casey Means and The Glucose Revolution by Jessie Inchaupé. And my sister-in-law gave me an extra Oura ring, which connects with the Stelo to give insights between glucose and other biomarkers! (Such an amazing gift… although I warn that there is an ongoing fee to use the Oura ring in addition to the up-front cost of the ring itself but also I think it’s totally worth it!).
The real reason I have my own business. Hint: It’s about you AND me.
Nesting parties ask us to re-think the way that we celebrate new parents and challenge us to focus on what the expecting parents need. It’s really less of a party and more of an opportunity to provide the family help.
Unlike baby showers, “Nesting parties shift the focus from stuff to support to help families prepare their homes and hearts for life with a new baby,” explains Lara Elfstrand, the pediatric sleep practitioner of Little Elf Family Services.
When you have a baby, there’s a lot that may surprise you. In this conversation Stephanie opens up about her transformation after seeking help and guidance for her new role as a parent. In this interview, Stephanie shares her challenges, frustrations, and the wins that she achieved through coaching and Gottman Bringing Baby Home classes at Little Elf Family Services.
Recently several people have asked for strategies that can boost the immune system for an exclusively breastfeeding mothers. Moms who are breastfeeding have to be so careful of what they put into their bodies and what they pass on to their babies.
So what's my answer? Interestingly, the research (as shown here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=625t8Rr9o6o) shows that contempt and criticism erode the immune system. So one of the best things that any new parent can do to boost their immune system and protect their baby is to WORK ON THEIR MARRIAGE! Strange, isn't it?
One of the best ways to work on our marriages as a new parent is to take the Gottman Bringing Baby Home program. It's research based and research tested to:
increase relationship satisfaction;
increase language and cognitive scores in babies;
help babies to cry less and smile more;
and to reduce the incidence and severity of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders.
It has NO negative side effects! It leaves you feeling empowered, knowing how to handle conflict and to strengthen your friendship so that your relationship can weather the storms of life. And it boosts your immune system by reducing criticism, contempt, and hostility.
Interested in a class? Let’s talk about it!
It makes a great gift for the expecting and new parents in your life! Gift certificates are available here or put the class on your registry at Be Her Village.
Our mission is: 1) register for pregnancy date night at pregnancydatenight.com, 2) attend our date night tomorrow evening (Friday, December 3), and 3) get started on your journey towards a healthy family.
Sometimes I struggle to describe the challenges of early parenthood because I never want to scare people or make anyone feel like they aren’t enough, or that they won’t be a good enough parent if they don’t do certain things. As a new parent sanity specialist, one of my primary goals is to help each of us as new parents to grow in our growth mindset, being able to ask for help, to make mistakes and learn from them, and to keep learning. We are all iterating our way to awesome, as Marisa Murgatroyd always says! And part of that is to encourage parents to ask for help from the very beginning. Why? As a new parent, you deserve to feel nurtured, protected, and cared for. You deserve to have a partner that knows how to nurture, protect, and care for you. And while they hopefully are great at that now, parenting is a new thing when we are first time parents, and your partner is not a mind reader. So if we’re going to be able to know how to care for our partners well, it’s important to solidify our skills to keep our friendship intact and to be able to regularly and clearly express our needs.
Do you have a newborn baby at home? Sometimes it can be hard to know what to do with a newborn baby when they're actually awake. First off, that can be rare. (Find this video on Placer Birth Connection’s Instagram page).
Some of the first things we're focusing on with babies, of course is learning to eat and sleep.
The number one goal in the first two to three months is to build trust by being responsive, by meeting our baby's needs, and by getting to know them. And even building trust with ourselves that it's okay to be wherever we are. Our goal is to love our baby, take care of our baby, but it's okay to be a first time parent. If you're a first time parent, it's okay to be a first time parent. It’s okay if it doesn’t feel totally natural yet. Let's embrace being first time parents, but also it's awesome to ask for help and get support. This is a vulnerable time of life, and we all need support at this time. We all need help, and there are tons of strategies that we can use that can make life better.
After trust, our next goal is tummy time. Why do we need tummy time? The back to sleep campaign for safe sleep tells us that babies are the safest when they sleep Alone on their Backs, in a Crib (ABC). So they’re on their backs when they’re sleeping. They’re on their backs in a car seat. They’re on their backs a lot. So their muscles can get uneven because they’re constantly pulling against gravity from their back, and they need practice and repetition to pull up using the opposite muscles in their backs. So in tummy time we are giving them time on their stomachs when they are awake so that they are strengthening their back and neck muscles. They can have tummy time on our chest or when we hold them facing out. We want babies to get practice lifting their heads and pushing up against gravity on their tummies. That’s going to help them prepare for crawling.
Another great thing I learned recently that can help to prepare babies for crawling is that when we are doing diaper changes, we can roll the baby to one side; put the diaper under them; and roll them back. That is good positioning for changing the diaper, and it also is giving them regular practice at rolling.
When is a good time for play? If our number one goal is to be responsive, and to build trust, and to teach the baby that she he or she is lovable, and safe, that the world is a safe place, and that they are lovable, then we want to choose times for play that are appropriate, right? So we want to choose times when the baby has already eaten is not hungry, and is not tired. And with little babies, that can be a real challenge. Because the wake window for a newborn baby, generally speaking, is that they're probably going to be tired about 45 minutes to an hour after they last woke up. And that includes time for feeding. So in the early days, there's not going to be a whole lot of time when they're in that quiet alert state.
The quiet alert state is the time when all of us are most available for learning. Even for a toddler, we want to teach before the tantrum and after the tantrum, but teaching in the middle of the tantrum is generally not going to be effective, because our brains are not really in gear when we’re in the middle of a tantrum. Quiet alert is the time when we are not tired; we are not hungry; we are not fussing; we are not crying; we have good eye contact.
Newborn vision is at its best when the baby is about arm distance away from us, being held in our arms. So it’s best to play with our faces about that distance from them.
We want to remember that a baby’s timeline is WAY slower than ours. If you think about what time was like when you were a young child… I remember that summers as a child felt like they lasted forever. And as we get older, time generally goes faster. Summers seem to go by in the blink of an eye. If we think about that when we are playing, that reminds us that we really have to slow down when we are playing with our baby. Everything is new for them. They are going to need a lot more repetition than we think they will. We’re going to need to have a lot of patience. One of our goals as new parents is to “ruthlessly eliminate hurry” (Dallas Willard).
Imitation could be that we just stick our tongues out over and over and give lots of repetition and watch for the little attempts that the baby is probably going to do as they are watching us. We can do simple face movements like raising our eyebrows or opening and closing our mouths. Then when the baby starts to imitate us, we can make a big deal about it. Even if the baby doesn’t know our words, they know when we are excited and that they did something that we got excited about! We can imitate facial movements. We can imitate the way that they move their fingers, their legs, their shoulders. We can do something that is easy to imitate, or we can imitate something that they are doing.
The idea of cause & effect is that we are an experimenter, testing out different ideas. “If I do this, the baby does that.” Similar is trial and error, where we try different causes and see what happens. Parenting is a process of trial and error, and babies use trial and error to figure out the world. When we imitate the baby, we are teaching them about cause & effect, trial and error, body awareness. They are learning so so may things. When I work with families, I bring in a whole toolbox of ideas and a tips and tricks that we can try, and then we experiment to see which tools work best for each baby and each family.
Another example of cause and effect is, under careful adult supervision, tie a ribbon around their arm or leg that attaches to a toy or a kitchen utensil that is attached to a mobile or a car seat handle or a play gym over their head. Or we can find mittens that have rattles in them. The idea is that the baby learns “when I move my arm or leg, I hear a sound” or “when I move my arm or leg, I see that thing move.”
The last strategy I’m going to talk about is sound play. We can read rhyming books. California First Five has their whole promotional series about Talk, Read, Sing. And we can pick a sound of the day. I would probably start with vowels. You can sing any song without the words… just using that one vowel.
One of my favorite quotes is that “The critical link between play and learning—the reason we repeat something and therefore learn from it—is pleasure” (Stamm & Spencer’s Bright from the Start). The idea is that when we are having fun, we want to do it again. When we do something over and over, the pathway in our brain gets stronger and we learn by repetition. But it’s the pleasure and the fun that makes us WANT the repetition.
With newborns, we are focusing on trust. We are focusing on teaching them that they are lovable and worth responding to. We want them to develop muscles evenly on both sides of the body by giving them intentional time on their tummies when they are awake and supervised. We can use imitation, cause & effect, and sound play to teach babies important skills in a FUN way.
Recently I had the exciting opportunity to interview Juan Irby II. Juan is a postpartum doula for dads. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation together.
I am Juan Irby. I am a postpartum doula for dads and also for families. I'm located in the North Carolina area--the Charlotte/Concord area. I started my journey with my first son, my first child. I went through postpartum depression and anxiety. You know I was having those feelings, okay, I'm not getting enough sleep. Is he okay? My life is changing; my life is not normal anymore.
And as a man, we're taught, “Don't cry. You're okay. Man up.” Things like that. But it's okay for men to cry. It's okay for men to seek help. Seeking help does not mean being defeated at all. And so, when I looked at go seek help there was no help in my area.
So, years go by, a friend of ours came over for Memorial Day, and we started talking about being a postpartum doula. So, I looked into it. I signed up that the next month. And in June, I became a certified postpartum doula and my business is called From Dad to Dudla. So you can find me on Instagram at dadtodudla and my website is www.dad2dudla.com, and I provide services for families, for dads. If you just want to talk and have one-on-one connection, you can share your story; I can share my story. And we can just chat, and go from there. But, my background is in business.
So I haven't done any in person yet. I've just done more virtual. I've had a few clients in Seattle, and one in Arizona, and we talk on a weekly basis just to get to know each other and also for me to see where their head space is. I want to make sure that, as a dad that they are not being forgotten in the fourth trimester, and because most dads are forgotten either in the birth or after birth, and I want to make sure that they are not forgotten because they play a great role in their child's life.
Some of the challenges that I've seen, were dads being afraid of not having that one on one bonding time with their child or children. And what I would totally recommend is skin to skin contact. Skin to skin contact is very important within these first few hours of the child's life. And because having skin to skin contact is having your child listen to your heartbeat so it's going to regulate you and also going to regulate your child. It's going to catch on to your hormones, and it's going to calm you down, and also going to calm your child down as well. And just having that skin to skin contact is also going to regulate your child's temperature as well. So just making sure that that contact is there, that's going to start the bond of you and your child and you can do it from an hour, two hours, three hours, as long as you want to.
What I like to focus on is the mental health of mom, dad, brother, sister, and everybody that want to be involved in that family. I know most people don't talk about it but I like to prepare a postpartum plan. And by having a postpartum plan, that lets you know, okay, who is going to be allowed to come into my house? Who's going to be allowed to touch my child or children? Who can, you know, do this and do that? And by having that plan and posting it on the refrigerator, or whatever, that gives them, Okay, this is what we need to do. If a baby is crying, okay, why is the baby crying? Is it hungry? Does it need to be changed? And just making sure that all of those options are there on that plan, so that mom can know, dad can know, because we have a lot of first time parents, and they really don't know how to do those things or how to change the diaper how to babywear, and I'm a huge fan of babywearing also.
I love the Moby Wrap classic. It's a large sheet of fabric. And I would use that for my skin that skin. So I will take off my shirt, wrap my son up in the Moby wrap, And he will be up against my chest, and also allowed me to get housework done, because he would fall asleep in the Moby Wrap. So while he's still asleep I was able to get things done, and have a sense of normalcy, while he was sleeping. And there tons of wraps out there. You have the Moby Wrap. You have the Katan. There's so many out there and I do recommend babywearing as skin to skin contact. Or just open up your shirt, put him in a blanket and just hold him close.
I do actually, I like to tell people about Postpartum Support International, and being a PSI coordinator for dads. I like to recommend dads to come to the support groups that we have at Postpartum Support International. And they can share their story. They don't have to talk. But if they choose to talk, it's a group of men in there who share their stories. We come together. We have a whatsapp outside of the meeting that we have every month. And so, we check on each other. We say hey, has anybody gone through this yet? Or has anyone tried this? Or has anyone tried that? And that's how we as dads can communicate amongst ourselves. And so that way we can support each other, even though we may not be there in person. We can be there to support them and give them advice via that app.
So you would go to www.postpartum.net and or just type in Postpartum Support International, and there are a ton of resources on there from therapists to doctors to doulas to postpartum doulas, and there are coordinators that help you find someone located in your area with PSI.
I was in a doula group on Facebook, and someone reached out to me and said, I think you would be a good fit for this right here. So I did some research on being a PSI coordinator, and I emailed the manager. I was like hey, I would love to do this. My name is Juan Irby. I'm a postpartum doula for dads. I specialize in dads. I want to make sure that they're okay. If I need to lead a support group I can, and go from there. And so she emailed me back and was like, I love this. This is fantastic. I really need you on board ASAP. So, I went through the training, and I am now a PSI coordinator, specialized for dads, and we have a dad Zoom call. It's once a month right now, but we're gonna open it up to maybe once or twice or maybe three times a month. So dads can come in, express themselves and just get things off their chest, and we also have a support group for moms as well. And we also have a support group for women of color, BIPOC, and everything else. Anything you could think of, PSI has it.
I do actually. I am a huge advocate for parenting as a team. I would suggest that before you bring the baby home or right when you know that you're pregnant, come up with a plan on who's going to be doing what at home.
Are you guys going to breastfeed or bottle feed? If you do bottle feed, who's going to clean the bottles? Who's going to prepare the bottles? Who's going to make sure that the bottles are sterilized? That plan needs to be put in place because it's okay if one person does it and it's okay if both people do it.
But if we have that plan already, then we can say, "Okay, I'm gonna go down here to warm up the bottle if you can go get the baby." Or, "if you can go and get the baby, I'll go take care of the bottle," and we can tackle this together. And if and when baby does poop or pee then dad can change the diaper while mom gets the bottle, or mom can change the diaper while dad cleans the bottle. Just having those small conversations about that can really benefit the whole entire team. Who's going to take the first shift? Who's going to take the night shift? Who's going to take the day shift? Who's going to take the nap time?
When the baby sleeps, everyone should sleep, and I truly truly recommend that if the baby's sleeping, you need to get some rest as well.
I will also suggest hiring a postpartum doula. Because, while the baby is sleeping, the doula could be doing some laundry. The doula could be preparing a meal or doing those small things that you normally do on a daily basis. Until you guys get back into a routine with this new person, we're going to hire someone to help us out to just do the things that we normally do, because mom just gave birth or just had a c-section, and can't do a lot of going up and down the stairs or walking or things like that.
Dad is here. Dad can go up and down the stairs. Dad can do the laundry. Dad can do this, but dad also needs to rest. Dad also has his own birthing experience. And dad also has his own birthing story. Mom has her birthing story and dad has his birthing story. So I think it's very important for those things to be talked, those things to be expressed to one another, because communication is a big factor when it comes to parenting. And you have to communicate with each other in order for these things to get done.
Have you heard of the Gottman Institute and their Bringing Baby Home program? I think it would be like so right up your alley. So the Gottman Institute studied marriage for many years, and they found they can predict, divorce, with like 90-some% accuracy. And so then they studied what happens to marriages when a baby is born. And they found that two thirds of the couples they studied experienced significant amounts of hostility. They created the Bringing Baby Home program to help with that communication that you were talking about, and the teamwork and asking questions, similar to what you're saying about creating a plan around what you're going to do for feeding. There are all kinds of activities in there about what kind of plans you need to make together as a team, and managing conflict and building friendship and intimacy skills. It's one of my many favorite things I like to teach. It’s been a good tool in my toolbox. It has a whole section about why dads are important. In general, dads tend to be super playful, and that is one of their superpowers. The play and the soothing are both things that dads can be really great at. And that's really powerful for the relationship as a couple, and for equality and both parents feeling confident and capable. You’re so right up my alley that I feel like I could just keep talking. But I also was totally hear what you have to say, so anything else that you want to add or anything else that comes to mind, I just love everything that you've. I love your work and and all the stuff I want to thank you so much for being here even, I don't know how much you want to say about where you are right now but congratulations.
Find Juan Irby on Instagram at dadtodudla and www.dad2dudla.com
Find Bringing Baby Home at little-elf.org/bbh or The Gottman Institute
Watch Juan’s interview here: https://www.facebook.com/placerbirthconnection/videos/557183272376797
Three of the top skills of a value driven professional—a person who excels in their workplace—are: they know how to de escalate drama; they know how to accept feedback as a gift, and they know the right way to engage in conflict (according to Donald Miller in his book Business Made Simple). And you know what? Those are skills that I teach in my coaching and in my Gottman Bringing Baby Home classes. They're also skills that make for a great parent and that help us to have a more peaceful, nurturing postpartum period.
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©Lara Elfstrand, MA ECSE, IF-ATMHP, CPSI - Little Elf Family Services, P.O. Box 5098, Auburn, CA 95604
