Lockdown. It's a horrible word, right? I just felt you shudder. 

If you're a parent, especially a working parent, you've not been having a good time overall during these last few months. Lockdown in the UK came into force in early January, and has meant that across England, Scotland, Wales and NI over 66 million people have been asked to stay at home and only venture out for a few essential reasons. Schools across the country closed to all but key worker children, although nurseries stayed open. And parents nationwide heaved a heavy sigh as the dark nights took hold and the weather went downhill. 

Being a parent can be stressful at the best of times, but at the moment everything is amplified. Every little difficult moment feels huge, and the situation we're in can feel neverending. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and we've all made it this far.

Here are some things you can do today, now to help alleviate some of the stress and pressure you might be feeling as a parent.

The 5 Things Lockdown Parents Need to Stop Worrying About:

1. What Other Parents Are Doing.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Theodore Roosevelt is right: when we compare ourselves to others, especially to those little squares on Instagram or to someone's positivity-saturated tweet, we look at our own life in a different way and can feel like we're failing. Especially if you're comparing apples and oranges. 

Your 1-year-old can't be expected to undertake the same tasks as a 3-year-old, no matter how advanced they are. So stop worrying about the finger paintings and the baking and little Jessie doing cartwheels at the park. Turn that focus inwards and find the joy in your own home. 

2. Insta-Mums.

Speaking of Instagram, if your feed doesn't bring you joy then it's time to curate it. Are you following parents who only post glowy staged photos of their little ones in gorgeous clean clothes playing with toys gifted from beautiful companies? That's great - if you enjoy looking at that content. I do, but for a lot of parents it can produce a huge amount of pressure. 

So unfollow the perpetually perfect parents and follow the ones who post the 3am reel about how their toddler is having a dance party and they Just Won't Sleep, or the mum who's worn the same pair of leggings for a week because the pile of washing is looking scarily tall (hello!). Or follow a good, healthy mix. But cultivate your social feeds so you enjoy what you're consuming, not so you feel judged by it.

3. Being The Best At Everything.

You're doing the best you can in an unfathomable situation. No, we aren't all going to the classes we thought we would be, or playing outside as much as we'd like, and maybe the TV has been on in the background more often than we ever wanted. Perhaps your child ate oatmeal and grapes for dinner because the battle was too exhausting. You know what? Great! They ate! That's awesome. 

The time for competition with yourself isn't now, and if you're not hitting the parental milestones you thought you would then give yourself a break. You can be the mum who makes the best chocolate chip chia muffins for the school bake sale next term.

4. Enjoying the Little Moments For Yourself.

And don't feel selfish about it. 

Toddler tired and went down to bed at 5:30pm? Instead of worrying about an early wake-up call, take the extra time to sit down with a coffee or a glass of wine, a good book or the next episode of Grey's, and relax. Walked past the park and it's quiet? Take ten minutes to let your child burn off some steam and push them on the swings. The fresh air will help and whatever you were on your way to do can probably wait in lieu of a bit of quality time together outside of the house. 

5. Asking for Help.

Oh boy. Us mums aren't great at that, are we? And it's difficult to ask for help at the moment since lockdown rules prohibit mixing of households unless you have a childcare or support bubble. But that doesn't mean there aren't other ways to ask for help if you're struggling. 

A friend might be happy to do the weekly food shop for you, or to take your child for a walk to give you some downtime. Need to vent about the stress of working from home? Call someone up for a chat. Not keen on Zoom calls? That's fine, me neither. But even a WhatsApp chat can take the load off. Got a toy or book wishlist for your child? Send it to a loved one and who knows, they might just send something back. 

Help is there, so don't be afraid to ask. People want to give aid to a friend who's struggling, and one day they might need to ask for the same. 

And a bonus: 6. Taking Enough Photos.

One day, one day soon, we will look back on lockdown life and remember it in a variety of different ways. The good and the bad. But what I'd love us to remember is the quality time we all had with our families, even if it was stressful and hectic and tear-inducing at times. Even if a long day felt like it lasted a week - don't remember that part. You don't need to document your child hating arts and crafts, sulking while you try and bake with them, or moaning as you go for a rainy walk because Fresh Air Is Good For You! 

Take the photo of your beautiful babe cuddled up asleep against you, and remember that moment, even if it's the only one you've taken all week. The moment when you could sigh, snuggle them close, and think of all the things you can do with them when the world opens up again.

Because it will. We'll go back to a sense of normality. But until then, try to take the pressure off. Even Wonder Woman needed some downtime. 

Picture this: you’re 30 weeks pregnant, and starting to think about the big day ahead. Your midwife, doula, friends, family, and the barista at your local coffee shop keep asking you if you’ve thought about the birth, and if you’ve jotted down any ideas yet. You have, but they aren’t exactly well-formed and you’re being a bit bombarded with information from a variety of sources.

One person tells you to write a plan and stick to it, don’t let the midwives or the doctors sway you from anything at all.

Another tells you to go with the flow, let nature take its course and baby will come one way or another.

So, to compromise, you decide to go for a good middle ground: a general idea of how you envisage the birth, but you’re open to things changing if they need to.

It’s important to say at this stage that there are only two main goals when it comes to childbirth: a living, healthy baby, and a living, healthy mother. Everything else can be dealt with in due course. And of course, that’s all anyone wants. Their precious baby, who they’ve lovingly carried for nine months to come out happy, in good health, and to cuddle them for the first time. 

The thing is, that even if you’re lucky enough to tick those boxes and both of you come out of the experience healthy, blissfully in love, and able to walk out of the hospital as a new family of three (or four, five, etc), women are still left with a lot of trauma following the birth which can be extremely hard to deal with and sometimes they can flounder without knowing where to go or who to talk to.

Birth trauma takes many forms but, at its core, it’s defined as lasting post-traumatic stress following childbirth. Many women experience birth trauma following an experience where the fear that they or their baby are going to die, whether that’s from blood loss, an emergency resuscitation, or a multitude of other factors. Most of the time it’s the mother who experiences birth trauma, but fathers, birth partners, and midwives can also feel the effects of it long after witnessing or being involved with a particularly difficult birth.

I decided early on in pregnancy that I wasn’t going to have a strict plan. I would write down some preferences, including a water birth and no medication if possible, but in general I just wanted a healthy baby. But slowly, over time, other things became important to me. I wanted to be the person to pull my baby out, I wanted my hands and my husband’s hands to be the first ones to touch her. I wanted to watch him cut the cord. I wanted to birth the placenta naturally and keep it. I wanted to use my hynobirthing techniques, and I didn’t want internal examinations.

I only had one thing on my list that I firmly did not want, to the point that I said I would refuse to consent to it during labour due to past trauma: foreceps.

We all expect that not everything on our birth preferences list will happen. We hope it will, but we resign ourselves to the fact that we may not have our perfect birth, that we might have to sacrifice some things on the list in order to have our child safely. But what happens when none of the things you planned for come to pass?

Backing up a bit, I was a bit of a worrier during pregnancy, but with reason. In 2018, we lost a baby at 11 weeks pregnant and I was hospitalised for blood loss and complications. This meant I was a little bit nervy during pregnancy, to say the least, but I approached the birth confidently, calmly, and with an open mind that it didn’t matter what happened as long as our baby girl arrived safe and well.

And she did, but following a lengthy, heavily medicated labour lasting fifty-six hours, with an epidural that didn’t quite work, and ending up in theatre with forceps delivery. That’s obviously the heavily shortened version of what was the most traumatic, frightening three days of my life, but you’ve got the gist.

The Birth Trauma Association lists the following as potential factors that make birth trauma more likely:

• Lengthy labour or short and very painful labour
• Induction
• Poor pain relief
• Feelings of loss of control
• High levels of medical intervention
• Forceps births
• Emergency caesarean section
• Impersonal treatment or problems with staff attitudes
• Not being listened to
• Lack of information or explanation
• Lack of privacy and dignity
• Fear for baby’s safety
• Stillbirth
• Birth of a baby with a disability resulting from a traumatic birth
• Baby’s stay in the special care baby unit or neonatal intensive care unit
• Poor postnatal care
• Previous trauma (for example, in childhood, with a previous birth or domestic violence)

Any single experience on this list, or a combination of them, can cause women to be left with lasting physical and mental trauma which, if not treated, can last for years and can seriously impact many aspects of life. It can cause problems bonding with your baby, problems with other relationships in your life, problems with your sense of self, and a myriad of other difficulties.

I was lucky that I didn’t struggle at all with bonding with my daughter. But that trauma manifests itself in other ways, which I will save for a later post. 

The point of writing this out is twofold: catharsis, and to let other women know that they aren’t alone in struggling after a traumatic birth. We expect childbirth to be difficult, painful, but ultimately a joyful experience and when that joy is ripped away it can leave us with a skewed sense of the world around us, the experience itself, and life going forward.

I’m now tackling the trauma I experienced at my daughter’s birth using EMDR therapy, but there are many other techniques out there that work well when it comes to treating trauma, particularly following birth. The Birth Trauma Association is a fantastic place to start. 

Just know you’re not alone. It’s okay to look back on your child’s birth and recognise that it didn’t go to plan and that it’s left you hurting. But also recognise that help is out there. You’ve got this. 

Sounds crazy, right? I read a lot of books while pregnant on how to deal with growing a baby and pushing it out, but my line of thinking sort of stopped at cutting the cord. I'd deal with the ensuing chaos later, and would accumulate a long reading list along the way. I envisioned myself flicking through book after book with helpful tips on bottle vs. breast, sleep training, sleep deprivation, how not to throttle your husband when all he did was breathe a little too loudly... you get the picture. I remember lying in a hospital bed, hardly able to move and with a sleeping baby snuggled on my chest, adding a few random books into my basket on Amazon but never getting around to pressing 'Checkout'. Which, in hindsight, is the best thing I could have done and here's why.

I didn't want any outside influences clouding my natural instincts as a parent.

For me, parenting has been intuitive and when the newborn fog cleared, I realised I didn't want any outside influences clouding my natural instincts as a parent. I will admit that I've had what most people consider an 'easy' baby. She fed well, she slept well, she rarely cried. So that was certainly a good baseline to start with, but I found I quickly fell into a rhythm with her, and that we had a strong connection from the moment our eyes met in the brightly-lit and, quite frankly, terrifying theatre at our local hospital. It was like we both told each other 'we got this' and, it turns out, we did. 

I found my parenting tribe.

I knew next to nothing about parenting styles while pregnant, and even less before the idea of children came to mind. When my daughter was a few months old, I curiously looked it up and found myself down a rabbit hole of information. Emerging, I had the Attachment Parent banner clasped firmly in my hand and a new network of parents to connect with. Parents who responded instantly to their baby rather than leaving them to cry, parents who didn't feel sleep training was for them, parents who contact-napped and co-slept, parents who devoted 100% of themselves to their baby and spent 99% of their time joined at the hip. I'd found my parenting tribe. 

Many of the big names in childcare have written guides and manuals of what to do in various situations, and for many parents these books are gospels - and that works for them. The last thing I want to be is a Judgy Mum (although we all fall to that trap from time-to-time, I'm sure). But the only thing I ever really sought guidance on was healthcare (I swear I had my health visitor on speed-dial at one point) and weaning, because it turns out feeding a baby isn't quite as easy as feeding the bottomless pit I call my husband, or the four-legged Hoover who loves nothing more than to sit by the high chair in hope. And usually, that help was sought from wise friends who have been there, done that. So yes, three weaning books are sitting snugly on my shelf. But aside from that, we've been winging it.

Now, she's thirteen months old and a toddler in every way possible. She moves faster than I thought any small human could and has the appetite of a hungry wolf. Suddenly, even though our connection is stronger than ever, there are potholes and pitfalls that I need some outside help with, and some large hurdles on the horizon (potty training - where do I even start?) so I've turned to my trusty books to help me out. 

I know by now how I want to parent, I know of authors who will resonate with me, so the books I seek out are in-line with how I parent my daughter and how we connect, rather than trying to shape that connection and that parenting style to fit with the way we 'should' be doing it as instructed in numerous mummy manuals. 

This approach certainly won't work for everyone - nor should it. We all parent differently, and some mums and dads prefer to do everything by the book from the word go. 

But for anyone wanting to trust their instincts, I definitely recommend trusting yours. Don't be afraid to seek help when you need it, but finding our own ways as parents and learning how to nurture our little ones without being given a list of 'shoulds' and 'shouldn'ts' is definitely something I'd encourage any mum to try. It certainly worked for us.

Now, onto the toddler years...