Burnout Risk is Greater in Pandemic Times, especially for Working Mothers!
Working mothers have been especially hard-hit by the pandemic. In addition to balancing their work responsibilities from home – many working remotely for the first time – they are also having to serve as school mistresses and child-care providers, pushing many to the edge of burnout…and beyond. What’s a working mother to do? Read on for 5 ways to prevent or arrest burn-out …
What is burnout? The World Health Organization (WHO) defines burnout as chronic workplace ...
More Desperately Seeking Sanity: The Power of Casual Acquaintances
“Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.” Benjamin Franklin
I love Benjamin Franklin and look often to his wisdom for insights; the quote above is one which I find appropriate for what we are going through right now. It causes me to think not about the big things that are missing from our lives during this time, but the small things.
At lot has been written about preserving ...
How Does Working Affect Your Kids Over the Long Haul?
When I was researching depression in children of mothers who work, every mother I talked to worried that working might be negatively impacting their children’s development. They worried that they should be spending more time with their kids and they felt guilty that they weren’t. During that research, I found that kids of working mothers actually had pretty high well-being. These kids were experiencing real-time benefits as a result of their mothers’ working. I tried to make the case that ...
From Frazzled to Composed in One Minute Flat!
Working mothers take everything they do seriously because they care. They care about their work and they care about their families (and generally not in that order), creating stress and guilt for them. This stress can make them tired, moody, anxious, and sometimes even depressed. How can working mothers reduce the negative impacts of this stress … and not sacrifice the incredibly important and rare resource of time? One concept that holds promise is mindfulness.
When we think of ...
The Genesis
As a student in Martin Seligman’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology program at Penn (lovingly referred to as “MAPP”), I was in awe of him. When he singled me out one afternoon in October 2016 by responding to a question I raised with “someone really should investigate that”, I knew he had thrown down the gauntlet. My question was whether there was a correlation between depression in adolescents and their mothers working outside the home.
I had been one of those – a mother ...