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Parenting often requires regulating our own emotions to effectively respond to our children.

Postpartum PTSD symptoms may affect brain regions involved in emotion regulation and caregiving.

Trauma symptoms can make early parenting harder, but support and treatment can help.

My daughter headed off for a week at sleepaway camp for the first time this week. I was excited for her and knew she would do great. She is brave and confident in a way I love and admire. Still, the goodbye hit me harder than I expected. In that moment, I was leaving my baby girl. Where had the time gone? I managed not to cry and kept my cool as she headed off to her swimming test without even looking back. As a parent, I knew that was exactly what I was supposed to do. My job was not to make my emotions the center of her experience. My job was to regulate myself enough to give her the freedom to have her own experience—to feel excited, nervous, proud, homesick, or whatever else came up for her.

And yet, it felt like just yesterday that she was a baby in my arms.

That moment at camp is just one version of a task parents face over and over: feeling our own emotions deeply while also needing to regulate them enough to make room for our children’s emotions and needs. This is not an easy task, and we don’t get to wait until our children are walking and talking to face it. This kind of emotion regulation begins much earlier, and we know it is especially relevant in early postpartum, when babies first begin learning their own regulation by tuning into their parent’s responses. Managing one’s own emotions is helpful for being able to offer warm, flexible, and attuned responses as a parent.

In this time, new mothers are learning........

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