Tips for parenting mindfully during turbulent times

Sarah Harris, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, a registered play therapist supervisor and a board certified telemental health provider. Inspired by her family, she wanted to learn how she herself could have a successful marriage and family. And she now helps others through her group private practice that provides exclusively virtual therapy to individuals, children, couples and families.

Harris, married for 17 years with two daughters and a fur baby named Nala, is a passionate advocate for soul-care. Some of the ways that she nurtures herself is through long-distance running, yoga, reading, meditation, cooking and sharing vegetarian and vegan meal ideas. Here's a Q&A.

From a child development perspective, most young children aren’t even aware of what they are feeling and why. Rather, these feelings will most times present themselves as problematic behaviors such as, meltdowns, clinginess, poor concentration, isolating, changes in sleep patterns and angry outbursts.

I have observed that many parents do not feel well-equipped to parent during these unstable and tumultuous times. Instead, they feel lost and overwhelmed. They themselves might be having a hard time managing their own personal stress. They don’t know if they should even talk to their kids about COVID and current events, and if so, how to do this. They want to do the right thing, but, instead feel stuck. They so desperately do not want to make things worse for their child.

On top of that, parents are worried that especially the littles are not getting the social interaction with their peers, which is a building block of emotional intelligence, a healthy self-esteem, good social skills and all of the other benefits that playing with ones peers provides. They are also trying to focus on their children’s physical needs. Many kids are not motivated to go outside and exercise. Parents struggle to sometimes pull them away from their electronic devices in order to do activities with the family or just go outside and play. So, as a parent, it is hard to focus on the child’s overall well-being, during a pandemic, when they might have to work from home or support a spouse who now has to work from home.

In addition we offer social skills groups for children and teens, corporate training such as equity and inclusivity in the workplace and more.

My practice is also part of the Kinly network. Kinly is a parenting platform for families of littles. Once you connect to Kinly, you feel like you are part of a village, where families can easily connect to expert providers such as therapists, doulas, nutritionists, physical therapists and also access free, educational content from therapists. I like Kinly because not only is it a great resource I can point families to, but our community needs strong families and being part of Kinly means we can collectively work to strengthen families & therefore our community, together.