5 Ways Nature Helps Me Cope as a Stay-At-Home Parent
The baby is crying. The dog is chewing something they shouldn’t. The kitchen is a mess. Toys are everywhere. The toddler is having a kicking, screaming tantrum.
Clean laundry waiting to be folded covers your couch. Uneaten parts of breakfast are on the table and have been for 2 or 3 hours.
You brushed your teeth but not your hair, or vice versa. You have fresh spit-up and lanolin stains on your shirt. You feel so alone despite the noise of other dependent beings filling your ears.
And this is the fourth day this week where you feel like you are failing at your job, the job you said you wanted, the job you thought would be fulfilling enough for you to be content and happy.
And in your entire journey of motherhood thus far, the negative feelings feel like they have outweighed the positive ones. And you feel overpowering shame about this perception which you see as painful truth.
What can you do to stop this spiral? It must be stopped, because you have 7 or 8 more hours with these helpless creatures that are yours to protect and nourish and no one else is going to do that crucial work for you.
Go outside!
One key tool that worked for me to stop a shame spiral was to go outside. There is a ton of data out there about how nature is healing for people.
According to the American Psychological Association, nature has been linked to a host of benefits, including improved attention, lower stress, better mood, reduced risk of psychiatric disorders and even upticks in empathy and cooperation.
According to the Child Mind Institute, children spending time outdoors isn’t just enjoyable — it’s also necessary. Many researchers agree that kids who play outside are happier, better at paying attention and less anxious than kids who spend more time indoors.
How Time in Nature Helped Me
#1: Nature as a Reset Button
I had an 8 month old who wouldn’t stop crying. His screeches and sobs pierced my hearing until I felt absolutely surrounded by the noise of distress. I literally couldn’t hear anything else. So I set him in his crib and stepped outside on to my front porch.
I felt the warmth of the sun and the coolness of the air on my face. I heard the peaceful twitters of birds. I was able to take some deep breaths. And the tunnel vision and tunnel hearing was gone, I could see the bigger picture again. So I stepped back inside to comfort my child, and the sobs stopped within a few minutes.
Time outside with my children was a way to have a reset to the day if we needed one. And we definitely needed resets. By going outside, even just to our yard, all of our senses would experience a change in stimuli, and that would help us all reset to a calmer baseline, at least for a little while. It didn’t always work for my children but it did for me. I had post-partum depression with my first two children and post-partum anxiety with my third. I needed as many sources of regulation, support, and joy as I could find.
#2: Nature’s Gifts of Novelty
We were on a walk at the local park along the river. My oldest had just started pulling himself to standing. There was little sun and there was a crispness in the air, and the ground was just a bit muddy as the seasonal rains had only just started.
As our feet tread the slightly crunchy, slightly squishy bark chip path, my son, riding in his stroller, caught sight of a downed log and reached his hands out to it, clearly wanting to experience the log. There was tall grass growing around it that tickled my chin as I squatted next to my son; this log was not new.
As I squatted with grass tickling my chin, my son marveled at the bark of the log. He caressed it, he slapped it, he pounded it with his little fists. He rubbed his cheek on the bark, experiencing a patchwork of smooth and rough due to the moss growing on parts of the log. He held tight to a cut off branch climbing towards the sky and leaned right and left, back and forth, experiencing the log and nature with his entire body.
That day, the log was novel and it was beautiful.
The human brain values novelty. Novel and valuable objects are motivationally attractive for animals including primates. Nature is dynamic and always changing. Whether I took my kids to the same park in the neighborhood we frequented regularly or to a new or different place, we could always find novelty and that brought us all joy.
#3: Nature as a Constant, Comforting Presence
There is one local place called Fitton Green that calls me back to it for its constancy. It is up high in a meadow. You are on a tall hill and you are surrounded by distant rolling green hills, and you are surrounded by vistas. It is quiet. At Fitton Green, I can hear the wind even on days when there is hardly any.
Fitton Green was the first hike I ever took a child on, when my oldest was 4 weeks old, and we have continued to hike there regularly. Every time I go to Fitton Green, I find peace in the constancy of the view, whether it is shrouded in fog or rain clouds or wide open and sunny.
For me, nature was a constant, comforting presence that made me feel less alone as a parent. And I felt really alone as a parent, because of my mental health challenges and the shame that came along with them.
I connected with nature by spending time listening to the birds as I walked at a toddler pace and by touching the plants and blossoms and enjoying all their different textures and smells and sharing them with my children. I would feel connected to other organisms that were not dependent on me for everything, and that enabled me to take deep breaths and find a grounded center again, from which I was able to be the best parent I could be.
#4: Nature as a Place to Be With Other Parents
It was late February. I was 7 months pregnant with my second child. The air was cold and wet and the wind blustered. I wore my 2 year old on my back in a mei dai, tied Tibetan style above my large baby bump. I wore my husband’s blue rubber rain coat, square and blocky as I could no longer wear my own. My son was in his blue rainsuit, when I walked or he moved the rain gear crinkled and slid.
I was happy to be where I was, with 4 other moms and their toddlers.
I was a regular attendee at our local chapter of Hike it Baby hikes. There was a core group of 6 or so families who regularly attended the hikes. From the time my oldest was 18 months until he was 3 ½, one or two days every week we joined the Hike It Baby hikes, rain or shine.
I didn’t realize how much those weekly hikes with other parents helped me manage my mental health until most of the kids were in kindergarten and no longer attending the hikes, and the chapter kind of dissolved. Luckily I had a post-partum doula helping me out at that time so I had some 1-on-1 support through my mental health challenges.
#5: Nature as a Place to Immerse my Body in Movement
I push a stroller with one hand and hold the dog’s leash with the other. I have my maternity support belt on, tight and warm at the base of my expanding uterus. I create a breeze for my face with my running body and I am thrilled to be outside moving.
Exercise is good for the brain and body. When you combine the benefits of exercise with the benefits of time in nature by exercising outdoors, you enhance the benefits of both.
Exercise in and of itself is powerful and I leaned on it a great deal for managing my mental health. I was more active after I had my first two children then after I had my third, and I think that is partially why my anxiety became so problematic after my third child. When I started exercising regularly again when my third child was almost 3, I noticed that I would get more relief from my anxiety immediately after the physical activity and it would last for 2 or 3 hours.
If I went 2 or 3 days without rigorous exercise, my anxiety became a beast I had no breaks from. I eventually did come to the conclusion that I needed medication and other tools to really manage my anxiety, but exercise helped some when I didn’t know what other resources were out there.
Nature Can Be Salvation
Time and time again, I leaned on time outdoors to get through emotionally challenging times. I still do.
