Your children have been playing nicely for a few minutes, giving you the chance to get a head start on dinner. Maybe tonight you’ll be able to make something other than pasta, thrown together at the last minute.

But then, the kids’ voices get angry and loud, with shouts of “That’s mine!” And you think: Here we go again. Can’t they get along for more than two minutes? Why can’t the older one just be nice?

Before you can get to the kids’ bedroom, you hear the little one wailing and you know her big sister has done it again. You rush in, angry, and yell at your oldest child for hurting her sister – and then feel like crap when you see the look of fear in your oldest child’s eyes and she starts crying as loudly as her sister.

Two minutes later, you’re sitting on the bedroom floor, a big mess of self-flagellation, resentment, and frustration, while your kids giggle as they peek around your body at each other. You’re mad at yourself for breaking your promise to not yell at the kids. You’re exhausted from the kids’ constant bickering and fighting. You know you must be scarring them in some way with the anger and resentment you can’t keep from bubbling over. But really, if they just behaved better, you’d be a better mom.

​You don’t have to stay here on the floor, tearing apart your parenting. Here’s how to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.

Taking Care of We
Your ability to control your reactions is governed by the part of your brain called the prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex is like having a CFO who collects all of the data and makes executive decisions on how to manage your behavior and your choices.

When you lose your cool because your kids are misbehaving, screaming bloody murder, and trying to take each other down, it’s like you’ve set up shop in the basement, otherwise known as the fight or flight part of your brain. To get back upstairs into the CFO’s office (your prefrontal cortex), you need to find a way to feel empathetic toward your child.

To build empathy, see if you can you look at the situation from your child’s perspective. Usually when a child acts out, the bad behavior is expressing a need:

• Has your child started a new preschool with new rules and a new routine and he needs more help adjusting?

• Are changes surrounding the addition of a new baby changing how much attention you can give to your older child and your daughter needs more time and reassurance from you?

• Are you working more hours lately and your child is missing you?

Getting promoted to the CFO’s office by shifting your perspective, being empathetic, and managing your temper is an awesome goal. But when your child launches into another tantrum at Target or leaves teeth marks in his brother’s arm, and you feel those mean mommy emotions starting to boil, what do you do?

​How can you keep your patience when everything – including you – feels like it’s falling apart?​

Taking Care of Me
It’s scientific fact: the better you take care of yourself, the more self control you have available. Eating well, getting good sleep, and other healthy habits affect how you use glucose, fuel for your brain and body. Physical activity – not just what we commonly define as “exercise” – makes your brain bigger and faster, especially in the prefrontal cortex.

You can build willpower with STEAM Power: S for Sleep, T for Talk Nicely, E for Eat Well, A for Activity, and M for Mindfulness. When you integrate new habits that help your prefrontal cortex work more effectively, you can more easily manage your moods, stop yelling, develop patience, and feel like a better mom overall.

Are you thinking that all of these ideas are great but you’re wondering how in the holy hell am I supposed to do all that? Or have you tried to let go of resentment, yelling, or another bad habit in the past and your new ideas have worked for a while but then you’ve fallen back into your old, familiar patterns?

If you think more information is nice but you know you need more hands on help, schedule a free mini session with me to get you back on track. I’ll work with you one-on-one to share tools you can start implementing right away to ease resentment and frustration with your spouse and kids, let go of guilt that can get especially loud when you start thinking about yourself, or help you figure out comes next for you so your time is filled with what matters most.

From my perspective of a mom of older kids, the adage the days are long but the years go fast is gospel truth. What do you want your kids to remember? How much more time do you have to fix what isn’t working? If patience feels so far out of reach it feels like you’re stranded on the basement floor, it’s time to try something different. You don’t need to spend all that time climbing 44 flights of stairs to get to your inner executive offices. Let’s go find the elevator.


Kathleen Ann Harper is the author of The Well-Crafted Mom. She works with moms who know they have everything they ever wanted, yet still feel like there’s something big missing. Through one-on-one sessions, group programs, and retreats, Kathleen helps moms find the time and energy to craft a life that includes creativity and joy. Discover more about Kathleen at thewellcraftedmom.com/about
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September feels like a mini-January to me. I love how the new school year is a fresh start for everybody: new notepads and pencils for the kids, new classrooms and schedules, and new resolutions for me to be better organized and prepared for each day.

Maybe it’s the same for you. You drop the kids off at preschool and daycare and you're ready for action. You have the whole morning mapped out: expedited errands, a workout, and an organized effort to finally get the house in shape.

But then life gets in the way. One of your children gets sick and you can't work out. You start off with a lot of energy to tackle the household mess but, after a week, it doesn't seem like you're making any progress, get discouraged, and stop. This is a pattern for many people: starting off with big goals and big enthusiasm, but after a few weeks in, they're back in the same habits as before. Not following the new calendar app, not organizing the flood of papers that come from school, not going to the gym, going for a walk, or attending the classes they signed up to take.

Why is it so hard to build a new habit – and so easy to stay stuck in an old one?

Research shows that our brains are wired for falling back into old habits, much like a wheel finding a well-worn groove in the road.

It’s not impossible to build new habits, it takes awareness and effort – a few resources that might be hard to find if you’re a mom without a lot of extra resources to spare. Here are a few tips to make it easier:

Find your resistance
If you’re trying to build a new habit and getting stuck, find your resistance. What are the stories you’re telling yourself for not doing what you originally were so motivated to do? It’s too hard. I’m too tired. I should be doing (insert something else that sounds a lot more important here).

Over the summer, I was motivated to get up early and head outside for a morning walk before the rest of my family woke up. Lately though, I’ve been more likely to roll over in bed than head outside. When I took a look at my resistance, I realized I don't want to go  outside because it’s now dark at my walk time when it wasn't over the summer. Now that I'm aware of this piece of information, I can work on creating a solution. (Stayed tuned.)

Unharness your inner power
Use the power of visualization – not by imagining the end result but by picturing yourself doing the small steps along the way. A study from UCLA showed that students were more successful on tests if they imagined themselves developing and following good study habits, rather than if they pictured receiving a good grade at the end of the semester.

So if your goal is to have a well-organized home, you’ll want to imagine yourself accomplishing the steps involved in getting to what you desire. Picture yourself spending 15 minutes every day working on one part of your home, or putting the paperwork away to keep your home neat, not the final “reveal,” which may be months and months away.

Change what doesn’t work
Many people try to solve an old problem using the same methods they’ve tried before.  Sometimes what you need is more than another appointment book, membership at the gym, or yet another resolution. What you might need are new ideas, new tools, or someone to keep you accountable and motivated so you can keep moving toward your goal.

You might need some new tools and stronger resources if …

• Your house is full of half-finished projects because you find yourself giving up on your goals only a few weeks after setting them,

• You lose motivation for exercise shortly after starting a new program,

• You sacrifice the time you set aside to do creative projects and instead fill your time with what’s required and feels more important,

• When you stop working toward a goal, it makes you feel bad about yourself, even if it’s just a little.

Let me help. I offer a free call to help you create new ideas for making your goals a reality, not another reason for feeling like you’ve failed. To start the conversation, send me an email. I'd love to hear from you.


Kathleen Ann Harper is the author of The Well-Crafted Mom and a certified life coach for moms. She works with moms who know they have everything they ever wanted, yet still feel like there’s something big missing. Through one-on-one sessions, group programs, and retreats, Kathleen helps moms find the time and energy to craft a life that includes creativity and joy. You can purchase The Well-Crafted Mom on Amazon by clicking here.

Writing a book is a lot like being pregnant. The process is very personal and internal. There’s a lot that happens that feels like a delightful secret: the baby hiccups, moves, kicks you to say hello when you rest your hand on your belly.

It’s the same way with a book. While in the writing stage, I’d read back over what I wrote – chapters no one else had seen – and have that same, delicious, private pleasure because something special was growing within me.

At the same time, growing a baby – whether it’s a real baby or a book or a personal project – is something that’s rarely done completely alone. You have guidance, support, resources, a wealth of information at your fingertips, friends and family to lean on, a support system of experts, like doctors and nurse practitioners (or, in my case as an author, a publisher, editor, art director…)

And just like I learned so much about myself in the months before giving birth to my children and then once I became a mom, I’ve learned just as much as I became an author.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is to lean.

I’ve never been good about leaning on friends and family or admitting I’m not able to handle everything myself. I believed that there’s more value in going it alone. I like the feeling of barreling through challenges like they’re my own obstacle course and I’m racing to see how much I can get done, as if I’m out to set a personal record. Doing it alone carries weight, builds status, pushes you harder to achieve more.

But it also creates exhaustion, reduces focus, and isn’t fun.

And the idea that having an inner Mean Manager who drives you to work hard and then work harder so you can get further faster isn’t necessarily true. Sociologist Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion shows just the opposite: the more self-compassionate you are, the more productive you are, and the happier you are at large.

And just like when you’re newly pregnant and can’t imagine ever fitting into the enormous maternity clothes that your friends have passed your way, I couldn’t imagine how much I’d grow. Over the summer, I made it my personal goal to say yes whenever I could to requests for help. I’ve reached out to ask for help from my writer’s support group, even (or especially) when I felt vulnerable. Friends have taken care of my children and taken care of me by shopping for me, reading chapters and giving honest feedback, sitting down with me and my scattered to do list and helping me prioritize and organize what to do first, even providing free acupuncture sessions to help me ease out of my head and back into my body. Friends listened to my writing woes and then gently told me to shut up, sit down, and get back to work.

Just like research has shown that having an exercise partner increases your motivation – and also your performance – having friends, colleagues, and family in my corner increased my resolve to finish, even when writer’s block stopped me in my tracks, even when I experienced my longest bout with insomnia ever, even when I thought I couldn’t add one more task onto my already full plate.

Friends – including my so very patient and devoted husband – would bring little gifts: a smoothie while I wrote, a bag of berries left on my front porch, a grown-up coloring book to help me relax, a homemade meal for my family when I was out of town with a note that said, “Thank you for sharing your wife with the world.”

I leaned, and there was a strong wall of so many people who held me.

“Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends,” wrote Virginia Woolf.

To my friends: Thank you.

“You’re handing this remarkably well,” said my husband as we brought the last of the houseplants out to a shaded corner of the backyard. We were preparing to have the house tented for termites: all of the open food and liquor, houseplants, medicine, people, and Traviesa the cat needed to be removed for the three-day process.

Our original crash pad arrangement had fallen through and so my husband, two kids, and Traviesa were going to be bunking for three nights with a generous friend who had a meticulously-kept house, exquisite hardwood floors, elegantly upholstered furniture, and who had never had children or pets of his own. (I gave the cat a stern talking-to while trimming her nails before putting her in the carrier; the boys were lectured, too.)

I knew my husband meant his statement as a compliment, albeit a backhanded one, and I let my soft self accept the statement as praise, ignoring my prickly side which had a slightly different reaction.

But I had to agree with him; I was handling my stress remarkably well.

In the past, I would have continued to squeeze more projects and responsibilities into my already full schedule – even with the addition of moving out of our home – until each day was filled to overflowing, bringing my stress to high levels while my mood crashed and burned.

There was a lot that I was saying yes to this summer, but I was saying no to so much more.

Earlier in the summer, I had written a short handbook to accompany my “How to Parent Like a Prius” program for moms. (You can get your free copy here.) The handbook includes a recommendation to evaluate everything on your to do list in terms of its desirability and its urgency/importance.

Here’s what happened when I followed my own advice:
I exterminated responsibilities with low desirability and low importance from my to do list. This means that, for now, I’ve ditched passive leisure activities like watching television and spending extra time on Facebook.

I’m handling responsibilities that have high importance and low desirability the same way I deal with big, icky spiders – by asking, “Honey, could you help me, please?” My husband took over most of the preparation for the fumigation and all of the tasks involved with moving back in. (He thoroughly cleaned the empty refrigerator and freezer before stocking the food we had stored offsite during the fumigation. No, I’m not sharing him.)

In addition, I delegated all of my baby sign language responsibilities to the extremely capable Teri Voorhes, one of Touch Blue Sky’s baby sign language instructors and an uber-efficient administrative assistant/project manager.

I'm treating items with high desirability but lower urgency (not importance in this case) with the utmost care. Much like how I capture delicate daddy longlegs with a cup and carry them outside, I moved my time with girlfriends to after my book launches on September 1st. I’ve missed seeing my friends but I know they’ll be waiting for me when my schedule clears after book launch day.

What’s left are the essentials: work that makes a difference, my children, husband, and home. And even though my schedule is crawling with things to do, I can breathe easy.

Kathleen Ann Harper is the author of the soon-to-be-released book, The Well-Crafted Mom, and a certified life coach for moms. She runs programs for moms, offers one-on-one sessions, and speaks to groups both large and small to help moms manage the many transitions of motherhood. Download her free handbook, How to Parent Like a Prius, by clicking here.

I had a hard time watching the animated movie Inside Out. I went to see the movie with my kids and, like most of my mommy friends, I cried in the dark theater. The movie reminded me of how many of my children’s memories are fading and dissolving in clouds of smoke – like how my son can’t remember the imaginary friend he had when he was really little or the sweet ceremony our family shared when our first cat died.

But what made me squirm in my seat was how Inside Out reminded me of times in my own life when my outside circumstances changed and wreaked havoc with my internal emotions, like when I let go of my massage therapy practice last year, when I lost a dear friend while in my 20s, when I shifted from being a mother of one to a mom of two.

Sometimes Joy disappears from my emotional headquarters, leaving in charge a confused muddle of Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust. When Joy is absent, my husband reminds me of all of the goodness we share: healthy kids, work we love, a beautiful home. His words are a gentle shake of my shoulders as he tries to settle Joy back where she belongs.

But Joy has to find her own way home.

I try to help. I keep a gratitude journal to illuminate parts of the dark path for Joy to find her way back to my emotional control center. I build signposts for Joy by exercising regularly in my dance classes and heading outside for early morning walks. A healthy diet of good mood food, reminders to rest and play, and time with friends keep the path clear for Joy, too.

But waiting for Joy to return is mostly about being patient, trusting that she’ll find her place with the other emotions at the control panel and expertly turn up the happiness dial. I know Joy is back when happiness comes unexpectedly and unbidden, when I feel like I've stepped out of a dark movie theater after a summer matinée, blinking in quiet surprise at the forgotten brightness of the sun.