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If you’re a parent chances are you’ve joked that parenting will drive you insane. I’m guilty of it. So much so that from 2009-2012 I blogged about being a full time single parent and even dubbed by 11-14 year-old daughter Drama Queen.
But it’s not all jokes and blog posts that make you want to rip your hair out. There are some serious stresses that go along with parenting and not all of us handle the stress in the best ways.
There are the parents, such as the Turpin parents (more momentarily) who were back in the news last week and then there are the parents who suffer in silence and suffer alone.
The topic for our Thursday evening Mental Health and Wellness Social Interest Group call is Mental Health and the Stress of Parenting. The info is below and we would love to have you join us for an hour of conversation beginning at 9 pm Eastern/6 Pacific on February 28.
To me, the ones who suffer in silence are the parents who are most likely to develop a mental illness of some kind, most likely depression and/or anxiety.
Why?
They’re alone and have no support system. No friend to call so you can vent and bounce ideas off of. No one with experience who can help guide you through the maze. We all need that. Someone who gets us and our situation and is willing to help.
A support system is vital when parenting. I don’t mean a group of friends where you go around the room simply telling each other what your kids did to drive you up the wall, but an actual support system that will help you deal with the problems and not just make jokes about the situation.
As promised earlier, we have the parents with extreme mental health issues, such as the above mentioned Turpin parents. If you don’t know who they are, they’re the people who chained their 13 children, ranging in age from 2-29 to their beds.
Somehow a 17-year-old daughter was able to escape, but she said she had been planning how to do it for two years.
There are other examples of parents who killed their children, but I think you get the point. Parenting is tough on our brains and our mental health can suffer in many ways, from extremely mild to, well, Turpin-esque.
We’ll talk to you this Thursday night at 9 pm Eastern/6 pm Pacific for Mental Health and the Stress of Parenting.
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Join the Mental Wellness FACEBOOK GROUP here.
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Talk to you soon.
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Photo courtesy Unsplash.