You can love your child deeply and still struggle to stay connected when they’re upset. For many high-achieving mothers, the skills that have helped them succeed—anticipating, solving, planning and taking action—can make the emotional uncertainty of motherhood surprisingly hard. Here’s why connection requires a different set of capacities, and how those capacities can be learned.

If you’re constantly telling your kids to hurry, rushing may have less to do with time than you think. Here’s what happens when time pressure becomes nervous system pressure—and how learning to slow the urgency can actually help you function better, connect more deeply with your kids, and enjoy more of the life you’re working so hard to manage.

Maternal mental health is having a moment. But the conversation needs to extend far beyond crisis. From better-trained clinicians and coordinated care to postpartum anxiety, intrusive thoughts, identity, uncertainty, and the conditions in which we ask women to mother, here are seven places I believe we need to pay closer attention.