The Juna Women podcast is a weekly discussion where I talk to Moms about their health, their work, their parenting, and all the different ways they’re keeping it together. This is Episode 001, The Psychology of Parenting with Kara Hardin.
On the first episode of Juna Women, I sit down with Kara Hardin who is a Mom to 2-year old Josh, a licensed psychotherapist, a lawyer, and most recently an entrepreneur.
Kara just launched her own consulting practice and has some really helpful advice for being productive, but more importantly, being kind to yourself.
She analyzes her thoughts and self reflects as well as anyone I know. If you’re looking for a unique voice on the psychology of parenting, Kara is it.
She also put on her therapist hat and flipped the script on me, asking me some tough, but insightful questions. Together we got vulnerable and dove deep into our expectations of motherhood and how they’ve changed over the years.
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Intrauterine growth restriction
We started by discussing the paths we both took to Motherhood, which as you can imagine, were very different. Kara talks about the difficulty she had with intrauterine growth restriction.
At 20 weeks she was starting to notice that her baby’s growth was tracking lower than 50% on the growth chart. It turns out he was very little and he was born in the 3rd percentile, 10 days early, 5 lbs and 6 ounces. He was healthy, but not a pound of flesh to spare. She had an emergency c-section and had an epidural when she was dilated 0.5 cm.
We talked about the mindset of a mother who’s baby is suffering from intrauterine growth restriction and the guilt you might feel. Kara’s advice was spot on:
“Be kind to yourself. If there was something you could do, you would do it. It can be a helpless feeling. You really are helpless just watching your child get smaller.”
The episode clocks in over 1 hour, but is chock full of incredible advice about pregnancy, being a Mom, an entrepreneur and navigating what all that means.
Show Notes
You can connect with Kara Hardin at www.karahardin.com where she provides compassionate and evidence-based mental health consulting, coaching & clinical counseling.
We talked about the book by Ellyn Satter called Child of Mine, Feeding with Love and Good Sense. It’s a gem. Don’t be fooled by the cover.
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