Mothers today juggle more tasks, work longer hours, and sleep less than their own mothers did. Yet the self-healing revolution has overlooked the most significant issue in the lives of some twenty million women: how to cope with the relentless, sometimes overwhelming, stresses of raising young children in the twenty-first century.

Rick Hanson, Ph.D and Jan Hanson, L.Ac. , have written many colums to help a mom take care of herself while she takes care of her family. Be sure to visit often as this area will be expanding to offer more than 100 colums that will be searchable by keyword for easy navigation.

Inner Skills Articles:

• Essential Inner Skills for Kids and Parents
  Raising children is about love and nurturance, playfulness and enjoying each other, encouraging good values and virtues, providing reasonable limits and discipline -- and helping kids learn how to do things. From that very first moment that a newborn roots for the nipple of a breast or a bottle and figures out how to latch on, life is a thrilling journey of discovery for a child, cheered on by loving parents, as he or she acquires the skills and knowledge needed to make one's way in the world.

• An Essential Inner Skill for Parents and Kids
  As we've discussed in recent columns, grown-ups and kids alike need inner skills as well as outer ones -- and the essential inner skills are self-awareness, letting go, insight, taking in positive experiences, and choosing well.

• How the Inner Skills Can Help
  In order to see some of the ways these skills could be really helpful, the last column applied them to a rambunctious 2^nd-grader. This time, imagine a mother who is trying to get dinner together while her toddler and preschooler bubble around, and her husband calls to say he's hung up at work and will be getting home an hour late.

• The essential inner skills are self-awareness, letting go of painful experiences, insight into yourself, taking in positive experiences, and staying motivated.
  In order to see some of the ways they could be really helpful, let's imagine a rambunctious 2^nd-grader who's charming and full of life yet has a hard time settling down and doing his work in school without distracting others, and who is starting to get irritated at all the criticism that keeps coming his way.

• Staying Motivated: An Essential Inner Skill for Adults and Children
  More than anything else, the happiness, love, and success in your life will depend on how skillful you are. This is true for kids and grown-ups alike.

  Consequently, it's really important to help yourself and your children to become increasingly competent at more and more things. That's what gives you a steep learning curve at home and at work, rather than a shallow or even a flat one. You cannot change where you happen to be in life at this moment, but what is within your power is how much you learn and grow from here.

• Taking In the Good: An Essential Inner Skill for Adults and Children
  As we've discussed in recent columns, grown-ups and kids alike need inner skills as well as outer ones -- and the essential inner skills are self-awareness, letting go, insight, taking in positive experiences, and choosing well.

  Our last column focused on insight. This one covers probably the most enjoyable inner skill: soaking in positive experiences.