My guest today is Sarah Ockwell-Smith, one of the world's leading parenting experts, having written 13 books and sold half a million copies. Her philosophy of gentle parenting is hugely influential in the motherhood WhatsApp groups of Great Britain and her latest book ‘How To Be a Calm Parent’ has as much to tell us about how to look after ourselves, as it does about how to look after our kids.

In this episode we talk about how to be calm, self-kindness and why being a busy parent isn't actually something to be proud of.

Sarah mentions seven principles of being a calm parent in her book. I asked her about the first one, which is everybody can be a calm parent or a calmer parent:

The number of parents I meet who believe that you're calm or you're not, they kind of view calmness as a fixed trait. So they'll look and think, "well, other people are calm". I'm not calm. It's kind of not worth me trying. So they're very much in the fixed mindset that calmness is something you have or you don't have. And if they don't have it, then it's not really worth trying. You know, that's not how they were born.

But I really and truly don't believe that's true. I believe that everybody can be calmer. There are obviously things that get in our way. So what's happening in their life at the moment, depending on the sort of certain amounts of privilege you have and whatever, we can't all be like zen-calm gurus, but we can definitely improve on where we are at the moment.

✔ Links:

Sarah Ockwell-Smith on Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/sarahockwellsmith/

Sarah Ockwell-Smith on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/TheBabyExpert

Sarah Ockwell-Smith:

https://sarahockwell-smith.com/

Sarah Ockwell-Smith’s books:

https://www.amazon.com/Sarah-Ockwell-Smith/e/B007L3YENI%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share

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Edited by Pavel Novikov:

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How to Be a Calm Parent

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