How about your child? If you haven’t met your child yet, how do you imagine they will be? Where have those ideas come from? As well as learning to parent ourselves, it will show us how to parent the child we actually have, not a textbook version, but our complicated, messy child with their own powerful needs. And by tuning into their language, learning how to hold them, not mould them, we can really start enjoying them for the funny and unique human beings that they are. Expecting humans to parent like chimpanzees is a bit like isolating an ant from her colony: we aren’t necessarily cut out for it – and often it doesn’t go well. Admitting that we need others is not a sign of failure, but is the very thing that makes us human.

It sometimes feels like parenting advice is being offered every time we log on to our socials or read magazines, not to mention by well meaning friends and family! How do we know what advice we should be taking?

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We hear a lot about how it takes a village to raise a child. But this conflicts with how isolated we often are as parents. The importance of having other parents around you as you parent is not only for advice or suggestion, but also for solidarity and support. What more experienced parents will often tell you is that you’ll figure it out over time, that phases pass and children change, and that it’s a marathon not a sprint. This can help us settle in for the long haul rather than focus on the urgency of problems as they arise. So if you do trust that your parenting information is coming from a reputable source, hold on to the bits that work for you and let go of the bits that don’t. Use it all as part of an experiment, rather than something to get perfectly ‘right’. Some elements will work for you and your family, other elements won’t feel right for you. Some you’ll make up as you go along! Our aim is to help our audience find a wide range of books and resources to help with their mental health and wellbeing, or share experiences that are useful to others

The term "nuclear family" only emerged in the 1920s. The family structure itself, which centres on two parents and a relatively small number of children, is older, and may be linked to the Industrial Revolution, as the shift from farming to manufacturing allowed for more independent lifestyles. An alternative explanation is that policies of the Western Church in the Middle Ages, which banned marriages among cousins and other extended family members, caused family units to shrink. But even though the nuclear family is such an ubiquitous concept in 20th Century Western research and popular culture, including countless novels, films and TV shows, Sear explains that it's actually rather anomalous, even in the West. Thank you! Parenting For Humans takes you through a similarprocess to the one I take clients through in therapy. Rather than offering any parenting advice, it supports you through understanding yourselfand all of the different influences on you now, not just as a parent but as a whole person. When we understand this, we can make choices about whether we actuallywant these things to influence us and how.This can also create space for us to see how these influences can colour the way we see our children and help us to see them for thewhole people they are, too. Then we can meet each other in this complex, lifelong relationship we’re in - with compassion.I’ve been told it is like ‘therapy in a book’ so I hope people can use it to support them in the often challenging task of parenting. With the right support and guidance, we can all totally do this parenting thing and grow a positive and loving relationship that will last forever. It’s a hard time for new parents at the moment, with lots of difficult news about maternity services and many parents speak about there being less support around than they would like. If you are anxious about pregnancy, birth or the postnatal period do speak to your midwife. But you can also draw from the experiences of other parents, both those who are more experienced as well as those going through it at the same time. Joining a group of parents who are expecting a baby at the same time as you can create a village that you might turn tofor many years. And speaking to friends and family about their experiences can be useful- you can caveat this by asking people to tell you the things they wish they had knownor the things they found really helpful. Also think about who you would like with you when you are giving birth- often we chooseour partner if we have onebut they are usually alsobrand new to this! It canbe so supportive to have someone alongsideyouwho has experienced birth themselves and evidence shows that having continuous support throughout labour can have a number of benefits (especially someone in a doula role).

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At Welldoing we are empathetic to the enormously challenging shift that becoming a parent represents. Our content about motherhood is always popular, showing a real need for trustworthy, helpful content in this area. We also know that people reach out to us for help with post-natal depression, as well as for support with all the ups and downs of the fertility journey, which for a saddening number of people may include loss through miscarriage or other difficulties with becoming pregnant. You are not alone if you feel like no matter how hard you are trying, you just can't quite get it 'right'. The fact is, parenting is hard and once you know this and why, you can forgive yourself for finding it a struggle, and start to look for the things that make parenting a joy. Join Emma’s session to shortcut you to happier, less stressful parenting. Sounds like a simple idea, right? Parenting as part of a relationship. But it is hard! Being a parent is hard work, because these little humans have a lot of needs and don’t always fit very easily into the world around them (a world which can often expect them to behave like little adults). But it is also hard because being a parent can raise so much for us about how we relate to ourselves, other people and the world. It leaves us thinking about how we were raised ourselves, about our current relationships, about what it is like to be a modern parent and the world we have brought these children into.

The typical arrangement for humans is not a single pair raising their young in isolation, she explains. Instead, we usually need and receive help when it comes to raising children. Nor is the idea of women as mothers and homemakers as traditional as it is sometimes made out to be. In historical and contemporary subsistence societies, women play a significant role in producing for their families: women are breadwinners, too.

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Congratulations on your new book ‘Parenting for Humans’ - we can't wait to read it! Could you give our readers a brief synopsis please? I wasn't the only one feeling that way. My phone buzzed as messages flooded the school WhatsApp channel, with parents wondering how they were going to fit the demands of their day jobs around fronted adverbials and long division. When did you decide to become a parent? Was it a conscious decision, or something that happened unexpectedly? Do you feel that you were always destined to be a parent, that it was an inevitable part of your life? Or perhaps something that you grappled with, and maybe still are?