36 weeks pregnant? Time for a hot oxytocin date! Quite literally, dates (as in the fruit) have an oxytocin effect on the uterus. Some recent research using randomised control trials found that women who eat 6 dates a day from 36 weeks of pregnancy right...

Four Things your Partner can do to support you in Labour Partners often feel like they don’t have a role in the birth space. Male partners in particular may have had limited positive associations with birth. Many dads in the 70s and 80s still were not...

Got Mum Guilt? Here's What Helps With my daughter going off to her first day at daycare this week, I thought it was timely to talk about mum guilt. For many of us, it starts pretty early in pregnancy. Maybe your guilt first crept in after getting pregnant...

Hypnobirthing as an Alternative to Synthetic Pain Relief for Induced Labour Inducing labour with synthetic drugs is never ideal. For me, induction wasn’t something that was my first choice, but once I got past 41 weeks, and a diagnosis of gestational...

How to cope with Morning Sickness and Hyperemesis Gravidarum At the peak of my Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG; ‘severe morning sickness’) I’d vomited 10 times that day. I hid the Very Hungry Caterpillar book from my daughter because I couldn’t look at all...

The Least Traumatic Birth Possible I am sitting writing this while my toddler and I have colds. Miss Toddler is also teething, so it’s a bit of a drooly, snotty mess and I’m watching old episodes of Home and Away the Early Years (don’t judge!) on Youtube....

Coping in pregnancy (without wine and coffee) Today is a two decaf kind of day. Which means I get a moment of tricking my brain into waking up, but then I’m back where I started. It’s been a rough few days. Everyone in my house has green-snot level colds....

How daily practise of character strengths improves your happiness Years from now, when you're an octogenarian lying on your deathbed, surrounded by your family and reflecting on your life, what will have contributed to your daily happiness? Many people go...

Children's understanding of death When families experience death, they often have lots of questions about how to handle the subject and what sort of conversations and activities are appropriate for children. It's always a good idea to use the ‘D’ words -...

The 76 year old feminist book worth reading this Easter How is this for brilliant Easter holiday reading? A powerful, feminist book for children. A book written 76 years ago by a white man from the deep south of the USA. When I’m stuck on a writing...

Psychologist comment for dolly magazine dating article In the April edition of Dolly magazine I provided some hints for coping with nerves and finding things to talk about on...

Reading too much into snooping LORELAI: Hey, what happened to our books? SOOKIE: What do you mean? LORELAI: All our beautiful, leather-bound books. Jonathon Swift, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens. A lot of them are gone. SOOKIE: The guests must have swiped...

Parenting Multiples: Should you keep twins in the same class? March 8-15 is Multiple Birth Awareness Week. A common question for parents of school-aged children is should you keep twins in the same class? Parents of multiples are often unsure of what to do...

Self-injury awareness day: a coping plan for self-injury cravings March 1 is self-injury awareness day. Generally speaking, people’s awareness of self-injury is pretty good but what’s lacking is action. People who engage in self-injury get so overwhelmed...

Selling Anxiety: The Construction of Psychological disorders Consumer anxiety results in sales. At the ground level, we have cleaning products - what sort of mother are you to expose your child to germs? Your child could die, you know, but if you buy this...

The Ego of the Freelance Writer As any freelance writer knows, the pathway to getting published is full of developmental milestones and learning curves about your own ego. Only the other week I was shocked to learn that a picture book can takes 3 years to...

Writing Picture Books for Children Earlier this year, on a complete whim, I decided to sign up for a course on writing picture books for children. I'm about half way through now, and I'm having an absolute ball. I have learned so much about the pernickety...

Expert Comment for Essential Baby This month, I was consulted for comment on an article in Essential Baby on whether or not babies see ghosts. You can read the...

Quoted on Supermom.com on the Psychological benefits of Loom Bands In July, I was quoted on the psychological benefits of Loom Bands for children for Supermom.com (YOU.co.za) in south...

Why drug reps Remind me of Going to the Butcher I miss the days when drug reps circulated conferences and gave you a nice handful of pens, post-it notes (pardon, page markers, they probably weren't made by post-it), a stress ball, and maybe even a coffee...

The Psychology of Colour: Coke red and Yellow Pages yellow and Owens-Corning pink and BP green, Cadbury purple, Easy orange and IBM blue... I love a rainbow of colour. That's obvious from my bookshelves alone, but my love of colours goes back a long way....

The Importance of Being Naked and Fat New, improved, free, sale, proven, expert. Boring marketing buzzwords. It's all about being naked and fat now. The obsession with the word 'naked' in advertising and media makes me think back to the elusive Cadbury...

Why submitting your PhD thesis is like sending your child to rehab… Last year I read an article which said that doing a PhD is like pregnancy for the brain. Well, I finally ‘birthed’ my baby on December 8th, somewhere around 11.40 AM. Everyone said...