The Working Mom Blueprint: Winning at Parenting Without Losing Yourself

by Whitney Casares MD, MPH, FAAP

Overview

Learn how to thrive—not just survive— as a modern mom. You love your kids. You’re proud of your professional accomplishments. You have hobbies and friends. And you’re tired. So tired. Working moms often feel like they’re failing on many different fronts. But what if there was a guide to reenvisioning, reprioritizing, and restructuring to build a vibrant, intentional life? As a practicing pediatrician and mother of 2 young daughters, Dr. Whitney Casares understands balancing family and career. She shares honest insights about her own challenges combined with her professional expertise about children of working moms—they thrive!—to create a reassuring guide to navigating modern motherhood. In this practical plan, you’ll learn to set priorities, cultivate self-care, establish an equal parenting partnership, delegate whenever appropriate, and more. With help from Dr. Casares’ advice, it’s time to make motherhood joyful again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610024860
Publisher:	American Academy of Pediatrics
Publication date:	05/11/2021
Pages:	275
Sales rank:	1,042,807
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Whitney Casares, MD, MPH, FAAP, is a board-certified, practicing pediatrician, the creator of the popular website modernmommydoc.com, and the author of The New Baby Blueprint: Caring for You and Your Little One. She is the mother of two young daughters and lives in Portland, OR.

Editorial Reviews

05/03/2021

Pediatrician Casares (The New Baby Blueprint) encourages working mothers to identify their priorities and align their lives accordingly in this upbeat and practical guide. “There is joy waiting for us as we mother, not in spite of our work but alongside it,” she writes, and urges readers to ditch the guilt, cultural expectations, and perfectionism that plague modern parenthood. Casares guides readers through creating a self-care routine (which she posits is critical for working moms), touts the value of modeling resilience to children, and gives tips for finding childcare and putting dinner on the table night after night. A chapter on how to successfully share parenting responsibilities with a partner is especially useful: she encourages couples to divide tasks based on strengths and weaknesses, not to expect a partner to do a job “how you would do it,” and to keep in mind common goals. Anecdotes are mixed in seamlessly with advice (“A few summers back, I had the ultimate self-care revelation. I took a mommyhood vacation”), though at times, Casares’s insights—mothers can’t do it all, the quality of time spent with kids is more important than the quantity, buy a good breast pump—don’t feel especially novel. Still, millennial moms especially will appreciate Casare’s encouragement and sensibility. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Dr Casares' vital message in this warmly reassuring, deeply empathetic book is that when you practice better self-care, you will take better care of everyone—and everything—else. It’s filled with practical, actionable tools and tips that even the most sleep-deprived, bleary-eyed working mother can follow." —Jancee Dunn, author of How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

"This book is exactly what modern parents need to get to that beautiful balanced space where they can love with every bit of their energy precisely because their tanks are filled in other areas of their lives." —Kenneth R. Ginsburg, MD, MS Ed, FAAP, author of Building Resilience in Children and Teens and Raising Kids to Thrive and director of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia

"Dr Casares shares timely and topical advice, empowering parents to not only prioritize what is truly important but also to serve as role models for our children to continue tilting the needle towards greater gender equity." —Shelly Vaziri Flais, MD, FAAP, pediatrician and author of Raising Twins, editor in chief of Caring for Your School-Age Child, coeditor of The Big Book of Symptoms, and assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine


"Dr Casares conveys a reassuring perspective that not only can we release the pressure but that we must, and walks the reader through a path that feels practical, believable, kind, and wise." —Amy Stoeber, PhD, licensed psychologist and creator of the courses The Art of Imperfect Parenting and The Kids Will Be OK

From the Publisher