48 - An Action Plan for the Stressed Out Breastfeeding Mom

If you are feeling at the end of your rope with your breastfeeding toddler - this episode is for you. 

I break down 4 steps to creating your own action plan to find ease in your breastfeeding relationship that WILL help to: 

• Stop the continual meltdowns
• Support your child to be able to tolerate the word "no" 
• Get your butt unglued from your couch (where your toddler always demands you sit to feed). 
• Help your child sleep for longer stretches
• Reduce food battles

Grab a pen and paper while you listen so you can chart out your personalized plan. Or, keep an eye on your email this week for a free printable worksheet. (Not on my email list?  Sign up here and get my free Making Changes guide & cheat sheet). 

Grab your free guide to say "No" to the feed while still saying "yes" to the need at  www.ownyourparentingstory.com/guide

Love this episode?!  Shoot me a DM over on Instagram @own.your.parenting.story and tell me all about it. <3

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro:
• 2:10 Step #1 -In the moment strategy
• 9:35 Step #2 - Your Child's Stressors
• 16:01 Step #3 - Your Stressors
• 19:09 Step 4 - Make Your Action Steps

Transcript

**Auto Generated Transcript**

[00:00:00] Today's episode is for the stressed out toddler breastfeeding mother. If you are listening and:

-you are feeling like your child cannot tolerate the word no, 

- if you're feeling like your child is melting down constantly,

-if you're feeling like you cannot get up from the couch, you're just always breastfeeding 24/ 7,

-if you feel like you're up all night breastfeeding,

-if you feel You are in a hopeless situation that you created.

If you feel like the only way out is to wean, but weaning is also simultaneously impossible because if you could have done it, you would have done it.

-Maybe you also feel conflicted because you don't want to take away something that comforts your child.

If you identify with any of that, or maybe you're just like, none of those quite hit the nail on the head, but I've got these other things going on and it's creating a lot of stress and stress around breastfeeding, then you're in the right place.

I'm going to be going through how [00:01:00] to create an action plan. So, it's really a support for you to go and create the action plan. I'm going to give you the steps that you need to take to do that. also, if you are listening to this and you're on my email list, check your email this week because I'm going to be giving you a worksheet that, outlines how to do this.

So all the information is in the podcast, but if you want a worksheet that you can follow along with, then make sure that you're on my email list. You can do that by grabbing my Making Changes Guide and Cheat Sheet, which is a great complement to this episode to begin with. But you can do that at ownyourparentingstory.com/guide and grab it there. And then you will grab my email that's coming out. 

Step #1 -In the moment strategy 

Okay, so let's go through how to create the action plan. So the very first thing that I want you to do when you're creating your action plan is, uh, Come up with an in the moment strategy.

An in the moment strategy for you, for stress. What I often talk about on my [00:02:00] podcast, uh, if you go back to episode, I believe it's 16, the toddler, uh, like boob addiction, toddler breastfeeding stress spiral. I, like, break down the toddler breastfeeding stress spiral in more detail. I also have Instagram reels and that kind of stuff about it.

So you can check my Instagram own.your.parenting.story Um, but I'm going to briefly break it down for you here. If it feels a little bit confusing, there is a graphic on the worksheet and like I said, you can look in these other places as well, but I'll link them in the show notes too. But I'm going to briefly go over the basics of the toddler breastfeeding stress spiral.

You need to understand this a little bit in order to understand, um, your action plan. In order to create your action plan, you need to know that your child Absolutely uses milk for comfort and for connection among lots of other things, right? So, nutrition, sensory, uh, needs, all that kind of stuff, but they are using it for comfort, and that's really important because your child's number one [00:03:00] need is a present, attuned caregiver.

That is physical presence, so you're actually Close in proximity, as well as emotional presence. You're attuning to them. You are able to see what's kind of happening in their inner world and help them to get their needs met. The reason why your child's number one need is an emotionally present caregiver is because they require a caregiver to meet nearly all of their needs, right? And so, it's not just enough that you're in proximity, but the emotional presence is there too. Now, if we're talking about specifics, I know that that can really bring up a lot of guilt. It does for me too. Like, I'm not emotionally present with my kids 24 7, and you actually don't have to be.

The threshold to meet that criteria of being an emotionally present, uh, attuned caregiver is being intentional and attuned about 25 percent of the time. Um, so rest easy, you're enough. [00:04:00] But it's important to understand that that is your child's one number one need. So, if you're not emotionally attuned and present and there's something particularly stressful happening, um, It's really important to your child that you become emotionally attuned and present, right?

So they're motivated to find that connection and to seek that comfort from you. Okay, so we have that your child uses milk for comfort, that their number one need is a present attuned caregiver, and then you need to understand that when you are stressed, your child picks up on your stress. This is biologically wired into them as it is all mammals.

We all pick up stress from other adults, uh, and other humans. It doesn't have to be adults, it can be children. And I'm gonna get into that in a little bit too. Um, that means that if you're feeling stressed out, even if you're not behaving in a way that's like overtly stressed or creating a stressful environment by like throwing things or screaming or yelling.

You don't have to be doing those things in order for your child to pick up on your stress, right? Especially if you are starting to feel a little bit disconnected [00:05:00] from them and distracted and that kind of stuff. So when your child feels stressed, right, they can feel your stress. So they're going to breastfeed in order to bring you close to them in order to help soothe the stress that they're experiencing, right?

The trouble is that when breastfeeding is a source of stress for you, the fact that they are breastfeeding, which is their way of relieving their stress, becomes stressful. And it kind of creates this push pull, and then you have this spiral happening, where because they're breastfeeding, you're feeling stressed, because you're feeling stressed, they're breastfeeding, and around and around and around we Go..

So, That's why my first thing is, like, my first step of the action plan is to find an in the moment calming strategy for you. This can be kind of more body based, it can be more cognitive, more thinking based. Whatever works for you, find something. I do teach a few different strategies inside of my program and with coaching clients in my [00:06:00] program on your breastfeeding story.

Um, one being like the safe seat, which is a PureJoy, uh, tool like that I have learned from Leslie Potter at PureJoy Parenting. But there are other ones, even as simple as taking deep breaths. Now, if you're going to take some deep breaths to kind of siphon off some stress, You want to, um, ideally be breathing out for longer than you're breathing in.

So that means take a deep breath in through your nose and then a steady, slow, long, out breath through your mouth. You can imagine that you're blowing bubbles out and you maybe want to do that like three or four times in a row. So deep breathing is an option. There's also, things like EFT tapping can be really effective, getting a drink of water, finding a snack, sometimes even going outside or looking out a window at a tree.

All of those can be very calming, grounding, options for you to relieve some of your stress. You can do things as well like self compassion, talking to [00:07:00] yourself as if you were talking to a friend. Right? So if a friend was in the same situation that you were with the stressors that you have, how would you talk to them?

Kindness, right? With love. It makes sense. Of course this is happening. Of course you're feeling super stressed out. It's been a hard day, right? You're not alone in this. You're not the only person to have experienced this, right? So talk to yourself in that way. Um, I share a little bit more about kind of meeting your needs and navigating that in the behind the scenes episode one, Survival Mode Motherhood, which I think aired back in January.

So you can scroll back a little bit on the podcast and find that there too, if you're interested in that a little bit more. And I'm sure I talk about it in other episodes as well. Okay. So you need your fast in the moment strategy, something quick, Deep breaths, drink of water, get outside, right? Self compassion.

And that's going to at least kind of temporarily break that cycle, where you're [00:08:00] finding some calm. Now, you need to be able to do those things, even if your child is screaming at your leg, right? Because this is about finding that center and grounding in you, because the same way that your child is going to pick up on your stress, They're also going to share your calm.

So if you can find calm, and I'm not just talking about having a calm exterior and pushing things down, I'm actually talking about finding a deep calm inside, because your limbic system, your emotional center in your brain, your stress response inside of your body is going to betray your best attempts at appearing calm.

So appearing calm is not the goal. Actually finding some calm is the goal. You don't have to go from a hundred percent stressed all the way down to zero. Just have to be moving that dial down a little bit. Now I do share a few more things in my free guide, um, making changes. I share a little bit more about, about that and how to kind of communicate with your child, even when you're feeling stressed and what you can do.

do [00:09:00] about that. So that might be a good place to look for that in a little bit more detail as well. Find your in the moment strategy. 

Step #2 - Your Child's Stressors

The next thing in your action plan, one is get your strategy, your in the moment strategy. Number two is to zoom out and look at the big picture. Now, your emotional stress state, right, can be your emotional state, your stress state, your stress response can be kind of shared and picked up on by your child.

But in the same way, if there are other stressors going on in their life, You can be picking up on that too. So, sometimes you're feeding off of each other. You are not your child's only source of stress, is kind of my point here. It's important also to understand that every single human being, the way that they interpret the world around them, their perception of internal things and external things, like, can even be neutral things, right?

is unique to them. Every human. So there [00:10:00] are going to be things that your child experiences as stressful that you experience as calming. And there are going to be things that most other kids would experience as stressful and your child experiences as calming. So we really need to drop all of the judgments and all the shoulds about like, Oh, well, that can't be it.

Or they're overreacting to that. Or, um, you know, these things are good for them. Um, and these kind of like more. Normative ways of thinking about things, more of the, you know, ways of thinking about things as if, uh, they're kind of being held up to this particular standard, what's normal, what's not normal.

We're talking about your individual unique child here. This is when you can sit down with a journal and if you've gotten the worksheet, you can grab the worksheet. If not, just listen through and, and write some of these things down. You're going to consider what stressors your child might be experiencing on a minute by minute.

You know, hour by hour, daily, like day to day, weekly basis. [00:11:00] And what might be contributing to them experiencing stress that is coming out as more frequent breastfeeding, as meltdowns, as poor sleep. Cause all of the stressors that I'm going to talk about can be adding up to all of those things. 

So, you want to consider environmental things, and by environment I mean things outside of your child's body. So, the five senses, and I don't mean their five senses particularly, but the things that they are perceiving through their five senses, so, um, sound, taste, touch, sight, smell, Things could either be too much or too little.

So they might have, they might really love to have like loud music or background noise, um, on. They might love, yeah, music, playing loud music could be quiet music, it could be birds chirping, white noise, that kind of stuff. Or they might not. It might be too much. And so you can kind of see if there's particularly certain times of the day that they're acting up more, [00:12:00] breastfeeding more, that kind of stuff.

What are the stressors leading up to that? Um, and then of course these things can be cumulative over time, so it doesn't always have to be tied exactly to that moment. It could be earlier in the day that's coming out later too. These stressors kind of like add up over time. It's like a bucket that's kind of filling up and then it can kind of hit that threshold of too much.

Consider things in their environment. Bright, brightness, right? Like visual stimuli, right? We get all are familiar with kind of that feeling overstimulated. That can happen to our child. So check that out. Other people's stress. So sometimes our kids are around other caregivers who are stressed out themselves, and that can be contributing to your child's sense of stress too. Just like we pick up that, um, and they pick it up from us, they can pick it up from other people. So consider that. Um, Routine and Predictability. Now, routine and predictability can be very calming and soothing and helpful for a lot of people. And, uh, There's [00:13:00] also a line where those things become too much.

They can become stressful, right? There's too much predictability or there, maybe there's too many things in that routine. It's too rigid. They need more flexibility. So consider that. What is their routine like?, so we have the five senses. You have other people's stress, routine, and predictability.

And then the next thing I would encourage you to consider is the demands that are on your child or the kind of lack of autonomy. Um, maybe there are things that are, they're not quite ready for yet, or are just too stressful, they're coming on too harshly, like too much, right? So, consider things like potty training, daycare.

There is also things like, you know, another sibling, those kinds of situations can be there as well. Right now, you're just exploring. So, While I'm going through these things, the five senses, other people's stress, routine, predictability, right, too rigid, too flexible, that kind of stuff, um, demands, jot down some things that you think, out of those categories, could be stressful for your child, and you [00:14:00] might need to take some A little bit of time.

You could write it right now, but you can also just be aware of these things for the next day or two, and then, oh, when something pops up, you're like, oh, my child kind of responded oddly to that, or I'm noticing that they look like they're kind of stressed out in this environment. I hadn't considered that before.

So, jot down what those environments are, what those specific stressors are for your child, and go through that. Then there are the inside things, and As well, consider these things in your day to day, but there's those external and then there are inside things, so thirst, tiredness, hunger, movement, rest, um, all of those things can also be stressors.

They're just coming from inside of your child's body, so are they not drinking enough water? Right? And again, this can be tricky when we're talking about breastfeeding toddlers because they are getting a lot of, or they may be getting a lot of hydration through breast milk and that's okay, and that's good, and that's beautiful.

They don't have to be drinking water instead of breast milk, but maybe when they're apart [00:15:00] from you or maybe when you're busy, They're not drinking a lot of water until they come home and they're really, really thirsty and that's contributing to the stress. Not just contributing to the breastfeeding for hydration, but it can also be contributing to their stress.

So it doesn't mean that you need to force water on them, but maybe they need a little bit more options provided to them for water. As an example, but there is also food movement, right? Maybe they need to move their bodies more or maybe they need more rest. So consider those things, jot down any specifics that come to mind.

Step #3 - Your Stressors

And then your next step, drum roll, is those. Nearly the same stressors but for you, right? We're talking about stress, , and it's a relationship dynamic, right? The toddler breastfeeding stress spiral, both of your stress can impact and kick off that spiral. So, again, these things are, can be unique to you, so don't judge them, right?

It's okay if you experience things as stressful that other people [00:16:00] experience as calming. It's okay if you experience things as calming that other people experience as stressful. So you're going to go through those same things, and again, write down specifics that might be coming up for you. So senses.

Are there things that are too much or too little in your environment? Do you need more light in your home, less light in your home, right? More noise. Sometimes I just need to turn that music on. I love having music playing in my house. Sometimes I need to turn it off. Uh, so consider that for you. Other people's stress.

Are there people and situations in your life that you maybe need to take a little bit of a step back from? Or maybe certain conversations with certain people that you need to say, "Hey, I'm not going to talk about this thing right now." consider that, consider that for yourself. The next thing would be routine and predictability.

Do you need a little bit more structure in your day to day? Are there a few things that you could do to, to create that structure? Or do you need a little less? Could Is this too demanding? Is it too many things going on? Also, consider, like, the demands that you have in your life. [00:17:00] Are there some things that you need to take off your plate?

That kind of plays into the routine and predictability, but it can also just be, like, do you have too much going on? Are there too many things that you are putting on yourself or perhaps other people are putting on you that you need to say," Hey! I'm only human. I need to take a break from these things." So take those things off of your plate.

And then consider the inside stuff. So again, same things with the thirst and hunger and movement and rest, but also consider, uh, do you need some, a little time alone? I know, I know it's really hard with a toddler, but try not to judge how you can get that yet. Just Is that something that you feel like is stressful for you?

You're not getting enough time alone. Maybe you need some time with friends or maybe more time with your partner. And consider decisions that you're making, right? This is kind of like the internal brain stuff going on with the demands and the things that you have on your plate. But instead of it being external things or things you have to do, the thinking, the decision [00:18:00] making that you're having Maybe it's stress around your child not being potty trained yet, starting daycare, all of those things.

And at this point, we're not even considering how we're going to address those. Just admit to yourself if those are contributing factors or not, and the specifics around them. Again, you can take a lot of space to journal about this, um, or you can just go real quick and jot down a couple.

So now you have gone through your quick, in the moment, getting out of that toddler breastfeeding stress spiral calming strategy, the quick one that's just going to bring you a little relief from your stress. Then you have gone through the stressors for your child and the stressors for yourself and you've identified some specific ones in your life.

Step 4 - Make Your Action Steps

Okay, now I want you to go back through and circle or highlight the ones that feel the most stressful for you and your child, for each of you.

 When you're looking at the list, you're like, yeah, that's probably a big one. Circle those. If it's one, if it's ten, whatever. Give them a circle. And now take that list that you've made the circle of, [00:19:00] like, or that you've circled. All of the ones that you've circled, take that list and rewrite them.

And beside each of them, write one to three things that you can do to relieve that stressor. So you can either bring in some more calming things in that moment for that thing.

So, for example, uh, maybe sitting in the car seat is really stressful for your kid and you've just, you've got a decently long commute to daycare every day and you've noticed that they get really cranky in that and they have a really hard time. Maybe there's something you can bring in that's calming while they're sitting in that car seat as an example, um, or maybe there's ways that you can eliminate those stressors.

So, what are some options for that? So, for each one of the stressors that you've identified as important or likely contributing a lot, and write down one to three ideas for how to reduce or add in something [00:20:00] calming. So, reduce the stressor or add in something calming. Okay, so you've gone through, you've created your list for your child, created a list yourself, you've selected the ones that are the most relevant for you and then you've created one to three ideas for each of them.

Now I want you to look back at that list of ideas and as you're looking at it Pick one, one idea that feels the most doable, the most comfortable, the easiest, the one that you look at and you're like, okay, I think I might be able to do that. One of them, not one for each, just one, one for the whole list.

That includes the stressors for you and the stressors for your child. And try that thing for three days. Give it a go. Don't just try it for like a moment, but really just rest on that one thing. And when the temptation comes up to do more or to change more things, pause and remind [00:21:00] yourself that you're focusing on this one thing.

You'll get to the rest, if need be. And after three days, after three days of trying it, Check in with yourself. How is it going? Is it not going well? Do you need to try a different idea? Or is it, it's going well, but you need a little more relief. You need a little more relief, so you're going to try one more thing.

And then try that thing for three days. So that is your action plan. That is how to create your action plan, I should say. I know I've repeated it a million times, but I'm going to go back and I'm just going to remind you that you are looking for that one in the moment strategy to Break that toddler breastfeeding stress spiral to just kind of get that stress decreasing so you can break out of it in the moment when it's happening.

Then you're going to be looking at ways that you can, prevent that, that spiral from kicking off in the first place. So you're looking at stressors inside and outside, right? Like internal stressors as well as those environmental stressors for [00:22:00] your child and for yourself. Looking at your day to day life, what is coming up?

What things? are, contributing to that spiral happening. And then you're going to pick the ones that are the most relevant, the ones that feel the biggest, like they're really, really crushing you right now. And you're going to create a few ideas for each. Uh, and again, that's a way to reduce the stress or add in something calming.

And then you're going to pick one, just one, one, one of those ideas, and give it a try for a few days. Um, This is your action plan to remove that stress. It's not necessarily your action plan for weaning, but it's a critical point. Uh, and sometimes, in fact, I experienced this a lot, this with a lot of people inside of own your breastfeeding story or clients that I've worked with in the past that just doing this can be enough and the need to wean or the pressure to [00:23:00] wean or the pressure to night wean can dissipate

 Give it a go. I also want to let you know if you didn't already hear in the intro that I have a free live workshop coming up on November 12th. You can register at ownyourparentingstory.com/workshop, or you can click the link in the show notes. It's going to be a live workshop on toddler breastfeeding, boundaries, and weaning.

And, you know, of course, as I do all of. My work, I'm going to come at that from a real compassionate, um, gentle approach and really helping you highlight what are the root causes that are making it difficult to set boundaries and to wean. And I'm also going to be having a live Q& A at the end of that workshop. So if you've been working on this, you'll have a week or two to take some time to go through this. Come to the live workshop and we can talk about it. Uh, ask your questions. That's when I'm going to be doing some coaching and all that fun stuff. So come live. [00:24:00] If you can't come live, that's okay.

Register anyways, and you're going to get a copy of the recording, uh, that will be available for a few days after the workshop. . You'll have time to catch up and watch the recording and still get all the goodness. All right. That's enough for me for today.

 I'm really excited to see how your action plans go. So shoot me the DMs on Instagram, send me an email, let me know. Uh, I'm really excited to hear from all of you.