Dr. Rick Hanson's Book: Mother Nurture

Among the people writing about personal growth and psychological well-being today, Dr. Rick Hanson stands out. He holds a Ph.D., and he has put out four books that pull directly from what he knows and has lived through. He's a best-selling author, and the recognition is earned.

His first book came out in 2002. The full title is Mother Nurture: A Mother's Guide to Health in Body, Mind and Intimate Relationships. Read it alongside the three books that followed, and a pattern emerges: Hanson treats the work of personal development as something to be planned and taken seriously, not improvised.

So what is Mother Nurture actually about? Hanson wrote it out of his own time as a parent. Becoming a father changed how he saw the job. Parenting wasn't one fixed routine applied to every child, and the real pressures a mother carries weren't getting honest treatment in the parenting books already on the shelf. His argument is that mothers are usually handling several things at once: a job, a household, the kids, and, somewhere down the list, themselves. People tend to underestimate the weight of that. The book is about how a mother can manage the daily flood of demands while still raising children in the world as it is now.

What sets the book apart is the lens. Hanson watched his own wife move through motherhood, and that's what pushed him to write about what it genuinely involves rather than the tidied-up version. A few things make it different from other parenting titles. It keeps the mother's health in frame, not only the child's. It's candid about how depleting raising a family can be. And it names something he calls the Depleted Mother Syndrome, which he says shows up far more often than many parenting experts will admit.

There's also a practical side. The book lays out a way to track the process of motherhood over time, and it describes a program a mother can follow to look after her body, her mind, and the intimate relationships she depends on. A fair amount of it deals with how both parents can actually split the parenting and the housework, so the load that usually lands on the mother gets lighter. The advice carries weight partly because of where it comes from. Hanson drew on acupuncturists, a nutritionist, a psychologist, a gynecologist, and an obstetrician.

Who is it for? Any mother, and also anyone in the family who wants to take some of the pressure off her. A mother may have a plan for her own well-being and still find she can't follow it once she's overwhelmed. This isn't a stack of quick self-help tips. It's built around real accounts of motherhood and knowledge meant to be absorbed slowly, with attention to what a mother's life really looks like. Mothers are often looking after the father, the children, and the household at the same time. Plenty of that can be a good life. But the overwhelm has to come off the pile before the rest of it is reachable.

Mother Nurture tells the truth about motherhood at its best and its hardest. Whether you're a mother trying to hold everything together or someone standing next to one, wanting to help her out from under the weight, there's something in it to take.

- Cara Havens