Try paying mindful attention during small and ordinary tasks when you're caring for a baby or toddler

Caring for your small child brings with it many humble and repetitive tasks, necessary if you are to keep your little one safe, clean, warm, dry, and fed.

Caring for ourselves also requires that we attend to humble and repetitive daily tasks, such as the cooking and cleaning, attending to our clothing and body, sorting and tending our home. Is it possible to slow down and bring your full attention to these tasks as if they really mattered? I don't find this easy to do myself, to be honest. I've come to think of it as a personality thing.

It's easy for someone with my personality to resent mundane tasks, as if they get in the way of the grand plans I have for my life. But of course, small, mundane tasks form the foundations of my life, and any good life. They make up much of what it is to be alive. So I am practicing attention to ordinary tasks every day too, as best I can, being kind to myself because I find it so hard.

It can be very difficult when it feels as if your previous life with your meaningful paid work and career has shrunk down to days filled with overwhelmingly mundane and repetitive domestic tasks, now that you're caring for a baby or toddler.

But on those days when you're home and in the primary carer's role, or if you've decided that you really don't intend to go back to paid work right now and are in a primary carer's role most days, you can take the opportunity to practice certain psychological skills which prepare you for the rest of your life.

Are you able to

• Slow down and pay attention to the touch of warm or soapy water on your hand?

• Inhale the scent of the coriander as you prepare dinner, even if your movements are slow and awkard because your baby is in a carrier or toddler in a backpack carrier, let's say?

• Take time to notice the soft skin of your child in the bath water, the scent of his scalp when he snuggles in to you at bedtime or breastfeed time?

When you have a little one, mundane tasks often take place awkwardly and in disconnected ways around the bouncing, noisy, unrelenting demands of the baby or toddler. If you practice slowing down just a little in the midst of all that ruckus, of you practice paying attention to the small things in the present moment, you'll be developing up a skill which will help protect your emotional wellbeing and mental health for the rest of your life.

Recommended resources

Missing out. Dr Russ Harris

Other recommended resources, acknowledgements, and selected references for the articles in the Caring for you section of The Possums Sleep Program are found here, including selected research evaluations of both Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Compassion-focused Therapy in the perinatal period.