Mommy Burnout: How to Reclaim Your Life and Raise Healthier Children in the Process

Psychologist Ziegler’s superb self-help guide diagnoses “mommy burnout” as a distinctive syndrome of women being mentally and physically exhausted from chronic stress, distinguished from anxiety and depression by being entirely culturally and environmentally based. Thus, Ziegler reassures her audience, the problem is fixable by understanding it and making appropriate lifestyle changes. The book’s core advice includes rebuilding both female community networks and close friendships, avoiding overtending to kids, and resisting the urge to multitask and rely on “busy-ness” to feel significant. Grounding each chapter in the extended profile of an individual client from her practice, Ziegler gives a sense of complexity and realism to her example moms, but doing so sometimes causes her narrative to wander into side topics, such as a chapter on support networks that also dives into a consideration of special-needs children, relationships with adult children, and spirituality. The book has compassion and solutions for women on both sides of the working/stay-at-home divide, affirming that both routes leave women open to burnout. Most importantly, Ziegler manages to highlight the problems that family stress can cause for long-term health, for both mother and child, without piling additional guilt on readers already feeling judged by the world. (Feb.)