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Why New Parents Need to Take a Break From the News (and What They Should Do Instead)


In the months after my kids were born, the news cycle would send me into tailspins of anxiety and fear. The Penn State sex-abuse scandal and the Newtown shootings paralyzed me for days—I wept while changing diapers, wept in the bathtub, wept while pushing the stroller down the street. What might have been (merely!) horrifying pre-kids was now incapacitating. For my own mental health, I had to stop reading the news and looking at social media.

Take a Media Fast

Judging from the conversations in my moms’ groups, these feelings aren’t at all unusual. New parents are especially vulnerable to anxiety, says Laura Venuto, a New York City therapist specializing in postpartum mental-health issues. “Sleep deprivation and hormones exacerbate mood and anxiety symptoms. With new parenthood comes a heightened awareness that you’re suddenly not only responsible for yourself, but also a small child in what sometimes seems like a dangerous world.”

Dr. Venuto suggests a total news-media fast or at least a major reduction, corralling your news into 10 or 15 minutes (“In the morning! Not before bed!” she says), and then doing something pleasurable, like playing with your baby or calling a friend. For those worried that being out of touch means slacking off in their political activism, she gently suggests cutting yourself some slack: “If you’re a new parent, you’re not going to be making changes on a global scale. You’re in survival mode. You can put in a call to your representative, and that can be enough.”

Practice ‘Containment’

Lissa Hunsicker Kenney, a social worker in Brooklyn who counsels trauma survivors, also recommends “containment”—the first line of treatment for anxiety—as a first step. “Turning off your iPhone is containment—because it’s so easy for it to become uncontained. It just scrolls and scrolls, and it’s endless.”

So what are we supposed to do, instead? (Besides take care of our kids, I mean.) I asked Lifehacker readers, and my own new-mom friends, what media they turn to for good escapist distraction. I didn’t vet all the answers (though I did nix anything that had “horror” in its IMDB description—what about “non-disturbing” did these people not understand?) so do your own research before leaping into something totally unknown. They’re a good mix of classics, favorite sitcoms and adventure shows, a few kids’ shows and books, comics, and pretty much the entire oeuvre of the BBC.

Ideally, this list will remind of you of beloved books, TV shows, and movies that you’ve enjoyed in the past and will be soothing entertainment now, while you’re still in the sensitive new-parent stage. I read all of Jane Austen at night instead of mindless smartphone scrolling; others swear by sitcoms: “When my son was born we very quickly figured out we had to stop watching Breaking Bad and Walking Dead and just ended up re-watching Parks and Rec on a continuous loop for like three years,” one commenter wrote. Check out the original comments here, and please add your favorite comforting (no child-in-peril, no dead parents, no rapes or murders) media below.

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