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One of the most common questions I get as a pediatrician is how to get a child to poop on the potty. It’s so common that kids will pee on the potty with glee, but absolutely refused to put their poop anywhere near it.

For generations, we have seen depression as an illness, an unnecessary deviation from normal functioning. It’s an idea that makes sense because depression causes suffering and even death. But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if depression is not an aberration at all, but an important part of our biological defense system?

I am a pediatrician and I am a mom. But I never really understood what parents feel like when their kids get sick until I got a dog. It’s not that pediatricians don’t worry about our kids. We definitely do, but we worry about weird rare stuff you’ve never heard of. But we do have the ability to deal with the basics of our kids’ illnesses.

Zach’s mom was at her wit’s end. Even after three months of trying, she could not leave Zach alone in the room with his father for even a moment without Zach crying. During the coronavirus pandemic, she’d been alone with Zach most of the time, and her husband’s demanding job kept him from spending much time with them. But he wanted to play with his fifteen-month-old son, and she wanted five minutes to herself. Due to Zach’s crying, his mom couldn’t even get that. 

It is normal for kids to be attached to their mothers in the toddler years, but that attachment often comes with separation anxiety. Some kids are so attached, that they won’t even go to other trusted family members without their mothers in the room. This can happen under normal circumstances, but the problem seems more intense for families during the pandemic. 

It was Labor Day, and we were looking for a way to spend time together as a family. “How about a board game,” my husband suggested. The boys headed to our game cabinet because we’d been having a lot of fun with board games lately.

But then we made a huge mistake! Maybe all those good family experiences made us overconfident, or maybe we just weren’t thinking. Whatever the reason, we decided to play Monopoly.

These are heavy times. As the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the globe and has reached unprecedented numbers in America, we are facing the reality that it’s not going anywhere soon. In pandemic life, with all the associated hardships it brings, many of us are feeling a bit down. But are we sad or are we depressed?

New parents feel anxiety for a very good reason. They are suddenly responsible for the life of a fragile infant, so anxiety shows up to help parents pay attention. Anxiety is an adaptive response that provides inexperienced parents with the energy they need to come up a steep learning curve. Postpartum anxiety is valuable, but somehow it gets a bad name, and all too often is pathologized. In fact, researchers have increasingly called into question the way anxiety is labeled a mental disorder when it could be more properly understood as an adaptive response to adversity.