James' World 2

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The first 25 times I read “Goodnight Moon,” I cried. Not in a dainty, tear-dabbing way; I’m talking Niagara waterworks, heaving sobs and a red nose.

My firstborn daughter was only a few days old, swaddled in a blanket printed with baleful teddy bears, when we made our first foray into the iconic picture book by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. I’d been a mother for long enough to know how little I knew: My bathing and feeding skills were weak. My diapering experience was limited to Cabbage Patch Kids. The one-handed stroller collapse that would become my signature maneuver was a mirage shimmering beyond a desert of sleepless nights.

Reading was something I could do with aplomb, and I thought the experience would be soothing for all involved — including my husband, who was sweating over instructions for a bottle sterilizer that looked like R2-D2. I picked “Goodnight Moon” because I remembered how veteran parents had slapped their hands over their hearts when I unwrapped the slim hardcover at my baby shower. The vote was unanimous: “That one is the best.”

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It’s the first book many babies receive as a gift, and one of the few that parents will keep when their child is grown. Why does this 75-year-old story have such staying power?

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You are sitting at lunch at your desk, worrying that the report you just finished isn’t good enough. You know about the benefits of self-compassion and wonder if practicing it would make you feel better about your work.

For example, there is one self-compassion exercise where you think of something that bothers you about yourself. You then write a letter from the perspective of a compassionate friend. There’s another exercise in which you imagine a compassionate friend comforting you as you struggle. And there’s an exercise meant to tackle the self-critical voices in your head.

You could use a compassionate friend right about now to reassure you about your report. You imagine a friend sitting next to you, saying words of reassurance: “It’s OK, you did your best on the report and that’s all you can ask of yourself. It will be fine.”

But your friend’s imagined words feel empty. You don’t feel any better. In fact, you feel worse; now you are thinking about that time you turned in a report that your boss thought was terrible. You are now even more convinced your report is bad.

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Greater Good

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— Searching for the Right Reasons

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Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Yuricazac/iStock/Getty Images Plus.

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A few years ago, I started noticing that my normal news diet left me feeling depleted and depressed. I tried mixing up my news habits, like moving my morning reading routine to the afternoon and giving up TV news entirely. Some days, I’d read a couple newsletters and not much else. It felt like a shameful secret. Shouldn’t journalists love consuming the news?

For a long time, I thought the problem was me. But eventually, journalist friends started confessing that they needed a break from the news, too. And I started to ask myself a bigger question: Was the problem the news itself? And how journalists typically identify, frame and deliver the news? And if so, was there a way to fix it?

On a two-part episode of How To!, we investigated that question with the help of some very smart people: Nicole Lewis, an editor at Slate (now with The Marshall Project), and David Bornstein, co-founder/CEO of the Solutions Journalism Network. Nicole and David are two people who are trying in different ways to redesign the news for human consumption. In these episodes, we talk about how journalists can regain the trust of their audience—and how news consumers can find stories that both inform and inspire. With help from our listeners, we try to get to the heart of how the news became so broken, and how we can put it back together again.

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We try to use our time wisely—both at work and in leisure—but we often waste it. We may blame work for stripping us of recreation, but when valuable free time comes around, we can often revert back to more work.

What explains the gap between how we use our time and how we want to use our time? A conversation with Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans helps us analyze our complex relationship with time and how to orient our time use around what we value.

This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.

Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at howtopodcast@theatlantic.com. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber.

Music by the Fix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), Gregory David (“Under the Tides”), and Yomoti (“Nebula”).

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Getty / The Atlantic

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Therapist Kelly McDaniel has spent more than a decade helping her clients overcome grief.

In counseling hundreds of women, she noticed a particular grief many of them experienced that had nothing to do with death. Rather, McDaniel saw women who longed for the love of a mother, even if theirs was still alive.

In 2008, McDaniel coined the term “mother hunger” in her book “Ready to Heal.” She fleshed out the term in her 2021 book “Mother Hunger: How Adult Daughters Can Understand and Heal from Lost Nurturance, Protection, and Guidance” after noticing the phenomenon in so many of her clients.

Mother hunger isn’t a medical diagnosis. Rather, it’s McDaniel’s theory to explain how specific types of childhood neglect lead to attachment injuries, which can impact how a person acts in future relationships.

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Kelly McDaniel is a grief therapist who coined the term “mother hunger” in 2008. Courtesy of Kelly McDaniel

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