Abigail Wald

Hi! I am Abigail Wald, a parent coach passionate about helping parents build "the story of your family" that you truly want to pass on to future generations. I am the co-host of the popular Hand in Hand Parenting Podcast (with a quarter million downloads in its first year alone) and also the founder of RealTimeParenting.com, where I get to work with parents all over the world through private sessions, classes, and speaking engagements.

But my own parenting story did NOT start there. In fact, my first two years of parenting felt more like falling out a plane with no parachute, and somehow no landing. Just a terrifying free-fall with a kid on either hip. 

This was definitely not what I had envisioned for myself. In fact, when I first had kids, I thought I was going to be great at it. I had very clear ideas of the kind of family I wanted to help create, my husband and I were close and on the same page, we wanted kids, and we were conscious loving people who had had full lives before becoming parents. I mean, really, how hard could this be?

Well, it turns out, it wound up being pretty hard, actually.

My first son had major medical issues we did not expect, and needed open heart surgery at birth. And then my second son had different medical issues.

But really, most unexpectedly, I found the regular day to day of parenting just as beautiful and difficult as the major medical challenges we were facing.

Here are just a few of the things I found shocking:

• Who knew parenting could feel so lonely? 
• Why were my children whom I loved so much, so difficult sometimes? And why did it feel so personal? Didn't they know how much I loved them? 
• And scariest of all, who knew that sometimes I wouldn't feel that love? That sometimes I would feel rage or grief or frustration instead...

None of those were the things I had imagined and yet here they were, staring me in the face. But luckily so were my toddler and my baby.

Luckily all that love I had was not useless. It did give me the motivation I needed to find a way to make it all work. To acknowledge what I was feeling, but somehow give them what they needed. To transform my feelings of powerlessness into the confidence I NEEDED to have the kind of family I had imagined.

So I did what many parents do. Read all the books. Scoured the internet. Tried every parenting methodology I could find. A year later, I was still frustrated. The things they told me to do weren't working with my kids, which made me think my kids were just super difficult or I was an awful mom who had done irreparable damage somehow and none of us would ever be happy.

And then, in the midst of the darkness, someone casually mentioned I might want to check out the Hand in Hand Parenting tools. I did.

And that was the last day I wondered if I could do this parenting thing. That was the first day I knew we would all make it through, and thrive TOGETHER.

These tools WORKED. They helped my kids AND they helped me. This was genius. I was hooked. After that, I started absorbing everything I could. From Patty Wipfler at Hand in Hand Parenting. And then from Dan Seigel. And Gordon Neufeld. And then I went on to study Michael Gurian's fascinating and science based gender research. And as I cobbled together all these new truths, what I learned is this: 

Sometimes, love is not all you need. You need tools that work, and a mentor to teach them to you.

With my mentors by my side, I was lucky enough to truly heal my own family, and tell the parenting story I had wanted to all along.

See, I wasn't a bad mom with bad kids. I was a mom in need of help with kids who needed to be understood and deeply listened to, instead of just ordered about, even if it was with love. 

But I couldn't stop there. I started teaching other families because I was just so determined that everyone should have the right to this kind of information and support. Five years later, I am now a certified Hand in Hand Parenting Instructor, and have already taught many hundreds of families how to have MORE JOY and LESS STRESS, While STILL BEING ABLE TO SET LIMITS for your kids and PROMOTE YOUR OWN FAMILY'S VALUES.

Because now I know it doesn't have to be so hard. And I want YOU to know it too.

XO,

Abigail