We recently connected with Emily Edlynn and have shared our conversation below.
Emily , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.
I hit a professional crossroads in 2016 when we moved our family of five from Denver to Chicago for my husband’s job. For ten years before that, I had worked in busy children’s hospitals as a psychologist on medical teams. I had most recently been on the professor track at University of Colorado Denver which meant I was working with children and families, running a program as a director, teaching, supervising, and doing research. I also had three young children. I loved my work and the career I had dreamed of since age ten and built with six years of graduate school and more years of specialized training. And I was burned out. I had nothing to give in my personal life and I felt like I was barely present for my children. The move allowed me a chance to re-evaluate and pivot. I realized I did not want to take on the long commute to any of the children’s hospitals and return to the relentless pace and endless to-do lists. I took this opportunity to return to my love of writing and started a parenting blog. As a stressed out mother of three with training in child development and families, I wanted to be part of a movement to change the paradigm of unrealistic, guilt-inducing parenting guidance. I started my blog in 2017, was hired by Parents.com in 2019 to write a regular parenting advice column, signed my first book contract in 2021, and joined the Psychologists Off the Clock podcast as a co-host in 2023. I now work part-time in private practice doing the work I love as a psychologist and I spend the rest of my time putting creative content into the world that aligns with my values and my mission to relieve stress and burnout for parents. I am now psychologist, author, and podcaster in my professional life and have found the balance I need to thrive.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am passionate about enacting meaningful change in the parenting culture so that parents, children, and families as a whole are healthier and happier. In my work, I share my own challenges and vulnerabilities as a parent while also providing guidance from what we know from good science about children and how to successfully raise children. In my book published in 2023, Autonomy-Supportive Parenting: Reduce Parental Burnout and Raise Competent, Confident Children, I identify the problem of parents controlling too much of their children’s lives and offer a science-based, realistic solution. I center the parent’s experience rather than placing the child’s needs as front and center to family life, which many other approaches do. Through my book, my blog The Art and Science of Mom, and my writing across national outlets (Washington Post, Scary Mommy, Good Housekeeping, Psychology Today, Motherly and more), I promote a modern parenting guidance that does not rely on fear, guilt, or shame. I bring a voice of balance, compassion, and flexibility around the real-life experience of parenting. My content is for the parent who feels worse about themselves after looking at parenting influencers on Instagram or reading the latest bestseller parenting book, who feels like there must be something wrong with them if following others’ advice doesn’t “work” with their kids. My content is also for the person who feels frustrated with the state of parenting guidance and doesn’t buy into it, but could use some more support. After more than 15 years of being a child psychologist and 14 years of being a mother, I bring my personal and professional experience to refresh a world of parenting guidance that has let down too many for too long.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I spent a year grieving my career. After my family moved in 2016 and I pivoted away from the only type of job I had ever known in academic medicine, I took a part-time position at a local medical center. The position was new and unstructured and I ended up spending most of my three days a week with little to do. I felt no sense of purpose or meaning. I was bored and I desperately missed my previous identity as a program director and psychologist at large children’s hospitals. I missed the community of a vibrant workplace. I felt like a failure in my current position and I cried a lot. It was like I was drifting through days filled with tedium and meaninglessness. My husband kept gently encouraging me to use this time to return to my writing. As a child, teen, and young adult, I had always been a writer. I majored in English in college but I had not done any non-academic writing since starting graduate school in 2001. Years earlier as a new mother in 2010 I had a vision of someday writing a parenting book, and it seemed like maybe this was the time to finally work toward that vision. So in the two days a week I wasn’t at the part-time job, I started reading more parenting guidance, forming my ideas, and creating a website for a blog. I began writing blog posts and figuring out my voice as a writer. After a year of the soul-draining job, a colleague connected me to a private practice, where I’ve been doing therapy since 2017. In the year of this professional “in-between,” I felt like I lost who I was and grieved that loss. But by gradually returning to my creative self and exercising those muscles, I re-discovered my most authentic self that academia had eclipsed. After this journey through professional identities, I feel the most ME that I have felt in years. I forced myself to figure out how to awaken my creativity and integrate this dormant part of me into a fully realized current professional identity of psychologist and writer.
Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?
As a psychologist with a voice in the parenting world, I think success depends on developing an intuitive sense of where people’s pain points are and what feels helpful. This intuition comes from paying close attention not just to what people say about their struggles, but what emotions come up from these struggles. Because I have heard and seen so much guilt, shame, and self-blame in parenting, I know I need to articulate a message that counteracts those feelings so that when people interact with my content, they feel uplifted and empowered. It’s not focusing just on what to say, but how to say it and why.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.emilyedlynnphd.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dremilyedlynn/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrEmilyEdlynn/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-edlynn-phd-0610072/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrEmilyEdlynn
- Other: My book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Autonomy-Supportive-Parenting-Parental-Competent-Confident/dp/1641709766/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1JYV4PRMGWFSX&keywords=autonomy+supportive+parenting&qid=1694006457&sprefix=autonomy+sup%2Caps%2C98&sr=8-1 Psychologists Off the Clock podcast: https://offtheclockpsych.com/
Image Credits
Headshot by Matt Kosterman