Joy solution: These Negative Nancies are the easiest to fight because you can recognize the impact right away. Leaves you feeling: Enraged and wanting to spread all that bad juju to others. Queen of the backhanded compliment, “I wish I were comfortable enough to do school drop off without make-up, especially with your skin.” This mom steps up on to her high horse on the backs of others. Newborns (toddlers cough cough) don’t sleep, but nothing beats pudgy dimples in place of knuckles. Joy solution: Remind yourself what you love about the phase you’re in. Leaves you feeling: Like your #strugglesARENTreal. And yes, every phase has it good and bad parts but they are all temporary.

These moms seem completely incapable of remembering that fortunately most cards in life are dealt one at a time. You think dealing with grade school bullies is hard, just wait ‘til you have a teenager screaming that they hate you. Oh you think a newborn is hard, wait until you’re potty training and your entire house is a giant urinal. Oh you think being pregnant is hard, just wait until you have a newborn and you’ll never EVER sleep again. Compliments go a long way to Debbie Downers even if you don’t see the evidence right away. Leaves you feeling: Drained after a conversation and start to wonder about your own shortcomings. Her kids are terrible, her husband is a slob, her house is a warzone…on and on it goes. We dread asking her how she’s doing, because we know she’ll launch into a martyrdom monologue about how every day is just the awful. The Catastrophic ComplainerĮverything is always the WORST. Here are a few of the most common types of Negative Nancies who wreak havoc on our happiness and some ways to handle them. It seeps into our minds until we are being just as negative as those around us. It makes us forget all that we should be grateful for. However, the danger lies when it becomes the only way we communicate. I will be the first to say that a good ole complain fest with your girlfriends is not only cathartic but a vital part of survival in motherhood. We’re infecting ourselves and even more alarmingly, our kids. This contagious condition is carried by most of us moms.

Negative nancy images