There is an intense emotional strain involved with parenting a neurodivergent child with mental health issues. But we will do whatever it takes to understand her brain

“There’s something wrong with me!” my seven-year-old daughter sobbed, back in 2018. “Honestly, there isn’t,” I said, giving her a hug. “You’re just a bit sensitive, a bit anxious.” I wanted to be the reassuring parent, the mum who makes everything all right. But I was having the opposite effect on her: I was underplaying her distress, and it scared her, and shook her faith in me. How could she get any help if I didn’t accept there was a problem?

At the time her dad and I didn’t know our daughter was autistic. She was certainly not the easiest to manage, but she was also funny, bright, imaginative and popular at school. And although we were aware that she had intrusive thoughts, separation and sensory issues, a nasty phobia and difficulty controlling her emotions, her teachers, our GP, relatives and friends told us not to worry too much. “She’s a character! She’ll be fine.”

Once motherhood spelled the end of a sporting career. But more mums than ever are taking part in this year’s Olympics and Paralympics (the village even has a nursery for the first time). How do they do it?

Nekoda Smythe-Davis is a Commonwealth gold medal-winning judoka (judo expert) who has won silver and bronze at the World Championships and represented Great Britain at the 2016 Olympics.

After a troubling report on NHS care, the number of pregnant women seeking more control over their birth plans is growing

A growing number of patients are paying up to £8,000 to hire private midwives amid frustration at the poor service many face in the NHS. The UK’s only private maternity hospital, the Portland, has reported treating more women. It comes after a report from MPs this month found women in labour have been mocked, ignored and left with permanent damage by midwives and doctors.

Here, three women tell their story.

Madeleine Hewitt says it’s time people who support the movement recognised that nothing in nature exists independently. Greg Blonder notes that many of the problems we need to solve are the result of the growing population itself

Pronatalists like the Collinses, interviewed for your article (America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world: ‘There are going to be countries of old people starving to death’, 25 May), emphasise their authority on the “data”, but their cherrypicked results neglect to look at the full picture that humanity’s outsized impact is degrading the natural resources upon which we all depend.

The Global Footprint Network says we are in ecological overshoot, with humanity using the resources of 1.7 Earths. The UN has made clear that our unsustainable demand for resources is driving the triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity loss, and increasing levels of pollution and waste. And despite the rhetoric of Silicon Valley, technology is not our saviour; it is found to mitigate global extraction by only 5%.

Conceding to her request doesn’t do your relationship any favours, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. Take this as an opportunity to develop the relationship as two adults

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I’m moving away to another country for university next year and my mum wants to put a tracker on my phone so she can know where I am and make sure I’m OK. I don’t want her to do this, not because I have anything to hide, but because I’d like to have some independence and privacy.

She’s never been a particularly strict parent but she’s insistent on this one thing. But if I tell her, she might think I’m hiding something, or it might upset her as it may be one of the only ways she feels she could be a part of my life when I go – which isn’t true, because I plan to keep in good contact.

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The anti-sickness medicine domperidone is increasingly being prescribed or bought illegally to aid lactation. Yet, as I discovered too late, side-effects can include anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts

It is 11 days since I gave birth to my first baby. My breast milk still hasn’t “come in” properly and no one can tell me why. Midwives come and go, looking at me sympathetically and telling me to feed on demand, pump whenever I can and top up with formula milk. Still, I have no idea how I am going to exclusively breastfeed my child, which is what all the advice recommends.

Sleepless, anxious and desperate, I do what many others with the privilege of disposable income do in this situation and pay for a private consultant. I find a local International Board certified lactation consultant (IBCLC) online and we meet. She diagnoses my son with tongue-tie, which she treats by snipping the skin connecting his tongue to the bottom of his mouth. She also suggests that I start taking a drug I have never heard of, domperidone, to help me produce more milk.

Research that looked at 53 million births says Black and Hispanic mothers and those in lower socioeconomic groups most at risk

Heatwaves increase rates of preterm births, which can lead to poorer health outcomes for babies and impact their long-term health, a new study found.

Black and Hispanic mothers, as well as those in lower socioeconomic groups, are particularly at risk of delivering early following heat waves.

Squeals and growls tend to occur in groups, finds study of infants aged up to 13 months

It might sound like a stream of jolly nonsense, but the peculiar sounds babies produce could be an attempt to practise the vocal control necessary for speech, researchers have suggested.

A study analysing the sounds made by infants during their first year of life has found squeals and growls tend to occur in groups.

Much has been made of the struggles musicians face when they become mothers – but what about the inspiration? Bat for Lashes, Logic1000 and others discuss the radical energy unleashed by the ultimate collaboration

The year my son was born, I spent a lot of time walking laps of my small ground-floor flat in a milky, slightly hysterical state of sleep deprivation, listening to a set of instrumental albums by Raymond Scott from 1962 called Soothing Sounds for Baby. YouTube helpfully let me put them on repeat, between scratchy loops of synthetically produced white noise.

“Yes! I listened to Soothing Sounds for Baby too!” says Natasha Khan, AKA Bat for Lashes, whose daughter, Delphi, is now three. “Delphi grew up on instrumental and ambient music – a lot of synthy 80s stuff and Japanese composers.” Khan’s new album, The Dream of Delphi, is her own sonic celebration of those sleepless days in early motherhood, with tracks such as The Midwives Have Left, Her First Morning and Letter to My Daughter. “It’s such a hallucinatory, liminal experience that documenting seems to be the only thing you can do,” she says as we video-call on our sofas, talking about the psychedelic transformation that is motherhood.

We would like to hear from people who have taken classes to prepare themselves for pregnancy and parenthood

We’re keen to hear from people who’ve participated in private antenatal classes across the UK in order to prepare themselves for pregnancy and parenthood.

What sort of information were you taught by your course leaders about pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for a baby? Did you find the information to be useful and evidence-based? Or were there statements or comments that gave you pause for thought?

It’s easier than ever for single women to have children on their own ... or so I thought. Then began my $17,000 journey

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One night in September 2022, like a kid sticking my finger into the flame of a candle, I Googled “how to buy sperm”.

I’d been thinking about it since splitting with a partner a year earlier. I was 37, and had started wondering if continuing on the “traditional” path – meeting someone, getting to know them well enough to decide to have children together, attempting to get pregnant – might cost me the chance to have kids.

Paula Jackson set up Brief Lives – Remembered to give bereaved families a chance to grieve properly

A woman who has helped find the final resting places of nearly 3,500 stillborn babies has said barriers remain to bereaved parents seeking the truth about their children’s fate.

Paula Jackson set up the charity Brief Lives – Remembered in 2004 after helping a friend based in Australia find the grave of his twin sister, named Zoe, who was stillborn in Aldershot military hospital in 1960.

Someone has shripped a parcel to shreds, but it can’t have been Dougie

If ever you land near death’s door, you may find yourself scrolling the options for non-human reincarnation. A noble eagle, perhaps, or a river dolphin; a mountain goat, or a stolid little bumblebee. Your best bet would be to come back as one of my father’s dogs. Free of human responsibility, you’ll still reap many of civilisation’s core benefits, like living indoors, eating cooked meals and watching Loose Women.

Moreover, you will know the love of humankind, for Annie and Dougie – his beautiful but large and needy Labradors – are my father’s most ardent objects of affection and his favourite topic of conversation. They are also, I should add, his favourite conversational partners. Sometimes, while talking to him this week, I’ve caught his face screwing up in resentment as he realises that he is reduced to speaking to a person. Most of all, he is their indefatigable advocate on those occasions when I speak calumny against them.

We all start our journey into motherhood with a Plan A for the birth, but wouldn’t it be helpful if we had a Plan B or C or even D?

Oh God, I mean, I laugh about it now. Which is funny in itself really, the idea that 10 years later I’d be laughing about the day, the dawn, where, white-faced in a room with blood up the walls, I would hand our new raw blinking baby to my boyfriend in order to frantically find, in my Notes app, the document I had grandly named Birth Plan. What was I hoping to find there, I wonder now. It’s funny, it is funny, how I scoured it – “I want a mobile epidural”, “I want gentle guidance rather as opposed to being forced to push” – this plan, written as if ticking off boxes on a dim sum menu, written in the voice of the person I was before. It seemed crucial, in that moment, to see if perhaps I’d given them the wrong piece of paper. Had it been an admin error? The forceps, the lack of drugs, the breast milk not coming in, the blood, was it my fault? I remember reading it again and again, I hadn’t slept for some time, of course, and the baby was crying, but I felt, I think I felt, that even though I had tried to do everything right, something had gone terribly wrong.

It turned out, despite my shock, despite the horrors and their ripples that followed me for years, my experience of giving birth was almost comically pedestrian. It reminded me of the time I got my ears pierced, I must have been about 12, going home on the bus looking at other women’s earrings and thinking, “OK, you’ve felt that same agony” – now I traipsed around London with the baby strapped to me looking at other mothers, thinking, “and yet, you are walking, you are smiling, you are putting on red lipstick in the reflection of a phone?” As the years have passed I’ve talked to other people about their births with a kind of hunger – these are stories of babies almost dying and mothers almost dying, and worse, of course – so when last week’s report on birth trauma was published, no part of me was surprised at the findings. I can’t imagine many parents were.

It’s obvious you feel grateful for what you have, but remember your experience is of having three siblings, not three children

• Every week Annalisa Barbieri addresses a relationship problem sent in by a reader

I have a strong attachment to my family – in particular my three siblings. We live in different countries but the bond is strong.

I have two children, aged six and two, but I’ve always wanted three. I know I am beyond lucky and grateful to have two. Since I had my second, I have been grappling with the internal debate “Should we have a third or not” and as I have just turned 40, it is occupying more space in my head.

From the 1960s, baby brokers persuaded often Indigenous Mayan women to give up newborns while kidnappers ‘disappeared’ babies. Now, international adoption is being called out as a way of covering up war crimes. By Rachel Nolan

At Tea Magic in New York, I’m happy to indulge my girls and their friends in the latest soft-drink craze. Until things kick off

Last Friday, I took four nine-year-old girls to their favourite after-school hang-out, Tea Magic, a place that is distinct from, and in their view superior to, Shiny Tea, Gong Cha Tea, Coco Tea and Mochi Dulci. If you had to create in a laboratory an environment to appeal to tween girls it would be this one: on each wall, huge Hello Kitty-type murals and a menu involving combined fluorescent syrups and a range of brightly coloured add-ons loosely inspired by the tapioca “boba tea”. Within seven minutes, everyone was jacked up on sugar, including a group of girls from a rival elementary school, whereupon things briefly got exciting.

As someone who grew up in the era of Panda Cola, I’ll admit that fashion as expressed through the medium of soft drinks is something I occasionally struggle with. Fifteen years ago, I was kind of on board with iced coffee, which was a mistake. (First, the ice means you get less coffee, which means the Man wins again. Second, when the ice melts, you are effectively drinking coffee-flavoured water; wise up people, this isn’t desirable). More recently, when fruit-flavoured seltzer became a thing in New York – specifically, the brand La Croix – I wasn’t on board with that, either, mainly because I’m not 14 years old, and also because we buy our seltzer in 32-can off-brand crates from Costco that cost about half the price.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

I’ve been a bereavement counsellor and a bereaved daughter. Both taught me that we need to face our emotions

It’s almost a year since my dad died. Even though he lived into his late 80s, and even though his health problems began when I was a child, his death was nevertheless a terrible shock. It still is. It was the most predictable thing in the world, but I still can’t believe it. The wave of grief surges up whenever I think of a joke he would have liked, or whenever I hear his advice in my head, and whenever I catch sight of his ashes, stored in a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar on my bookshelf until a more suitable container can be found. (He liked Hellmann’s, but not that much.) Each time I’m left gasping for air from the pain and, strange as it sounds, I’m grateful for it. Because I know this grieving life is far better than the alternative.

Years ago I volunteered as a bereavement counsellor, and I remember vividly the moment in training where it finally clicked: my job was not to take away people’s grief, but to help them feel it. You see, you may not need counselling or therapy if you are truly grieving; but you may well need it if you aren’t. Grief is a horror, and it’s supposed to be. Where grief has got stuck, or when it has still not even begun – that is when you might need a protected space, and time, and a good, receptive listener with whom you can find it in yourself to truly suffer the pain of your loss.

A group that began as 23 Black fathers from London on WhatsApp is now a worldwide digital space where 40,000 men discuss being Black and a parent

Dope Black Dads was formed by Marvyn Harrison on Father’s Day 2018, initially as a WhatsApp group of 23 Black fathers he knew in London. It has since developed as a digital safe space for some 40,000 fathers from the international community to discuss their experiences of being Black, being a parent and masculinity in the modern world.

The group brings together men who are navigating fatherhood, societal pressures and the age-old stereotype of the absent Black father. Far too often societal biases perpetuate the myth of absent or disengaged Black fathers. The photographer sees this portrait series as an opportunity to uplift the ideology of Black men, especially in their role as fathers. The work is a celebration of joy, pride and love, and a tribute to the strength, resilience and beauty of Black families, amplifying their voices and contributing to a more nuanced and compassionate understanding of Black fatherhood.

Klopp’s final game at Anfield will be momentous. But in life, the everyday endings we don’t notice are often the most poignant

Who was the last football manager to transcend his sport in the way that Jürgen Klopp has? Arsène Wenger? Brian Clough? Bill Shankly? Since arriving at Liverpool in 2015, Klopp has revived the fortunes of a club that had for too long been trading on past glories, bringing with him a thrilling style of play he has himself described as “heavy metal football”. So there was a palpable sense of shock when, in January, he announced that at the end of the season he would be leaving the club and taking a break from football.

The reverberations from Klopp’s decision to step down have been felt far beyond those for whom Gegenpressing is a familiar concept (and far beyond Merseyside – for the record, I have never had any great affection for Liverpool FC, except when they’re playing Manchester City or Newcastle). In an era when sports “personalities” go to great lengths not to express anything that could be construed as an opinion, he has been refreshingly honest about politics (he’s leftwing), Brexit (it “makes no sense”) and Covid vaccinations (comparing anti-vaxxers to drink-drivers and, when the Omicron variant appeared, making a direct plea to Liverpool fans to get jabbed). Couple this outspokenness with a natural charm, a sharp sense of humour and an irrepressible enthusiasm, and it’s easy to see why the German coach’s exit is not just a loss to British football, but to the wider country, too.

Even if we’re not sure what to do with it just yet

‘Gloob!’ says my daughter. This is what she calls the globe that sits on a shelf in our sitting room. It’s one of my favourite among her neologisms, and one we’re unlikely to grow sick of hearing. This is primarily because ‘gloob’ is one of the best syllables to hear pronounced by a ginger two-year-old, but also because time spent with her gloob means many precious minutes of self-directed play, allowing us a break from the more full-on supervision she so typically prefers.

Nana and Grandad bought the gloob for our son’s fifth birthday. It’s around 60cm in diameter, battery operated and comes with a stylus attached. It’s mounted on a base with a small LCD screen, which displays facts and figures about anything you point the stylus toward. It offers wildly detailed information on population, demography and national customs. Each creature mentioned is delineated by class and notes are given on its diet and herding patterns.

‘Heavy-handed’ crackdown ignores underlying reasons for failure to attend classes, say critics

Some schools in England are sending police to the homes of children who are persistently absent, or warning them their parents may go to prison if their attendance doesn’t improve, the Observer has learned.

Headteachers say they are now under intense pressure from the government to turn around the crisis in attendance, with a record 150,000 children at state schools classed as severely absent in 2022-23. From September, all state schools in England will have to share their attendance records every day with the Department for Education.

Four days after my child was born, I began experiencing postpartum psychosis. What I learned changed my life

The first time I start hallucinating I am home, alone, with my baby. Drunk from lack of sleep I watch as his features morph in and out of shape. I take photo after photo, trying to capture what I see.

A few days later, while I am pushing the pram outside, it happens again. I pull the hood down to hide my baby from prying eyes. I no longer know who I can trust.

I am dead, I am dead. And because I am dead it won’t matter if I take my own life. No one can miss what was never real.

Medical professionals and women who had bad experiences themselves respond to the findings of the birth trauma report

The maternity trauma report is deja vu all over again (Women having ‘harrowing’ births as hospitals hide failures, says MPs’ report, 13 May). I cannot read about it because it makes me want to scream.

I was around for the Shrewsbury and Telford hospital trust report a couple of years ago. All those dead babies, all those mothers and parents talking about not being listened to or respected. All that handwringing from service providers, all those promises from politicians. The recommendations were set up to prevent the experiences we heard about this week (‘I was left lying on the ground in pain’: shocking stories from UK birth trauma inquiry, 13 May). For instance, continuity of midwifery care through the maternal pathway prevents so much of the stuff we read about now.