Giving Makes Me Feel the Best: The story of a new baby in the house

As your baby grows, you'll discover the best story hours, kids' museums, parks, and baby-tolerant restaurants. Suddenly you'll know the name of the librarian, the crossing guard, and the barista who works the Sunday sunrise shift. You become part of the fabric of your town, thanks to your tiny sidekick.

Coworkers aside, you don't get very many chances to make lasting friendships after high school and college. Then pregnancy comes, and you've got an open door again. For me, birthing class and La Leche League meetings resembled the first days in a freshman dorm. I had so much to discuss with these women! The birth-class crew included Cheryl and Lisa. Though our life stories couldn't have been more opposite, and we took different paths to motherhood, we quickly came to love hanging out together.

I'll always remember listening to Lisa describe how she was painting her daughter-to-be's nursery; all the while, I was obsessively adhering to every possible pregnancy superstition like leaving the crib unassembled until the last minute. At some point, though, I realized Lisa's calm nature and innate confidence were qualities I needed in my mommy arsenal.

My other buddy, Cheryl, was convinced during her entire nine months that she was carrying a boy. So when her little girl came days after my son, my pal showed up at my door, ready to give me all the baby-blue clothes she'd collected during her pregnancy, and we laughed for what seemed like hours.

We three ended up nursing on each other's couches, comparing notes on baby behavior, and easing each other's worries about our perceived mothering shortcomings. We developed a genuine intimacy that I still treasure. Oh, yeah, and our children now school-age have all become friends too. Suddenly, the inconsolable baby crying next to you on a flight gets your empathy instead of your ire.

Mothering gives you the ability to step into other parents' shoes, and you appreciate the giant job they undertake with their own kids. It's no wonder that any other parent's tragedy or triumph strikes a chord and makes you a blubbering mess. Movies with plotlines centering on missing children are now unwatchable. Human-interest stories on the news break your heart. I had worked in costume for TV, theatre and film for 15 years in the capital. When I met the person I am with now, I knew I wanted to start a family. It was timing and getting my head together that meant my daughter Poppy came at the right time.

I was trying for just over a year before it happened. I read an article about a woman in her 50s who had a baby and she talked about biological age and chronological age and said that if you look younger, you feel younger. So that really helped me because I have always felt younger.

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The only time my age came into it really was when I gave birth. I had to be induced because I was 16 days overdue, but in the end I had an emergency caesarean, and one of the determining factors was my age. The birth was an incredibly positive experience. There is lots of fear around giving birth, which can affect how you feel about it. But I practised hypnobirthing — an education programme that teaches you to relax.

Having a child has completely changed me. My whole world revolves around Poppy at the moment. I feel empowered more than anything.

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I feel more comfortable in myself and happier with my body. I was just 40 when I got pregnant through in vitro fertilisation IVF , but I needed that because I have endometriosis. It just happened that at 39 I met the right person. I had no problems getting pregnant and it happened after my first round of IVF. I never got the feeling from friends or colleagues that I was too old.

I was a trend forecaster in interiors and fashion at the time, and worked with a lot of young people, who were all supportive. The only place I felt conscious of my age really was at hospital — I was called a geriatric mother, or some term like that. They used to shout it across the clinic. The birth included three days of labour and ended with a forceps delivery. Resilience, defined as "the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness," is an underpinning of success. It's what allows people to, as Sir Winston Churchill put it, "go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

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And that undaunted attitude is what allows them to work through problems without fear of coming up short--exactly the behavior that the "praise for the effort" tactic that Dweck advises is designed to develop. So how do you help kids to develop resiliency? Set an example, trust your children to solve many of their own problems, and encourage risk-taking while also asserting your authority as a parent when it's sensible, advises former Navy SEAL commander and now Missouri governor Eric Greitens. This next bit of science-backed advice requires some judgment. On the one hand, it's important to let kids solve their own problems when possible.

On the other hand, your job as a parent requires you to act like an authority figure and a determined advocate. Nowhere is this more true than in the schools. A year longevity study called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth found that schools often ignore the most talented students, in favor of trying to increase the performance of more average pupils.

This all comes from a misguided belief that gifted students will achieve on their own--even in spite of a strict educational system that doesn't serve them well. Unfortunately, it's a huge societal mistake. The only real antidote is parental involvement and advocacy. Researchers at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom found that parents who set super-high expectations for their teenage daughters--and who constantly reminded them of those expectations--had daughters who were less likely to become pregnant, drop out of school, or wind up in lousy, low-wage jobs.

Although the study focused specifically on girls, it didn't exclude the likelihood that such high-tempo reminders would have a similar positive effect for boys.

I have had more than a little bit of luck in life, but nothing equals in magnitude my marriage to Martin D. I betray no secret in reporting that, without him, I would not have gained a seat on the Supreme Court. Science backs her up. Louis found that marrying the right person leads people to "perform better at work, earning more promotions, making more money, and feeling more satisfied with their jobs.

Unless you're living in a society with arranged marriages, however, this is much more about your children's choices than anything you can do for them as a parent. Still, you can do your best to model a good marriage relationship and simply make sure they understand that the choice of who to spend your life with is probably the most important choice most people make. This one a bonus, as it's based on my own research.

While we know that money is not the key to happiness, a lack of money can certainly sometimes lead to misery.