Wellness Wednesday Issue #185

🤝 De-escalation training your team can finish in a day.

🪜 Women’s leadership development is shifting from career ladders to confidence and resilience.

🤖 Nearly half of women fear backlash for using AI at work.

🪙 Your emergency fund is losing money in the wrong account.

Here’s the part nobody puts in the pregnancy announcement: only 27% of workers in the U.S. have access to paid family leave.

The 12 weeks you’re legally entitled to under FMLA? Unpaid. And the average American birthing parent takes just 10 weeks off because they can’t afford the full 12.

If you’re pregnant or planning to be, you’re likely going to need to fund a significant chunk of your leave yourself. The earlier you start planning, the more time you actually get with your baby.

Start with Your Benefits, Not Your Budget

Before you build a single spreadsheet, know what you’re actually getting. Pull up your employee handbook, read the parental leave section, then confirm with HR directly. You’re looking for: how many weeks of paid leave you get, whether you can stack it with PTO or sick time, and whether short-term disability (SDI) is available.

If your employer offers SDI and you’re not yet pregnant, sign up now. SDI typically pays 40-60% of your salary for six to eight weeks after delivery, but most policies treat pregnancy as a pre-existing condition if you enroll after conceiving. Get in before the positive test.

Also check your state: 13 states plus Washington D.C. mandate paid family leave. If you’re in one, that money is yours to claim and most people don’t think to ask about it.

Know Your Actual Number

Once you understand what you’ll receive, calculate what you’ll need. What does your household income look like during leave? What will monthly expenses be with a new baby? How many weeks are you hoping to take, and how many of those are unpaid?

Subtract projected income from projected expenses and you have the number you need to save before your due date. Run this before you’re eight months along and scrambling.

Build a Dedicated Baby Fund

Don’t fold maternity savings into your regular account. Open a separate sinking fund (call it your Baby Fund) and set up automatic transfers into it every month. Keeping it separate does two things: it shows you exactly where you stand, and it removes the temptation to spend it on something else.

The earlier you start, the smaller the monthly contribution needs to be. First trimester is ideal. Third trimester is still better than nothing.

Save More Than You Think You Need

Your baby gets their own hospital bill, separate from yours. Postpartum care costs more than most people budget for. Recovery can take longer than expected.

Financial experts recommend saving 20-30% more than your calculated gap, because running out of money while you’re recovering from childbirth and bonding with a newborn is the last thing you want to be dealing with.

Stack Every Option You Have

Beyond your employer benefits and savings, use everything available to you. Cash in PTO and sick time to bridge unpaid weeks. If your company doesn’t have a formal leave policy, negotiate for partial pay and get any agreement in writing.

Look into WIC if you’re eligible. Run your info through benefits.gov to see what government programs apply to your situation. If you have a high-deductible health plan, an HSA lets you set aside pre-tax dollars for medical costs related to pregnancy and delivery.

Financial prep for maternity leave isn’t glamorous, and the fact that you have to do it at all is its own kind of frustrating. But the earlier you start, the more options you have, and the more time you actually get to be present when your baby arrives.

Nobody hired you to become the Director of Who Wears a Medium.

And yet here you are, three tabs open, one spreadsheet away from madness, trying to remember if Alex is a Large or “kinda between.”

Employee gifting should take 20 minutes. Somehow it always takes 20 days.

Swag.com exists for the person who just sighed reading that. You order, store, and send branded gifts from one platform, so you build the kit once and send it anytime without redoing the whole process from scratch.

Use it for:

• Onboarding kits that make Day 1 feel like a warm welcome, not a login scavenger hunt
• Promotions and milestones that deserve more than “👏👏👏” in Slack
• Event swag without turning your office into a shipping warehouse
• Client and manager gifts that feel thoughtful, not last-minute

One great item beats five forgettable ones. A ready-to-send kit you can deploy in two clicks is the real perk.

Explore Swag.com here and stop being the office sizing database.

OK, get mad at me, but I recently had a mom friend share with me how her sleep routine with her toddler takes her an absurd amount of time.

I’m going to preface this by saying I am not a mom. I’ve nannied and babysat for most of my life across a wide range of families and cultures, my maternal instincts are strong, and I genuinely love kids, but I’m the one who gets to go home to a quiet house at the end of the night. I know that changes everything. I hold that.

And still, I need to talk through this one with you.

A mom friend recently told a group of us about her bedtime routine with her toddler. She and her husband both work full-time, and since their daughter spends most of the day with a nanny, by the time mom gets home it’s basically dinner and bedtime.

Her daughter is so attached by that point that she won’t let her mom leave the room. My friend (who is visibly exhausted) often ends up falling asleep in her daughter’s room, drags herself to her own bed later, and then wakes up at 2am when the kid crawls in anyway.

The routine takes 3 to 5 hours. Every. Single. Night.

She described it the way you describe something you’ve accepted as permanent. Just part of motherhood. The other moms at the table were empathetic, supportive, present… and nobody offered solutions because they couldn’t relate. They weren’t doing bedtime like that, and wouldn’t.

I asked about letting her cry it out. She looked at me like I’d suggested something absurd.

I’ve been thinking about that dinner ever since.

Here’s where I’m sitting with it

I’ll be honest about my lens: I’m deeply solutions-oriented, and I use the same instincts with the kids in my life as I do with my dogs. That’s not an insult, it’s a compliment. I genuinely believe kids and animals operate the same way: they pick up on your energy, and they learn what you teach them, including what they can get away with.

Habits and boundaries are taught. I was raised in a European + Mexican household where kids adapted to adult life, not the other way around, and I’ve seen that play out in a lot of the families I’ve worked with, too.

So I found myself at that table having a hard time empathizing, and honestly, so did my other mom friends. Not because I don’t care about her, I do, but because if I were in her shoes, I’d be deep in a rabbit hole of sleep training research, trying every method until something worked.

The idea of chronically poor sleep, the kind that drains you at work, breeds resentment toward your partner, and puts a depressive fog over your whole life, and just accepting that as the new normal doesn’t compute for me.

At the same time: I’m aware that’s easy to say when it’s not your kid, your guilt, or your exhaustion doing the talking.

The other moms didn’t offer suggestions. I offered one and it didn’t land. And the conversation moved on.

I left that dinner feeling stuck because I think I saw something, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Or whether it was even mine to do anything with at all.

So I’m bringing it to you

TA babes, I need your wisdom on two things:

1. What’s the best way to support a mom friend when you’re not a mom yourself, but you genuinely think you see solutions she hasn’t tried? Is there a way to offer that without it landing as judgment? Or is the answer just: you don’t, unless she asks?

2. What’s your best sleep training advice? Methods that actually worked, things you wish you’d tried sooner, what you’d tell a friend in this exact situation — all of it.

Reply to this email and let us know. The best responses will be featured in an upcoming issue.

Thania (TA Content Mgr)

Between back-to-back video calls and the five browser tabs you’ll close “in a minute,” your eyes are doing a lot. If they’ve been burning, gritty, or just exhausted by 3pm, the drops you keep reaching for only buy you 20 minutes of relief.

Peep Club’s Super Omega Dry Eye Vitamins address the actual cause. Two capsules a day, made with wild-harvested Sea Buckthorn berries (naturally rich in Omegas 3, 6, 7 and 9), plus clinically proven Lutein and Zeaxanthin to filter blue light and support long-term vision.

Plant-based, never fish, free from preservatives and fillers. Optometrist developed. Most people notice a real difference around the two-month mark.

Try Super Omega Dry Eye Vitamins.

📧 Essays, playlists, recipes, and good vibes, this 30-second morning newsletter is worth waking up for.

✨ The Gorjana Parker necklace is the layering piece you’ll never take off.

🧴 Thin, sensitive under-eye skin finally gets its own peptide treatment.

🖥️ Finally launch the website you’ve been putting off. Built by humans, flat $499. No templates.

 Upcoming Events

• Thurs 7/16 @ 10AM PT: The Decision Default with Laura Weldy (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Fri 7/17 @ 8AM PT: AI Workflow Implementation Sprint: Week 3 Live Session (AI Cohort Only)
• Fri 7/17 @ 9AM PT: AI and Your Money: The New Financial Skill Nobody Taught You with Tess Waresmith (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)
• Mon 7/20 @ 1PM PT: Watch Me Work: Creating Social Media Content with Claude (SGS Only* | Join the waitlist)

* Smart Girl Society is our private community for women who want deeper conversations, accountability, and tools that actually make life easier. Join the waitlist to get in the next round.

👩‍🍳 Recipe of the Week: Tahini Date Shakes (thanks to TA reader, Rita, for sharing!).

😋 Have a recipe you love? Share it here.

 Browse our job board here.

Have more feedback? 💌 Reply to this email and tell us.

✨ P.S. Want more inspiration and positivity to kick off your week? Sign up for our Motivational Monday texts (U.S. only).