April 22, 2022

tips & tricks for growth

🧡 In honor of the upcoming National Infertility Awareness Week – April 24-30th, we’ve decided to highlight how to best support a friend who is experiencing infertility. Check out our latest blogs below 👇

how to support a friend experiencing infertility

Imagine for a minute that you have just received a life-altering diagnosis*. The plans for your future have been shattered. The treatments you choose can leave you with debilitating migraines, nausea, bruising, mood swings, and extreme fatigue. Your every waking moment is consumed by your new reality. No one knows how to respond, so they tiptoe around your diagnosis. You can’t concentrate at work. Your friendships and marriage start to suffer. You feel alone, grieving the life you thought you’d have. This is what your friend who is experiencing infertility is going through. And it’s not an exaggeration. According to the National Survey of Family Growth conducted by the CDC, 1 in 8 couples have trouble getting pregnant or sustaining a pregnancy. And 7.4 million women, or 11.9% of women, have received infertility services in their lifetime.

You want to be supportive and empathic. You want to help your struggling friend in any way possible. But you have no words. You have no experience. In fact, you may have children of your own already and feel slightly guilty to bring them around or talk about them now. Or you may be pregnant and afraid of being a constant reminder to your friend of what they don’t have yet. You’ve entered into a delicate predicament where you don’t know what to do or how to act.

First and foremost, kudos to you. For realizing that you may not have all the answers. For acknowledging that this situation is worth researching and putting the work into. Learning how to best support your friend during this time takes courage and vulnerability.

Talking about such an intimate detail of a relationship isn’t always something people feel comfortable doing in the first place. Everyone has a different comfort level with what they are willing to share. Your friend may tell you right away that they’re struggling to conceive, or they may choose to wait until they get a prognosis. They may be feeling embarrassed, ashamed, in denial or in disbelief. But once they do share, take it as a compliment that your friendship is a safe place for them.

SEE HOW YOU CAN SUPPORT

guide for guys: supporting a friend through infertility

You’re hanging out with one of your friends, and he confides, We’ve been trying to get pregnant for over a year, and it just isn’t happening. It’s been hard on our marriage. What can you say to help, encourage, and support your friend facing infertility? What shouldn’t you say even though you may mean well?

How can you support your friend during this challenging time of crisis and grief?

As men, we often have some generally unhelpful tendencies in these situations. Let’s acknowledge them so we can try to avoid them:

✹ When presented with a problem, we want to fix it. Often, the better move is to try to feel it.

✹ We project the help, support, and needs we would have onto the person we’re trying to help.

We forget that everyone is different, and everyone is not us.

✹ We’re frequently uncomfortable with emotions or feelings – our own or someone else’s. This can cause us to withdraw or avoid people and not engage in hard conversations.

SEE TIPS TO SUPPORT YOUR FRIEND

what we’re lovin’

This week’s picks come from Chris Ownby, a husband, #GirlDad of 2, and our Research Strategist here at First Things First! He’s always researching & reading so he’s come across some great things.Take a peek at his recommendations for this week because they are just THAT GOOD. Check ’em out 👀:

📖 52 Modern Manners for Today’s Teens– Great conversations for the dinner table that introduce tips showing respect and composure in regards to technology, friendships, and engaging with others. Not off-putting, each page offers a practical piece of wisdom parents and teens can easily talk about.

⛔ A unique family-fun experience: take a self defense course together as a family. You’ll find that these are often offered by your local community center, martial arts school, or police department. It’s fun, not to mention you learn a great skill. Or, try out a martial arts class. Many schools offer a first class freebie, and you don’t have to commit! (Unless you want to, of course!) Look for schools where families can learn together in the same class.

💎 Have you heard of this thing called Geocaching? It’s been around for a while, but my daughter and I got hooked on it a few years ago on summer vacation. It’s literally like a treasure hunt using the GPS on your phone, and there are geocache treasures everywhere. It’s a blast, especially if you have kids that love to explore. This is a great app to use – chances are, there’s a geocache close to your neighborhood!

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Know a friend who would love reading all the relationship goodness we’ve packed in here? Go ahead and share it with them!

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