Abigail Wald
Parenting Hack Queen 

I’m a natural born hacker, ever since I was a kid. A door was closed, I’d find a window. There were no windows? I’d learn how to build them. Where others see blocks, I see blocks too. But then I turn them into stepstools so I can climb higher. Then parenting broke me. It was the first time in my life I couldn’t find a solution. I tried everyone else’s solutions on and they’d work a bit but not entirely. Three yrs in, I was a mess. Broken hearted that it didn’t look like what I wanted. Broken hearted that I couldn’t SOLVE it.  I became obsessed with figuring out where were the breaks, what were the patterns that were unhealthy?
How could I recode myself and make parenting work? So that’s when I started building my OWN solutions. Not only my own solutions but also my own parenting language. Bc my exp of parenting was different, as it is for so many of us. Today I have hacked not only my fam but over 500 others. I don’t just do it for them. I teach them how to hack THEIR families so they can fix their own software bugs any time they happen. Because let’s be real I’m not going to be there in your kitchen at 7am when your kiddo is having meltdown bc you flipped the pancake wrong. I’m not here to have you need me. I’m here to teach you the secrets so you never need anyone else other again. So when you work with us we build you your very own perfect code for your family. Hand made just for you. It all start with the coding blocks which are the language around the ideas. You may wonder why code?? Apple. code for the Red thing you eat. We all speak in code all the time. The language we speak. And the emotional language we communicate under that. We have built the code for the emotional language of parenting. Once you understand it, parenting won’t confuse you anymore bc you’ll understand what’s happening. The only q is how fluent do you want to be? Learn a few words. And so if you wanna learn more about that, like, and you wanna learn our language, then go check out the cards. Learn phrases. f you wanna play around with some of the code, do a workshop. Become truly conversational. If you wanna actually take a coding class in emotional parenting,
then do the 30 day family reset. Get fluent in your family. And if you’d like us to really help you fully recode your life, then you do mentorship and lean into that.   These days, I don’t do all this hacking on my own. I have a team of people who help me. If you wanna know more about who’s on our “recoding life” team, here it is: 

Prema: Marketing Ops and Mother of Two. Builder. Breaker. Rebuilder. Prema’s specialty is big bold ideas that break paradigms and get the ball moving. She is my second brain, and even better than my original one at some things! 

Debbie: Astoundingly Awesome Assistant and Mother of Two. Detail hero. Code cleaner. Spreadsheet artisan. She keep us clean, lean, and efficient, and helps everything run smoothly and bug-free. She is also the connector, keeping communications running freely and smoothly between us and you. 

Beccy: Comms Director and Mother of One. Wordsmith. Deep diver. Idea buddy. Her brain swims fast, and writing new code with her feels like riding on the back of a dolphin: fast, playful, and just the right amount of dangerous. 

Holly: MFA Mentor and Mother of Three. A heart big enough to catch anyone and everyone who comes close. Unafraid of the darkness and always able to find the light, Holly will show you how to find hope again, and then help you achieve what it is you’re hoping for. 

Chris: MFA Mentor and Mother of Three. A keeper of calm wisdom, Chris will show you how to ride the waves of life with confidence and clarity. She’s seen a lot, knows a lot, and will shortcut the hard parts of your journey, so you can spend way more time on the good parts. When you work with me, you get all of us working for you.

How I went from a loving, screaming parent with crying kids → to a loving, joyful parent with safe and happy kids.

These days, Abigail Wald is the co-host of the popular "Hand in Hand: A Podcast for Parents" (with a quarter million downloads in its first year alone!) and also the founder of Real Time Parenting, where she gets to work with parents all over the world through private sessions, classes, and speaking engagements.

But I'm going to get real here, OK?

My first days of parenting looked like THIS:

You get the idea.

It's almost like I can hear my poor baby just throwing his arm up, thinking:

"Geesh, I can't believe I got stuck with this lady!"

 See, when I first had kids, I thought I was going to be great at it.

I had very clear ideas of the kind of family I wanted to help create, my husband and I were close and on the same page, we really wanted children, and we were conscious loving people who had had full lives before kids. Seriously - how hard could this be?

Well, it turns out, it wound up being pretty hard, actually.

My first son had major medical issues we did not expect, and needed open heart surgery at birth. That picture above was about a month or so after we had finally been released from the hospital to go home. You can see the shock on my face.

And then my second son had different medical issues.

But really, I found the regular day to day of parenting just as beautiful and difficult as the major medical challenges we were facing. I had no idea how lonely parenting would feel. I couldn't understand why my children whom I loved so much could be so difficult. It never occurred to me that sometimes they would fight that love. That they would need something other than my love. And who knew that sometimes I wouldn't feel that love? That sometimes I would feel rage or grief or frustration or disappointment.

None of those were the things I had imagined and yet here they were, staring me in the face.

But luckily so were my toddler and my baby.

I had to find a way to make it all work. To acknowledge what I was feeling, But somehow give them what they needed. To transform my feelings of powerlessness into the confidence I NEEDED to have the kind of family I had imagined.

I looked everywhere and tried every parenting methodology I could. A year later, I was still frustrated. The things they told me to do weren't working with my kids, which either led me to believe my kids were just super difficult or I was an awful mom who had done irreparable damage somehow and none of us would ever be happy. That was how dark it felt, the day someone casually mentioned I should check out Hand in Hand Parenting.

I did.

And that was the last day I wondered if I could do this parenting thing. That was the first day I knew we would all make it through, and thrive TOGETHER.

After that, I started absorbing everything I could. From Patty Wipfler at Hand in Hand Parenting. And then from Dan Seigel. And Gordon Neufeld. And Michael Gurian. And many others who also made sense to me.

And as I cobbled together all these new truths, what I learned is this: 

Sometimes, love is not all you need.

You need tools that work.

And a mentor to teach them to you.

With my mentors by my side, I was lucky enough to heal my own family. But I couldn't stop there. I started teaching other families - not as a job, but rather as a passion. I was just so determined that everyone should have the right to this kind of information and support. Five years after that, I went back to Hand In Hand to become an instructor because it was clear that this was not just my passion - this was my life's work. Years later, I am now a certified Hand in Hand Parenting Instructor, and a certified trainer for The Gurian Institute, and have already taught many hundreds of families how to have MORE JOY and LESS OVERWHELM, while still being able to SET LIMITS for your kids and promote your own FAMILY'S VALUES. 

 Because now I know it doesn't have to be so hard.

And I want YOU to know it too.

 XO, Abigail

I'm Abigail, and this is my family.

I loved my kiddos from the get-go, but I had no idea how to LEAD them.

I just thought they'd love me and I'd love them and we'd be good to go. 

<Insert guffaws here. Then laughing so hard I am crying. OK, now full-on sobbing. With little breaks for occasional fistfuls of gummy bears.>

So yeah, it didn't really work out the way I thought it would. 

But the way it did, was

MUCH, MUCH BETTER. 

Luckily, the plans life has for us are often better than the ones we had for ourselves.

•  I wouldn't have chosen such an intense childhood but it taught me deep in my bones that while we can't always control what happens in our lives, we CAN CONTROL THE STORY we tell ourselves about what happens. And the story is more important than the event.
•  I wouldn't have chosen for my oldest son to need open heart surgery but that touch with mortality has given me a great appreciation for the GIFT OF LIFE. 
•  I wouldn't have chosen for my early motherhood to feel as hard as it did, but that spurred in me the desire and ability to CHANGE THE GLOBAL CONVERSATION AROUND MOTHERHOOD. 

And I invite you to wonder if this might be true for you too...

Might your current challenges really be the portal to your greatest wins someday?

Might your kids' less-than-fabulous behavior be the best thing that ever happened to your family?

But if you're not with me yet, I get it. We often go into growth kicking and screaming. I did too. 

The truth is I built these courses and this community because I needed to.

I was spiraling, and unwilling to lose this battle.

Like you, I had a vision for my family that I wasn't willing to give up on. 

So I devoted my life to figuring out how to WIN at this.

After ten years of research I identified 3 key ingredients we mamas need in order to THRIVE and be able to LEAD OUR FAMILY WELL.

Parenting We're Proud Of

We need a parenting philosophy we LIKE using, and that also supports OUR DEEPEST VALUES. This should be evidence-based, well researched, and IT MUST INCLUDE ACTIONABLE TOOLS we can use in the heat of the moment. 

Moms to Rise With

We need to stop feeling so alone, because we're not! We deserve (and need) a community of moms who are non-judgmental, to be our trench buddies and help US DO US on the daily. We need a place to fill back up and get revitalized so we can go do tomorrow with a smile.

A Deeper Meaning to It All

We need to find ways we KNOW WE MATTER in our lives, because we are more than quesadilla makers and car-poolers. We are soul shapers. We get to write a whole new story of what motherhood means to us, and what we want to mean to it.

As I built these three pillars into my life,

WOW. Everything changed.

But why didn't every mama have this information?

Why wasn't it all in some secret magical booklet tucked into the very first baby blanket we received?

And why was all the other mainstream info that everyone was pushing, so very... wrong??

I realized other mamas had a right to this amazing information too, so I started sharing it with friends. I then began teaching formal classes as a certified teacher for Hand in Hand Parenting (I LOVE their tools, and use them extensively as one of the systems I teach). 

But I wanted to reach a LOT of parents, so I spearheaded and co-hosted The Hand in Hand Parenting Podcast, which has now been downloaded 

over 680,000 times!!

And now I run the Mother Flipping Awesome Podcast, which goes even one step further in pulling back the curtain on what this work really looks like. 

Take a moment to LISTEN TO THE TRAILER and SUBSCRIBE right now!

My life is full and yet I wake up every morning with a burning in my belly because it has become a MISSION for me. Get these tools in the hands of every single mama that wants and needs them. 

Because every mother should know what it feels like to be able to transform herself so completely into the parent she always wanted

The mission has now become a movement.

Every day I share this new way of thinking about motherhood with moms from all over the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Bahrain, and Switzerland. 

And we're just getting started...

JOIN US.

The mission has now become a movement.

Every day I share this new way of thinking about motherhood with moms from all over the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Bahrain, and Switzerland. 

And we're just getting started...

JOIN US.