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Hello and welcome to the Questions and Answers edition of Thriving Kids, a podcast from the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of children with mental health and learning disorders. I'm Dr. Dave Anderson, clinical psychologist and your host. Last week I was joined by Dr. Joanna Kim, a professor at Arizona State University, for a conversation about the importance of parental self care and the invisible labor of raising children. We're going to continue that theme in this Q and A episode and answer your questions on how to manage guilt and parental exhaustion and the logistics of showing up for yourself so you can show up for your kids. Let's get into it. Our first question for Thriving Kids podcast Q and A episode this week is When I see self care on social media, it's always spas and vacations. I don't have the time or money to do those things. How can I do self care? So it actually feels achievable in a normal hectic week. First of all, my heart goes out to this particular parent because it's clear that your social media algorithm has figured out that you don't have too much much relaxation time and is feeding you whatever it thinks might be best. At the end of the day, these are expensive solutions. I'd try to scroll as quickly as possible past those. Maybe it'll get the message that you're not really looking for the spa or the infinity pool or something like that, and you're looking for real, practical suggestions. Bottom line is, I love this as our first question this week because this is a constant question that we get in sessions from parents that they feel guilty about this. They feel guilty about the balance of trying to be there for their kids. And this also relates to the research, particularly on the millennial. So what we see in that research is that millennial parents are spending more time with their kids than previous generations. And this is even more true for families where they have two working parents or even one parent who's holding down one or two jobs and also spending time with kids. Every single trend in every family configuration suggests that parents feel like it's more important to be with your kids and to be experiencing things with your kids. This also means parents have less time for themselves in this generation than any generation previous to that. So so much of our work is helping people not to feel terribly guilty about taking time and at the same time to start off incrementally in the smallest increments we can think of. So for parents who normally can't take a ton of time for themselves, we start thinking about it in terms of one and five minute intervals. Is there a moment of mindfulness around something that you enjoy eating or drinking? Maybe it's a cup of tea, maybe it's a cup of coffee, maybe it's something that you like to eat. Is there an activity you can do in five minutes or less? And we'll go back to things like parents will tell us, I don't have any time for exercise. And I'll say, Look, there are YouTube videos with, you know, a high intensity interval training workout or hiit workout. Say, you know, for five minutes or for 10 minutes, they'll get your heart rate going and get some, you know, muscle training happening for you. If you even have that amount of time. Or if there's the possibility that your young child or toddler can be playing around you as you do it, at least we'll get something on the books. Or if we can think about your village. Are there other parents who like to watch kids together? And is there a moment where we can give you at least a few minutes to yourself and then you can return that favor to another parent or another person in your community? We're just looking at those kind of increments of like, let's start off clawing back just a few minutes of time and then as we get a little bit more into the habit of doing that, we can start to think about how you can fill your cup in and more effective bang for your buck ways over time. I'll also just say before I get to our second question, in the episode with Dr. Joanna Kim, we use the phrase fill your cup a lot more than parental self care. And we talk about why that phrase is important, partly because a lot of parents do feel like it's too indulgent or it's kind of like not something they have time for if they talk about self care. But if we frame it in kind of this positive way of thinking, like how do you fill your cup to be the best that you can be for your kids, knowing that even a half full cup is better than a totally empty cup? Let's figure out what that looks like in terms of your own wellness habits. How you're sleeping, how you're moving your body, your diet and your hydration, or other things that you find stress relieving or helpful. Maybe it's a long bath, maybe it's a cup of tea, maybe it's listening to a song you like. All of these things can be about filling your cup. So to get to our second question in this podcast, Q and A Thriving Kids episode a parent sent in this. I was listening to the episode on Self care. This is great. We love it when people are interacting with a previous episode and nodding along because I've seen its power firsthand. When I step away for even a few minutes, I come back with a better mood and way more energy. But I have friends who still feel guilt like me. Time is time stolen from their kids. How can I help my friends understand that filling their own cup isn't an act of neglect, but a requirement for the kind of parenting they want to do? So first of all, yay, active listening, Using the phrase filling their own cup and throwing back to the answer I just gave to the first question about finding those few minutes, this person is realizing they need to help their village. Like maybe they're on a journey already where they're finding ways to fill their cup, but they're feeling pain for friends who feel like they're shortchanging their children by even spending time away. And this goes back to common metaphors that we use all the time in clinical psychology. One that parents will often hear is this notion of putting the oxygen mask on themselves before they put the oxygen mask on their kids. Now, I've talked a couple times in various places about how I don't love that metaphor, if only because I myself little bit anxious when flying. Not to mention that that usually suggests that the premise is that the plane is in distress. So we want to think about this as something else that doesn't suggest you're in already distressed situation, but that helps you to think about the idea that just spending time with your kids when you're burned out, when you're not able to really be there for them, when you're not able to provide care in the way that you would like to, or when you're not able to kind of bring yourself as a parent in the way that you would hope. That's not necessarily the balance that we want parents to strike. We want to be thinking about how you maximize quality time with your kids rather than just the amount of time with your kids. And what that can mean is a little bit more balance. Where if we help parents to reflect on that question, is this time quality versus just quantity? And how can we increase the quality by maybe clawing back just a little bit of the quantity and maybe do some experiments on that. A common technique that we use in the office as cognitive behavioral therapists is the notion of doing experiments. Or we'll say to someone like, don't take my word for it. I'm just trying to persuade you on stuff. And for one reason or another, people will take mental health professional's advice or they might not. But how do we maybe commit to doing an experiment this week where we claw back a little bit of that time and we try to make you take conscious steps to make certain amounts of time you're spending with your kids a little bit more high quality and we see how you and they feel and we come back and we look at that data together. Because if anything, as you, you know, parenting coaches or parenting allies, we want people to take what we say, experiment with it, and then figure out if it might help for themselves. So the more that you can help your friends to take that kind of like this is a learning experience, there's no parenting manual. We're just going to tinker with stuff and see what helps or what helps us to feel better, what helps our kids to feel more drawn and attached to us. That's kind of the direction that we're going and thinking about these things. So our third question on this thriving kids Q and A We usually think of self care as adding things to our to do list, but sometimes it's about what we stop doing. For the parent who's a chronic yes person, how do we identify specific things we need to start saying no to in order to stop the energy drain? So I feel like this question was probably submitted by a parent who is in some sort of care profession or perhaps is even a therapist themselves, because it's one of these wise questions where the thinking is not just that you're filling your cup by adding things that help to boost your mood or reduce your stress, but that filling your cup often can involve setting boundaries around the things that either don't move the dial in what you want to be doing as a parent, or don't really help you to be able to feel like you're on top of things or bringing your best self to your kids. So this may mean that at some level, especially for parents of young kids or multiple kids who feel like they're kind of pulled in all kinds of different directions or that they're already low on sleep at their own wellness, what this might mean is that with family members or with friends or with extra things related to work, you might need to take this kind of temporary stance where you say, look, I gotta check in with myself. I gotta see where my fuel level is. Am I running on empty? Am I half full? Am I at a full tank? And if you notice that you're running on empty, that might be A moment where it's not so much that you're saying no to people who matter to you or to a job that has a lot of demands or something like that in perpetuity or forever, but you might say, just for the next few days while I'm trying to work my fuel level back up to be where I want to be as a parent, maybe there is a beauty in being able to say no. And then as you start, and this goes back to this kind of experimental mentality we have as cognitive behavioral therapists, once you start saying no to a few things, maybe in setting boundaries that you find are allowing you to be more present in the things that you deeply care about, then we can also ask the question, are there hard and fast boundaries that you want to set up really for the foreseeable future? Is this something where maybe it makes sense to just say, I'm gonna say no to this every time it happens unless I'm absolutely finding myself with my head above water and really feeling like I have the energy for it, which may not be ever until my kids are, I don't know, launched out of the house and completely involved in their own lives. So this is an incredible virtue. And what we're often thinking about with parents who have difficulty with this question about what to say no to is we'll kind of try to bucket. We'll have a discussion where we kind of bucket things in life. We'll say, okay, here are the non negotiables that you absolutely have to do. Like, maybe you don't want to do all of them, but this is like, this is the load that you absolutely must handle in any given week. What are the things you want to be doing more of? And then what are the things that you find are energy draining? And again, we're taking this baby steps kind of approach of saying, like, let's try to cross one or two things off the list and then see what this feels like. Because so much of this work is about taking incremental steps, then saying, how do we make those incremental steps a little bit more habitual, where we can really feel like we're in a rhythm and we can be habits that we take up and maintain. And then how does that then lead to an overall level of wellness? That can sometimes be a growth process. It's kind of like watching hair grow. You're not necessarily going to notice it's gotten much longer in a day or five days or a week, but over the course of three weeks, you might notice it gets a Little bit longer. And over the course of six weeks you might notice a real change. And that's the kind of habit formation that we're searching for, where we can find sustainable ways to support people in changing certain habits to be able to fill their tank and be more present as a parent. Our fourth question for this episode. I get homework from my child's therapist, like practicing routines, but then life gets in the way and I simply forget and feel like I'm failing. How do you handle that feeling when you just don't have the mental bandwidth for more tasks? We hear this from parents whose kids are seeing therapists, parents whose kids have tutors, parents who are having their kids first meeting with their school's counselor about college choices, things like that. And not to mention parents in almost any school district across the country where they're getting 17 emails a week that relate to four different ways to engage with the school district, six different things they need to do for their kids related to that particular week, and a couple other ways they can volunteer at their kids school. There is a lot of homework that gets handed down to involve parents. And at the end of the day, we don't necessarily want parents to feel like they've got to do all the things. However, if we're talking about the mental bandwidth for any tasks, and this goes back to just how we coach on executive functioning in general, we'd ask parents, what's your framework for how you A, keep track of things that you're planning on doing and B, what's your framework for how you prioritize those particular things? Lots of parents might tell us, I have a framework that works to keep track of things. I'm not sure it works. I'm not sure my partner necessarily uses it at the same level that I do. I set up stuff for my kids, but they never look at it. You know, there's a lot of work often to be done where we say, like, how do we help you figure out how you're doing task tracking in a way that might work in a sustainable fashion for you. And particularly if you are co parenting your partner in a way that would help you guys to reduce conversations, headaches and be able to kind of share a little bit more of the psychological load. Once we get past task tracking, we don't want to get in this kind of mindset that just by tracking tasks that means all of them have to be done. You've got limited time, there's gonna be some must do's, there's gonna be some want to do's and there's gonna be some just can't do's or just don't have the time to do. And how do we divide our task list into those kind of categories and say, like, it's gonna be okay. You know what? I'm gonna work on my own anxiety and guilt as a parent by letting go of some of those. I just didn't have time to or I just wasn't able to. And similarly, and I'll go back to this, as a therapist, I want parents to come into session and tell me they didn't have time to do this particular thing. My job as a therapist is to be non judgmental in that moment, to validate and to say, look, you were handling so many things, you were pulled in a million different directions this week. So let me help you think about what is manageable for you and what we can do at home and can apply that can help you to make progress. Cause I don't want to feel like one extra thing in your life or one extra thing that makes you feel guilty or like you should cancel our phone call or our coaching session just because, you know, you feel like you failed at that task this week. My job is to troubleshoot this with you, to help you make those, you know, small steps in parenting help you to feel better or like you're improving your kid's life or that things are getting better for them and not to feel like there's extra unmanageable tasks on a to do list that you already can't handle. So tell us that. Be honest with it. It doesn't make us feel like, you know, or actually, I should say we. Our job is not to make you feel like you're failing, but to work with you on it. Our fifth question, this one's a very honest one where I feel like the parent was kind of emoting right into Instagram or TikTok or LinkedIn or wherever they might have sent us this question or over email. I have no time, just none. I'm out the door at work, back home, making dinner, putting kids to bed, tidying the house, and then repeat. I don't know how to find time for me. What can I do? I feel for this question. I can feel it coming through in the kind of repetitiveness of it, in the way that a parent might feel exhausted, in the way they might feel if they slow down for even one moment. These things will not happen. Their kids might not get the sleep that they need. The house will become a disaster. Work will be at risk. Or something like that. And this is always a moment where there aren't necessarily moments where we as therapists will say, look globally. You can always do this, you can always do that. This is what it is. It's about applying principles, not necessarily taking a one size fits all approach. So to this parent, I'd want to listen for a little while, and I want to understand what that rhythm of life looks like. I'd want to understand whether they're flying solo and doing this, whether it's all on them, whether they have help from family members or a partner or other parents in their community who they're raising kids with together. I'd want to get the whole landscape so I understand just what is contributing to kind of this feeling that, you know, this repetition is the only thing. And it feels like you're just a hamster in a hamster wheel going back and forth. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have that parent take a sidestep. We're gonna do a conversation where we say, look, if you just suddenly had 1 minute, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour, let's just talk about the things that you do to de stress. Let's start with these habits of basic wellness. What do you like to eat? What do you like to drink? What do you like to do to move your body? You know, how do you get sleep? How do you spend your time in the evening? Hopefully in those, you know, stolen moments, perhaps between the kids being in bed and the house being tidied, when you fall asleep, which may only be, you know, three minutes. But what do you do to de stress? What helps to help you to feel like you've taken a little bit of time for yourself or that you can feel a little bit relaxed. And if a parent has no ideas, then we'll often start with just, you know, stuff on the Internet. We'll say, look, let's take a look at all kinds of different activities. De stressing activities. Let's take a look at service activities. I know that sounds crazy for a parent who's already doing so much service, but for some parents, they say, look, caring for others is one of the ways that I de stress. We'll take a look at a parent's faith background. We'll take a look at the kinds of things they connect with to make them feel a deeper sense of connection or spirituality. And as we look at all these things, any parents plan might look a little bit different from another parent's plan in the sense that one parent might say, look, as I look at this, I realize there might be that window on weekends when it isn't so much school and work, when I want to connect a little bit more in my faith community, or I want to do things that get my kids outside a little bit more, say, in the late afternoons or on the weekend, or they might say, I just want to try to figure out how I can make time for a moment in any given week where I just get to light candles, sit in the dark and smell the aromas, or I want to be able to read one book. I don't know how much time it's going to take me to read that book, but that's what I want to steal some moments for. And again, all we're looking for is, in the midst of a busy life, how can we help you to think really broadly about all those things that help you feel grounded, help you to feel a sense of belonging, help you to feel some sense of stress relief, some sense of relaxation, some sense of connection with your partner, with your friends, with your family? And as we look at all those different activities, we're gonna find some solutions where we try to think about how we can perhaps think through the rhythm of a day and steal some moments to begin making that a habit. Okay, our second to last question for this thriving kids podcast. Q and A. I was raised in a house where you didn't take breaks or take it easy. You just kept going until the work was done. Now whenever I try to take care of myself, I find I have to literally shake the voices of my parents out of my head, telling me I'm being lazy. How do we break those generational patterns and give ourselves permission to rest when our upbringing told us the exact opposite? This is a great question looking at not just like I think I feel like the answers I've given in the first five questions in this podcast episode take what's often kind of considered a second or third wave in psychology stance. And second or third wave refers to these kinds of waves of different psychological treatments that have been developed in different decades in the research, where second wave might be considered cognitive behavioral therapy and third wave is more dialectical behavioral therapy and mindfulness approaches and kind of thinking about distress tolerance. All different kinds of techniques that mental health professionals have evolved over the waves of psychology to help our patients and where we're still evolving really, because we're a young science. So when I look at a question like this, you know, so much of those waves is following from what we consider first wave psychology, which was mental health Professionals who really focused on the idea that early life experiences lead to certain very predictable patterns of functioning, ways of thinking, ways of doing things that come from the messaging you got from your parents, early models of caregiving, the ways that things were approved of or disapproved of by your attachment figures. And this is something that's deeply reflective for many parents. There are approaches in mindful and reflective parenting and in groups that have been developed across the country where we say to parents, I want you to take a look at the voices you're getting as a result of your upbringing. And then I want us to look at whether or not that helps you or maybe is less helpful in helping you be the parent that you want to be or in helping to optimize your own mental health and wellness. And so for a parent like this, there may be certain parents who say, look, I love the fact that I had a, you know, sit down when the work is done household, and if the work is never done, then you don't sit down. And that really helps me to feel like a very productive human who's getting stuff done at all times. And if somebody comes into my office and says that I'm not necessarily going to start to deconstruct their psychology, they're saying, I don't feel any subjective distress. My wellness is okay. This is a rule that I live by. This is kind of how I feel like, you know, I confront the world. On the other hand, if a parent comes in and says something like in this question, where they say, look, as much as I might love what my caregivers were able to do, for me, this particular mentality makes it so I never slow down and I just feel exhausted. And I will say, let's work on your internal thought process because for so many parents, those thoughts feel automatic. They feel like a monologue that can't be changed. But over time, we can practice how we talk back to those thoughts that feel so automatic in our head. And we say like, sometimes we get self compassionate. Sometimes it can be like mom or dad, you know, I love you, but at the same time I feel productive enough. And in this moment, I just love to have the picture in my head of you rooting for me taking a long bath right now, or at least just deciding to sit and look outside at nature for a moment or at the snow falling outside the window. I'm thinking of this a lot because we've recently had a lot of winter storms in Northeast and still very cold here. And then we can also take less self compassionate Kinds of things where we might say right inside of our head, if some of us need a little more forceful voice, hey, look, I'm not listening to you right now. It is okay for me to relax. I see other parents do it and I've got to believe that at some level this is gonna help me bring my best self to my kids. So my parents didn't know everything. And in this generation I'm trying to improve upon it a little bit more and look for a little bit more balance. The more we can get someone's self talk toward the support of the kind of behaviors that are going to maximize their wellness, the better we can look upon these kind of generational patterns with some level of compassion and at the same time give ourselves a break and start thinking about how we can talk to ourselves in a way that promotes our own wellness patterns, maybe while taking whatever wisdom our parents have given us and perhaps letting go of certain other pieces that are less helpful to us. Our last question on the Thriving Kids podcast Q and A episode this week, I saw a video on TikTok of a mom who told her kids, come get me in 20 minutes so we can all clean the house together. They didn't bother her for an hour. Any other clever tricks like that or ways I could set actual boundaries with my kids? So my response to this is twofold. It's basically, what a brilliant trick. And also, I'm not sure it's sustainable because look, this trick is based on the idea that you tell your kids, I'm going to go take a break for myself. And the only way that you're going to break the barrier of my break is you're going to come ask me to do an activity I know you absolutely don't want to do. Now, that'll work a few times. But at the end of the day, and I think of this because my wife and I are raising nine and six year old children at the moment, it might work once or twice, but at some point they're going to decide that, you know, as much as cleaning the house together might be the next activity, maybe you're not going to make them do it right away and they've got urgent stuff they want help with homework or they want to figure out if you're going to do an activity with them or there's something else they've spilled and they need to help clean up and they might interrupt that time that you've got. I like to think of it like this. For one reason or another, parents are going to use kind of fun tricks like this, you know, over the course of kids development, if they work for you and they get you the time that you need, and they don't necessarily cause any emotional harm to your kids, you know, good on you. But if we're looking for sustainable strategies, what I want to say to a parent is, what are we modeling for children in this situation? We're not necessarily showing them. And this goes back to the generational wisdom of like the last question. We're not necessarily showing them that we want to model healthy boundaries and let them know that we want to give them license as well if they make the decision to have children in the future, to take breaks for themselves or to fill their cups. What we're really saying is the only way you can fill your cup is if you trick your kids. And so there's no shame in that. But we do want to model for kids, that a lot of the ways that we care for ourselves are perfectly normal. They are perfectly, you know, acceptable. There are things that people need to do that it's okay to take a little bit of alone time and have that be something that helps with your own emotional health. And so the more that we can get someone to the kind of place of being able to say to their kids, look, we could go to this where they take the alone time and then the punishment is that if you disturb me early, you gotta clean the house. Or we can go to things like, listen, I'm going to do something for myself right now. What do you guys want to do for yourselves? There can be like that modeling and then that imitation aspect. We'll say to kids, what do they think they can do that they'd find is relaxing or de stressing or boost their mood, Especially if the parent needs to take some alone time in order to kind of fill their cup? Or it can just be something where you give them kind of a clear direction where you say, like, look, I want you to know it's really important for me. I want to be able to be present for such and such activity later in the day or to be able to be at my best when we do X. So I'm going to be going and doing this particular thing. I don't want to be disturbed. It's not because I don't love you, but it's because I need this time to get a few things done myself. How are you going to amuse yourselves while I'm doing this? That thing gets a lot older or, sorry, a lot easier as your kids get older. There's kind of like three zones. Like toddlers might have a lot of difficulty with that if there's not another caregiver present. And even then, that caregiver might not be a substitute for you. As you get into middle childhood, the kids will get a little bit more independent, but they'll still need you a lot. And as you get into the teenager world, you may wish for the halcyon days when they needed you when they were younger. But at the same time, you can still find great ways to bond with teenagers. And as we've outlined in a number of episodes, like with Dr. Janine Dominguez, Dr. Lisa D', Amore, and others in previous episodes of this podcast, Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in with questions and who listened to this Thriving Kids Podcast Q and A episode. Remember that each week we will, or I should say every other week we feature an episode with a guest talking about an important topic in 21st century parenting. And then every other week I will answer listener submitted questions from all kinds of different forums where we accept questions and you can also send in questions via email. For more tools and support, I encourage you to visit childmind.org resources, home to our Family Resource Center. There you can find expert guidance for supporting children with mental health, behavior or learning challenges alongside our Positive Parenting Thriving Kids Hub, which features videos on helping kids cope with stress and is part of a broader library covering everything from healthy development and self care to navigating major family transitions. Again, thank you for listening and we'll see you next week.