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Hello and welcome to Thriving Kids, a podcast from the Child Mind Institute that helps you raise emotionally healthy kids. I'm Dr. Dave Anderson, clinical psychologist and your host. Last week I was joined by Dr. Lauren Hughes, a pediatrician, mother of three, and a strong advocate for early childhood health. Today we're talking about the stress that can come with parenting in the early years, the sleep deprivation, the pressure to make the right choices, the comparison traps, and the moments when you wonder if you're doing enough. We'll look at what it means to support your child's health while also protecting your own, and why being a good parent doesn't mean getting everything right. It means staying connected, asking for help when you need it and repairing when things get messy. Let's get into it. So our first question this week, and what I love about this week's questions is we have a number of questions that are framed kind of from our listeners from the perspective of fathers, which I feel very, you know, kind of qualified to answer given that I'm the father of two children and also a psychologist. But also because I will say these questions are a little bit interesting for me to answer because some of them are about fathers perspective on mothers. And that is a topic where I want to be careful in speaking about my own perspective as someone who has not given birth to a child, but has been around when my partner has given birth to a child. So yes, you know, we're gonna walk through these things, you know, kinda going along a cliff's edge here. So here's our first question. What should fathers or non birthing partners understand about the pressure many moms feel around breastfeeding, formula and being a good mother? And this is a great question for us to start off with because if you've not listened to the episode with Dr. Lauren Hughes last week, we actually talked about this a lot and Dr. Hughes had a really fantastic perspective on this because she understands as a pediatrician, a mother herself, the pressure that many moms feel about certain messages about why, you know, you'll hear these phrases like breast is best or things like that, or some pressure to feel like, you know, formula, which she calls science milk, is, you know, for some reason, like something that maybe women are getting some kind of unconscious or conscious pressure to not utilize. And what she goes back to is the health of the mother, the mental health of the mother being more paramount than women. Which particular milk, breast milk or science milk? We are necessarily using the notion of how much pressure one feels and this feeling that also when breastfeeding is going on or formula feeding that, especially with breastfeeding, it's this notion that it's two parties, it is the baby and it's the mother. And when either party is done, that's when it stops. So we want to make it as simple as that. And in particular for fathers or non birthing partners, when we talk about what you should know, I would say that we can reframe this question to kind of what you should think about, which is this is an incredibly challenging experience, no matter what, and rewarding experience, you know, nourishing a child for the birthing parent. And this is one where the easiest thing to hear from is not an expert talking about this, but to ask your partner how they're doing with it. This question indicates that someone is aware there could be pressure and tension. Ask what that means and if your partner's not terribly able to verbalize that or be explicit about it, or maybe it's kind of like, look, I'm so tired, I don't have time to educate you. It's not your job to make it their job to educate you. This is where it's a great idea to go online and google this very phrase, pressure to do this or that, or watch, you know, people who specialize in this space, like Dr. Hughes and their messaging around this. And then what you come back to is you take that knowledge, you don't make it more work for the person who's already in this role. And you say, okay, as I'm walking in the room here, how do I validate how hard this already is, how challenging I know it is? How do I validate the fact that this is something that I want to support them on and I want to support whatever decision is best for their health or their mental health? You know, how much is this something where it's a microcosm of how we will actually address all kinds of situations in parenting where one parent or the other is bearing more of the load in this particular thing. And so the best strategies are to check in with that parent or to validate the fact that we know this might be a difficult situation, and then to kind of seek an understanding of each other's perspective before finding a middle path. This is all more like couple strategies than it is about the particular topic that we're talking about. So our second question for this thriving kids podcast, Q and A. When parenting stress starts affecting my patients mood or relationship, what are signs that I need more support, not just more willpower? And here's something where I'll reference an acronym I've used in previous Q and A podcasts that we use often in the mental health field, which is fidi, F I, D I, frequency, intensity, duration and impairment. When we're looking at someone who's really having difficulty with their mental health, whether it's stress, whether it's depression, whether it's anxiety, whether it's, you know, post traumatic event or something like that, what we're looking at is how frequent this is happening, how intense it is, how long it's been happening, and how much it stops you from being able to function or be or act in ways that you feel like are consistent with your values and character in school, with your friends, with your family, or at work. So that's a really, really key question is to say to somebody like, I don't know that I want to wait until something like this gets to particular threshold where it's like really severe and you're incredibly impaired. I would say to any parent, if you're noticing that there are multiple times a day when your parenting stress is really affecting your mood or your relationship, if you are noticing it's particularly intense at any one moment, if you're noticing that it's been a couple weeks where you've really been struggling and saying, like, God, I just. I can't seem to get relief or feel like I'm able to care for myself. Those are the moments where I would say it's a good idea to talk about more support. And you can start small. It can be with a partner. If you're raising a child with a partner, it can be, you know, with a supportive figure in your community, a friend, a faith leader, you know, someone you just like to talk to, that you might find. You know, sometimes I think about the fact that, you know, especially it could be for adults like the person who works at your local coffee shop. Granted, they may not want to be your support person, anybody you want to seek support from. And then importantly, as professionals, we are here to help if you need more support. My hope is that you might be able to find a professional through telehealth or in person who is, you know, accessible, covered by insurance, and able to kind of provide that support. And what I think most adults find is that therapy can be scary because of the stigma that surrounds it and the feeling that, like, you're worried something is wrong with you or that something is different. And at the end of the day, what most therapists seek to do in the office is to say to somebody, I'm here for you. I'm here to understand things through your eyes. I'm here to understand your experience and I'm here to help you accomplish what goals you want to set. I'm not here to give you a reason to feel bad about yourself or a reason to feel othered or something like that. I'm here to appreciate everybody's neurodiversity and to really kind of help you manage this stress. And this is where and I'll get into this in a couple questions during this podcast Q and A episode. This is where also we can really check in at kind of a comprehensive look at our own wellness. Say there are so many levers of wellness. I don't have to think that it has to be something big that could decrease my parenting stress. It's something that I could do that's small. And we actually have previous podcast episodes on the Thriving Kids podcast about coping with stress, parenting stress, how to kind of fill your cup, and how to kind of engage in self care. And I would also refer you all to those and the show notes. So we'll get to a bit more on that comprehensive wellness checklist and all of the levers that you can utilize for your own wellness when you notice parental stress getting kind of, you know, out of its typical range. And before we do that, let me go to our third question here in our Thriving Kids podcast. Q and A How can fathers or parents help create emotional safety at home, especially after they've yelled, snapped or lost their cool? And I get why this question might have come from a dad because there is some consistency in this notion of kind of like what's consistent with gender roles. And parents that like we do often see, for example, if it's a a mother and father and a couple raising kids, there's a common kind of expectation that perhaps the father might be a bit focused on discipline or on setting boundaries. And maybe, you know, a mother or maternal figure might be focused a little bit more on nurturing or on mindset or thinking in certain moments. That said, we see many families where these roles are distributed amongst parents are different or not according to gender. So with that, I think it makes sense why this person put this in parentheses, say parents. But we say, like, how can parents create emotional safety at home? So this particular question is targeted. It's that if we're talking about emotional safety in general, emotional safety means be emotionally available to your kids first and foremost. It means seek to share in activities with them that they enjoy. It means let them know explicitly that you're open to talk about things and that you will try to keep yourself regulated, even if they bring to you certain stressful things. It means, you know, think about the balance between nurture and structure in your home, and that emotional safety comes from people who lead with nurture and appreciation and letting us know our value to them and who then set boundaries when they're needed based on our conduct or kind of what's going on, but that it says, like, I'm kind of creating this space where you can share with me. Also, make sure kids know how you're facing challenges, that you're dealing with emotions yourself, and normalize the idea of talking about those things so that kids feel like they can share the challenges they're facing and their emotional reactions. But then we get to the targeted portion of this question, which is a parent saying, this is just after I've yelled, snapped, or lost my cool. And first, what we want to say is there's a lot of pressure on parents. There's a lot of pressure that parents will tell us that they feel to be kind of perfect. Like, I grew up in a home where one of my parents was angry and often yelling at me. And I don't want my kids to feel that. And so there's. There's a lot of this guilt associated with this. And what I tell parents is there's a couple things. First is that yelling at your kids from time to time is something that lots of parents do. But I want the yelling to matter. I tell my own kids that, you know, I want. I may yell, and I may yell in situations where their safety is something that I'm worried about. I may yell when they're about to do something that I would consider particularly egregious. And I may yell sometimes when I lose my cool for one reason or another, my voice might get harsh. And, you know, I want them to know that sometimes that's me as well, that my emotions might be getting the best of me in that moment. It doesn't mean that the message that I'm giving is necessarily wrong. A lot of times when I get to that point where I might, you know, snap, lose cool, like something like that. The thing that I'm trying to demonstrate is something I would consider important in my wife and my child rearing of our kids. But I can also understand that, like, the message and the method of messaging might be able to be, you know, separated. And I can say to my own kids afterwards, look, the message still matters. I really was trying to get something across. But also, I don't love how I got it across. And I think a lot of parents have difficulty with that process of repair of saying, I don't love how I got this across because there's this feeling of kind of like, I'm a parent, I have authority. Is it decreasing my authority or making it less likely that my kid listens to me, that I'm saying, you know, I'm sorry for yelling or I'm sorry for the way I treated that situation? And my answer is, whether you're a parent, whether you're a boss, whether you are, you know, someone who is in any sort of position of power, that power exists. Whether you flex it, talk about it, exercise or not, we have to acknowledge that that difference in authority exists. Teachers and students are another good example. It exists if you have to talk about it. If you have to worry about kind of losing it, we may not necessarily be thinking about it in the right way. That authority absolutely exists. People who tend to tend toward these statements of like, well, I need to make sure they know. My answer is we might be going a little bit too far over toward an authoritarian viewpoint here of like, kind of structure matters and everybody's got to kind of listen. There's a basic human decency aspect to this that says, says we appreciate the person that says, look, I can be an imperfect leader, I can be an imperfect authority figure. And at the same time I can utilize my authority to make sure that those people who I might authority over as a parent learn grow. Perhaps, you know, grow in accordance with values and rules that I've set forth. But again, my authority is there, it exists. And so we can think about this as something where that little moment of vulnerability also says to kids. Something that we want to see from people in authority, which is this notion that being an authority, you know, might mean that you're an expert, it might mean you're very experienced, it might mean people entrusted you with a lot of decision making power. It does not mean you're perfect, it doesn't mean you always handle it perfectly, but that you seek that and you repair and you invite perhaps feedback about that and relationships with those around you that can feel emotionally safe. All of these things map onto future relationships and they do not signal weakness. They signal something that we're teaching our kids implicitly about how you have relationships throughout life and what those relationships look like. Now, the next question is a great follow up to this one. It's what does repair look like with a young child when you know you didn't handle a parenting moment well? And this is where you know, the way that I interpret this in extension. Last question, is the way that I was answering repair in the last question. I'm picturing more of a teenager, or I'm picturing maybe a little bit older elementary school, middle school kid who might be able to have a conversation about this after a tough moment, might be able to sit with you again, separate the person, the character from the actions, understand and forgive that a little bit, and have a conversation about what is the kind of kernel of truth in what was being said and not necessarily the method by which it was being said. That's an advanced skill. I mean, I should say, even as I'm picturing an older kid, there are some couples who work on that all the time in saying, like, how do we have an argument? We can separate the way we're arguing from what the argument's about. How do we have an argument about what's actually the argument topic without engaging in other tactics that are perhaps more emotionally driven or impulsive? These are skills for life. But when we're talking about a little kid, there's a little bit less of an ability, on average, to kind of tolerate or ride out a really emotionally stressful situation or really sit with it and talk about it. So that's where repair with a young child might look like being with or playing with. Because if you think about a young kid, sometimes they're engaged in what we call parallel play, where a lot of times with friends, they're kind of a social stage where they're doing something next to somebody else, but that might not be an activity with the other person. It might just be something where they're building something with Legos and the other person is coloring and they're playing together. And then, you know, you might get into, with young kids, this kind of more interactive play style. But it can be a lot easier, perhaps, to do that repair by getting into another activity at the same time. Maybe you're coloring, maybe you're building with Legos. Maybe you're kicking a ball outside. And then you take a moment, either in transition or a moment during that activity to just kind of say, like, hey, by the way, before. Like, I really do think it's important to make sure to respect your sister's body and be safe with your body. But I realize I yelled pretty loudly, and I'm sorry about that. And you can kind of take that moment to give maybe one or two sentences, because that might be as much as a young child can take. And also set the kind of standard that you're going to ask them about their own reaction. So you might say, like, is there anything you wanted to say about that? Or another question might be, did you feel anything when that happened? Or. Or another question might be like, did you have anything you wanted to share about what was going on during that moment? And maybe they share something that's relevant, maybe they don't. But what you're demonstrating to them over and over is that even after a tough moment between people you can be with or sit with or play with, you can apologize and commit yourself to behavior change in the future, you can restate the thing that was really important to you in that conversation. And. And you can ask for their thoughts, feelings, or impressions, because the objective here is to also understand each other. And all of those skills map on to future relationships. Whether the kid meets you, where you're at as a young child or not, they're likely to meet you more as they get older. Or even if they'll meet you, do that in their other relationships and you have, you know, future partners of theirs and future friends who will thank you for what you taught your kid at an early age. Question number five on this Q and A. How can dads or non birthing parents be more useful during sleepless nights when the baby still needs mom or the birthing parent, but everyone is exhausted? So this is a really great question. Now, granted, this is one of those questions that, like, our producer here, Chad, showed me this question before, just before the episode as we're filming. And usually I like to like, you know, just kind of riff on these questions and go for it. But like, this question hits home like, this is something that I talk about or I talked about with my own therapist when our kids were really young, just about my feeling of kind of like, you know, my kids, especially in these early years, and especially because my wife did make the choice to breastfeed. You know, they were so dependent on her for nourishment. Their sleep schedules and her sleep schedule were so dependent on the dance of kind of feeding and sleeping. And it's just kind of this question of like, what can I do? Now, going back to the first question of this episode, if you are that partner, if you are me in this equation, asking that person is the first step. Just ask, like, you don't need me to tell you how to be more useful. I bet you that your partner has a lot of ideas about how you could be more useful in any of those situations. Secondly, you know, whether you're breastfeeding or you're feeding A baby on formula, especially during sleepless nights, there are bottles. Those bottles can be filled. Those bottles can be warmed. And take it from me, in my own personal experience, that can be a vast decrease in the psychological load to know that someone else can feed the baby if they're not yet sleeping through the night and they need to be fed, because we can put both things, mama's milk or science milk, as Dr. Hughes would say, in a bottle and feed the baby. Beyond that, there are ways to work around sleep. What we see so often is that parents are so exhausted that we don't even take two minutes to say, hey, is there anything we can do to kind of work on sleep? I still to this day think that it was so interesting to me when my wife and I were raising actually our second child, or not raising our second child, but after our second child was born, our first child was thankfully mostly sleeping through the night, was three years old at that time, and our first child was only a few months old. And I still remember, like, it never occurred to me that the person who's up, perhaps with our baby could have the other person sleep on the couch. Literally never occurred to us. I don't know what kind of dissociative state we were in in our sleep deprivation, but we had the great fortune of having a bedroom with a little crib that our baby daughter was sleeping in and a couch outside of it. And yet not once during her first year of life did we think one of us could go sleep on the couch and we don't have to both be up at the same time again. It's those things where, like, there is a level of exhaustion at this stage of life that is really, you know, unique. And the more we can maybe take one single moment to ask our partners what might be more helpful, the moments that we can take to say, like, is there a way? Like, is there something we're not thinking of? Can we back up? And then beyond that to just try to hack the equation of, is there a way that I could get any more sleep? You know, that works. What I will also say as well is, and this is something that Dr. Hughes and I talked about the podcast last week, there is a lot of guilt inducing literature on sleep training for parents. And at the end of the day, I will go back to what we discussed in the podcast last week, which is the mental health of parents matters more than what any particular thing is telling you about the timing of sleep training. At some point when you believe your baby is ready to sleep through the Night. And so we really want to be thinking like, okay, how do we help parents at the moment when they most need us for us to be available to help them think about how everyone can get a night's sleep as soon, as soon as they are developmentally ready for it, if that is something that parents need. And so with that, there's kind of like this notion of, like, we want to take out the guilt out of the equation. If parents say, I want to do sleep training, we want to take out the guilt. Where parents think a particular method or other method is going to somehow traumatize their child. There are a number of ways to sleep train. We know that some parents have real difficulty with crying it out, but at the same time crying it out. Sleep training can be science based, can be effective, can take only, you know, a short time, and can then see your child, you know, develop in a perfectly wonderful way socially and emotionally over the course of their development. So we really want parents to be thinking about that. We also don't want parents to get into unsafe situations because the other thing we'll talk about is if we're talking about co sleeping situations, which many parents do, we've got to think about how that co sleeping is set up so that it's safe and so that everyone's mental health is kind of, you know, supported. So there's a lot of variables in that particular situation. But what I'll say is the more we can engage in conversation, try to take space to think about solutions, and try to take the guilt out of the equation. Merely thinking about what each person needs in this equation, the better. Our sixth question on this podcast, Q and A. How can parents stop comparing their child's milestones to other kids or to siblings without ignoring real developmental concerns? So this is a really great question because you see this all the time in terms of, like, you know, people who read what to expect when you're expecting in year one and year two, they expect certain level of development. Sometimes these books go month by month and tell you what to expect in these months. And what I think anybody who is a specialist, an expert in the pediatric space will tell you is that there's kind of like the average of when this particular thing happens. And then there's a lot of noise, a lot of variation. You know, Dr. Hughes last week even talked about how she'll talk to parents about this notion that, like, the brain can only do so much at once in terms of how quickly your child progresses. And for example, if you're talking or walking Fast or ahead of schedule. Maybe there's a conservation of energy here where some other thing might be slightly lagging, but that doesn't mean anything terrible for a kid's developmental milestones. What I always go back to with parents is I say, look, get to know the developmental milestones of this phase. The things that we would assess if you came in with your 0 to 5 child and said, can you assess their development? Get to know what it means about expressive and receptive language, how much the child is saying, how much they understand, get to know fine motor and gross motor, how they're doing with little motor tasks, how they're doing with big motor tasks, like, you know, playing with a ball or walking or, you know, climbing up stairs, things like that. Get to know what it looks like at, you know, certain ages in terms of what we can expect from a social, emotional place or an interaction with others kind of place. And if you put your kid in a preschool class, especially in the early years, our kids were into a preschool setting within, really, I would say about three months out, were the first moments when they were in kind of a daycare setting. You know, if we start looking at those things, there can be these real kind of like differences in terms of where kids are developmentally, even if they're almost exactly the same age. I gave the example, actually, last week on the podcast of a kid who was physically running circles around my son, who was still in a cruising stage, while my son was also incredibly verbal. And so we want to get to know these milestones. We want to remember there's noise and variation in the system. And then the other thing we really want to make sure of is that there are people we can consult with who are experts on this all around. Now, if you put your child in a daycare or preschool setting, you're likely to see a professional who's seen lots of kids in this age range and can also talk with you about what you're thinking about development. One of the things across the country that we see where there might be more access than there are access to services when kids get older. But a lot of early intervention is actually more accessible kind of within school districts and within communities than even some services you might get as a kid gets older. And there's nothing wrong with making use of those services early to get your child assessed and to just kind of get a sense of whether or not anything is wrong. The last thing I'll also say is look at if your pediatrician doesn't have it, but you can also find this kind of online, there are lots of checklists that are given out at say the three, the sixth, the nine month, the year, you know, visit with a pediatrician to say, like, track your child's progress and understand this. Our friends at the Mount Sinai Parenting center, you know, friend of the podcast, Dr. Eliza Pressman, also have resources on their website looking at kind of these developmental milestones. And if you get concerned, you know, it's a great idea to talk to somebody who might be in early intervention and it can give you a sense of where your child might compare. Or if this is just a kind of moment where we want to say, like, look, kids progress at different stages. Your kids are only six months old. Let's give it until month nine because a lot of kids develop in that zone and, and it may not be that exact month or that exact time. The more that we can try to decrease a little bit of that intrusive rumination for parents, the better. Our seventh, our second to last question on this thriving kids podcast, Q and A. How can couples stay connected and avoid turning on each other during the first few years of parenting when sleep, feeding, work and stress are all piling up? This is another thing where I'm invoke Chad twice in this conversation because Chad just laughed. Chad and I are both raising kids with our partners, our wives, our co parents. And the reason why you laugh is if you think that you can get through the first few years without turning on each other at certain moments, like having those moments, like I'm married to a psychologist. I tell people like, we are trained in this stuff. We both served on an infant mental health service while working out at ucla. You know, back in the day, early in our careers, we, we thought we were prepared for the challenges of that 0 to 3 age range. We had all the information. We were armed with it. You're still parenting on instinct. No matter how much of an expert you are, you're still parenting based on your attachment style, how your parents parented instinct to some degree. And what I always tell people is that being married to a psychologist, being a psychologist myself, I think just makes me a lot better on the rebound. We are the Dennis Rodman, which is kind of interesting reference for this, but Dennis Rodman of rebounds as parenting, where we can sit there and take with our expertise a moment and say like, okay, let's take a look at what we just did and let's maybe think about resetting or maybe think about what our intent was here or maybe take it down a notch temperature wise and Emotion wise, that kind of stuff. But you still have those moments. So first I want to make room for the idea that like, you know, arguing is normal, like that's going to happen in the midst of the stress of the first few years. What I would say is that frequently what we're talking with parents about is we're saying like, okay, if we're looking at. And this is where I will send many of our listeners to like, read about, you know, certain research that you might find on couples. Like, you know, Gottman, for example, is a great researcher who. And a great kind of, you know, couples therapist and pioneer in couples work, who gives couples many different things that are operationalized, that are kind of evidence based scientific concepts that we can look at and say if we are focusing on some of these things in couples. Like for example, if you Google the four horsemen or love maps or certain things around bids and turning in Gottman's research, where you can look at all these different things, you can break down and how a couple communicates, how they know each other's minds, how they express themselves to each other, and whether or not they're expressing themselves with what he calls the four horsemen, which are, you know, four things that are predictive of a couple growing further apartments, whether that couple notices when the other person makes a bid for connection or a bid for, you know, shared collaboration. And how we kind of turn toward that particular bid instead of ignoring it or turning away. Those things can be massively predictive of whether or not a couple develops kind of the machinery to, you know, not necessarily take a large amount of time, because no parents of young children really have anytime, but how a couple takes that time to say, like, all right, can we take a step back and can we take a look at some of these issues and try to address them in a way that doesn't criticize, in a way that doesn't involve a summary of all the history and wrongs that are done to us in a way that is kind of future focused, in a way that frames the problem in a sort of somewhat detached way, in a way that involves us generating solutions that we could try to get and that focuses on the idea that, like, we are actually a team and the kids are the team that we're working for. Not so much that we are against each other in any particular way, you know, as much as we can kind of remind parents of that. And I tell people that, you know, when our kids were particularly young, and our kids are in late elementary and middle, elementary now, but when our Kids were particularly young. A lot of our dates, if we had time for a date once every three, three, four months, maybe when someone would give us a dinner out were logistical. I mean, like, if we were talking about the best way that we could reduce our stress, it wasn't necessarily going and seeing a movie together. It was sitting down. Yeah, we might have some food, but, like, let's figure out how to make it. So when we go back to the house, we've solved a couple intractable issues that have led to significant conflict before. Maybe we start talking about world events, the latest Real Housewives season or our favorite reality show, or the latest gossip amongst a few of our friends or something like that. But it's that kind of priority setting where you say, look, with the amount of time we've got, let's ask that very question of ourselves. How do we stay connected? How do we reduce some of our conflict points? And how do we kind of like, at least do our reading off book or when one of us is up with a kid or, you know, when we're on the train or something like that? That informs concepts we can use to stay connected as a couple. So with that, our last question of the Thriving Kids Podcast Q and A episode. And this goes back to an answer that I previewed before and I promised you I'd come back to. What are a few realistic wellness habits for parents who don't have much time, money, or energy, but know they need to take better care of themselves? So this is one of the things we talked about in a previous issue or sorry, previous episode of the Thriving Kids Podcast where we talk about parents filling their cup. And this notion, like parent wellness requires time, money, or energy because it's a big thing where, like, parents will say, like, I don't have time. Like, I don't have the money to go to a spa. I don't have the money to take a day off. Like, I don't have that ability to take that much time. And that seems indulgent. And what parent does have that? And our answer is yes, that is one very hyper. Hyperbolic, like, kind of way of thinking about wellness. What I will go through with almost anybody who comes into my office is I'll say, like, look, let me make a list on the whiteboard of my office of the areas that we as therapists think about as kind of the levers of, you know, wellness. So we'll start and we'll say, let's talk about your sleep a little bit. Let's talk about your diet. How you're feeding yourself. Let's talk about how hydrated you are. Let's talk about how much you're moving your body. Start there. Then I'll say, let's get into activities and hobbies you once had. You know, let's just talk about those things, things you were passionate about, things you like doing or activities, hobbies, or talents you wanted to cultivate at one point. You know, any number of those things. Let's talk about how you're feeling about yourself, your confidence, your stress, your view of yourself as parent, as any other role that you play in life. Let's talk about your emotions in general as you go throughout the day. What's your level of emotionality, like, what are some of the dominant ones you're thinking about? Let's talk about your key relationships. Let's talk about a partner. Let's talk about your friends. Let's talk about your relationship with your kid. Let's talk about a relationship with a boss. Let's talk about a relationship with any other community figure. Let's just kind of map that out. Like, what are your relationships within family? You know, let's say it's an aunt, a cousin, a grandma, you know, blessed if they are still alive and in your life. You know, let's talk about what those relationships look like. Let's talk about your social sphere, you know, how you're getting any contact with kind of friends. Let's talk about the people that you work with, your co workers. Let's talk about anybody else in your community, whether it's your religious community or whether it's a community that you share a hobby with or anything else. Let's kind of map that. Let's take a look at other kind of levers of wellness in the modern age. Let's take a look at your screens and your screen use. Obviously, we live in the digital age. You might need to use screens for email, you might need to use them for text and for communication. You might need to use them for information, sometimes for entertainment or relaxation, sometimes for social connection. And if we're getting to that point where we ask those questions of teenagers as well, where we're saying, like, are you using the screen for information, social connection or entertainment? Is it getting in the way of anything? Is it getting in the way of your sleep? In particular, biggest research result for adults and for teens, is it getting in the way of, you know, actually connecting in real life socially? Is it getting in the way of spending time together as a family? We'll kind of take a look at that particular lever. Then we might take a look as well at family time as well. We might take a look at the rhythm and the structure of schedules during the week and on the weekends. Now, as I list all these things, what I hope you realize is, even as I list them for myself, at least three raise flags in any given moment, where we lead people through a look at all the different factors that both reduce what they might be struggling with in their mental health and also promote wellness itself. Anytime we look at those things, there are usually two or three things where we can say, okay, now that we've talked about this, what are very small changes that could have a much larger butterfly effect on your wellness? What is one small thing you can commit to that perhaps before our next session or by a deadline you'd set with someone in your life who can keep you accountable, whether it's a partner, a friend, or heck, maybe you're a teenager and maybe you guys are doing goals together. But whatever it is, it's this notion of you go through that kind of survey, you really check in with yourself, then you focus in on a couple priorities, a couple areas, and then you say to yourself, what small steps I can take. How do I set up a plan that really gets kind of specific and focuses on kind of what time I might be able to do this and how I'm gonna prepare and make sure I'm ready to do this? Those kind of things that take a little bit of time, you know, for my own wellness, Whether that's a walk, whether that's a difference in hydration, whether that's a small change to diet, whether that's reaching out to a friend, whether that's a change in the way you use screens, whether that's a change in the way you want to handle family dinners or a way you want to talk to your partner. There's so many things, how can I do that one little thing, set a goal for that, and then hold myself accountable to at least assess in a self compassionate way how well I've been able to do that? I'll be honest, right now, as we're filming this podcast, I. I set a goal for my own wellness with my therapist two weeks ago and I just failed. I was in a state where I thought I was committed and I just, I didn't make the incremental changes that I really promised I would make, even in this kind of wellness survey. So even again, and I've emphasized this twice during this Q and A, you can know all the things and it still is difficult to act on all the things, so give yourself that compassion and then say, all right, but there's no reason to beat myself up. I can just start from square one and I can do what I can incrementally over time to improve my wellness. And if you're looking for more pointers on that, we have so many resources on childmind.org as part of our positive parenting Thriving Kids resources available free of charge on our website, in other podcast episodes. And even if you look at the list of guests we have up until this point, we're on somewhere around episode 48 or 49. Many of the very guests we've had are also in this space, on Instagram, on YouTube, online, in places you can find with books they've published some of the books behind me on our shelf with our Lefoufou's and all that kind of stuff where they're giving you even more recommendations about how you can approach this with that. For more tools and resources, I encourage you to consult show notes on every episode of the Thriving Kids podcast to visit childmind.org resources home to our entire Family Resource center where you can find practical advice and tips for parental self care as well as ways to avoid as much as you can passing on stress or other things to your kids because they've probably got their own that you're going to be helping them manage and supporting them as much as you can. So thank you once again for tuning in and I'll speak with you next week.