Dr. Sarah (00:00):

Parents who are exhausted and disengaged because they are burnt out, are still providing all of the practical care for their kids. But there’s this emotional disconnect, this sort of numbness and this type of parenting on autopilot can unfortunately really affect the dynamics of the parent-child relationship.

(00:21):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(00:59):

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the securely attached podcast. So today is New Year’s Eve. It is a day where so many of us are thinking about how do I take care of myself better? How do I tend to, my needs tend to the needs of my family? And I feel like if we really want to answer that question, we need to understand a little bit of the science of how we take care of ourselves and what are the things that can get in the way. And so I want to talk today about parental burnout, which is not the same thing as stress, right? Parents have stress, but there is something very unique to the picture of burnout that makes it one very chronic, two incredibly difficult to get out of. It can sort of self maintain. And we’ll talk a little bit about what that means and why that’s unique to this problem.

(01:59):

But also there are specific strategies that work. And if we know what we’re dealing with, we have way more room to get creative and do something about it so that we don’t come back every single new year as being like, I want to change how I feel about my role as a parent and feeling like we’re back at square one every single time. So let’s talk a little bit first about what is burnout, why this is not just a New Year’s problem, but it’s a perennial problem for parents who have it and what’s going on in the zeitgeist of parenting right now that might be contributing to it. We’re going to talk about three main areas that I feel contribute to parental burnout. We’re going to talk about why it’s important, why it impacts your mental health as a parent, why it impacts the health of the family system, why it can impact your children’s mental health and physical health.

(03:01):

And then we’re going to talk about what we can do specific strategies for reducing burnout, both on an individual level and on a family systems level. So this is important because parents really are kind of collectively at a pivotal moment of crisis right now. We had the Surgeon General’s report come out this last year saying that parents are reporting a tremendous amount of stress. They have never felt so under supported. Collectively, there’s research that says anywhere between 66 to 93% of working parents or mothers are reporting burnout. It’s becoming so just ubiquitous. So why is this happening right now? So there’s sort of three main influences that I feel like are very important to understand when thinking about parental burnout. One is what I kind of refer to as the rise of the parenting industrial complex. So what does that mean? If you are a parent today, you probably inundated with information about parenting resources, parenting science, parenting rules, child development.

(04:26):

This is great, right? More information is out and available to parents so they can make informed decisions about their parenting. Awesome. But also there’s a downside to this intense cascade of information at all times, which it’s leading to really high pressure that parents feel, and also a lot of perfectionism in parenting. There’s this huge shift collectively in parenting of what the expectations are for parents, what makes someone a good parent? What makes a child have a healthy life? When we were growing up, we weren’t spending our weekends in enrichment activities constantly. Our parents weren’t researching every little minuscule concept around child development. I mean, my parents, I love my parents. My parents were phenomenal. They did not spend every weekend trying to make me Pinterest worthy play prompts. They just were like, see you go play outside. And they didn’t play as active a role in curating my development.

(05:44):

And I would guess that if you reflect on your childhood, you might notice a similar thing. And now though, I think parents are, even if they know it’s not exactly true, they can see all of this messaging and say, I don’t need to do all these things. I know that it’s still so just all, just everywhere, that it’s really hard as a parent to not feel like every single moment of our kids’ lives should be considered right? There should be some sort of high level plan for all of these things. And so parenting has become a verb. It’s become a job that was not quite so crystallized when our parents were raising our generation. And so as the parenting experience has changed, I think there’s a lot more pressure on parents. It’s not all bad. The parenting industrial complex sounds so ominous, but this machine of information is not terribly, it’s not exclusively a bad thing.

(07:00):

This is, I think our interest as parents in understanding this stuff is partly because there’s new access to the information. And that’s in part because there’s so much expanded research and knowledge that we have now as a society about child development and the psychology of parenting. And so some of this research goes back as far as the early sixties when the science of attachment was really beginning to be carefully studied, that in that data, that information was not widely disseminated into the mainstream until much more recently. And the science on neurodevelopment and how significant early parenting relationships are so important on child’s brain development, that’s even newer. That was research was going on more in the nineties. And so when we see parents taking more time to educate themselves and applying that information to their parenting, that is a good thing. But it still can lead to a lot of pressure and even anxiety that there’s so much a parent is supposed to do and so much that they can mess up.

(08:13):

And unfortunately, that is the product I believe of another much more recent phenomenon, which is this mass production and consumption of parenting sound bites that are streaming endlessly on social media. And I think millennial parents are the first generation of parents to really be utterly inundated with parenting content. And while some of it’s good information, there’s still just too much of it and also a lot of the information is not that good, or if I’m being generous, it can oversimplify complex ideas that can then miss or misconstrue critical parts. This constant overthinking our parenting is a massive risk for burnout because one, the amount of output we think we need to do is incredibly high, very high, and it’s not actually that high. We do not have to put that much output to have a solid foundation for our kids’ development. So we’re feeling like there’s a tremendous amount of output that we are responsible for generating in order to be good enough parents, which isn’t true.

(09:28):

But then also there’s just this perception that everyone’s watching our parenting and that every little move we make is being assessed by somebody, which is also not true, but it creates this intense pressure. And when we have this kind of high output, high pressure parenting, we become very vulnerable to burning out. The other thing that comes with that piece is that it creates a very child-centric orientation to parenting, which can create, again, a lot of output, but then the absence of input to ourselves, if I’m focusing 90% of my efforts on parenting my child, I’m left with 10% of my efforts and energy left for maybe myself or other things. That’s not a great balance. So we want to look at output and mitigate over output, but we also want to look at input. And by input, I mean, what am I doing that is supportive of my own wellness, of refueling my energetic resources emotionally, physically, cognitively, all that stuff relationally.

(10:51):

If you have high output and low input, you’re going to get burnout. There’s kind of like physics. So that’s all one big area that increases parental vulnerability to burnout. The second area that I think cannot be, we cannot possibly have a podcast on burnout and not talk about this is that there are systemic challenges that make parenting exceptionally challenging. The expectations as we’ve just discussed for parenting is rising, but the support has dropped. So most families in America have two full-time working parents. Pretty much all parents are familiar with the second shift where you get home from work to take on parenting. And often there’s a third shift where working parents are logging back into work after the kids go to bed to make up for the time spent with their kids. And then of course, we’re all getting up at the crack of dawn the next day, whether it’s a weekday or a weekend, because parenting starts as soon as your wake up.

(11:54):

And this is understandably exhausting, and we can tell parents to take care of themselves, make more time for self-care, and I’m definitely going to talk about ways that parents can be more effective at that because it is important. But we cannot talk about self-care for parents without first acknowledging that there are systemic challenges on a societal level that need to also be addressed. We know that from the research that parents who are experiencing financial stress or limited support from their village or limited access to childcare or limited access to social services, that these parents are way more likely to experience parental burnout, which is not shocking. We need to feel like there is support so that we’re able to do that hard work of parenting. So we talked about how parenting output has increased. We talked about how parenting input has decreased, and we also, there’s these systemic things that maintain that which is problematic, that is all part of this larger constellation of parental burnout and why parents are really vulnerable to that right now.

(13:13):

Now, let’s tack on a third piece. And now this may not be true for all parents who experience burnout, but this is a very common thing among parents who experience burnout. And I think as I explain it, you’re not going to be shocked when a parent has a child with significantly more needs, whether it’s they require more support from a parent to stay regulated than the average child, or they have some type of mental health diagnosis or behavioral developmental challenge. If they just have a really sensitive nervous system and they’re those sensitive explosive kids that just need more co-regulation from their parents to move through the day, that kind of when you have a child that requires more from you as a parent, again, it’s math, you have to do more work as a parent and you become far more vulnerable to burnout. So some kids, and I work with a lot of families of kids like this, some kids really do need a lot from their parents.

(14:36):

Whether that looks like a child with a lot of anxiety, sensory sensitivities, really big emotions, a kid who gets dysregulated really easily and takes a long time to come back down to baseline. These are the kids who struggle regulating their behaviors and their emotions and their impulses. They might have a lot of trouble sleeping or separating or transitioning from one activity to the next. But when you have a child who’s very sensitive like this, your risk of experiencing burnout as a parent is higher. I found a study that was saying that parents whose children had anxiety or A DHD had two to four times higher risk of experiencing parental burnout than parents of kids who didn’t have anxiety or A DHD. We know that from other research that when parents perceive mental health challenge in their child, they report higher levels of burnout and it makes sense, right?

(15:35):

There’s this sort of negative feedback loop that we’re going to talk a little bit more about later, but that’s really common when you have a family system under stress. So if you have a child who is highly sensitive or has a lot of regulation challenges, needs you to really bring your A game parenting at all times, you have to have that a game parenting bandwidth to get out of the burnout loop, but you can’t bring that a game parenting because you are burnt out and then your being burnt out can indirectly and also directly activate your sensitive child making this sort of loop even more self perpetuating. And so this dynamic creates a particularly vulnerable population within a particularly vulnerable population. And also you could have a kid that looks like this at times if you’re parenting a really young child who just doesn’t have the regulation skills, that’s a season of parenting that most parents go through, even if you don’t have a highly sensitive child.

(16:48):

Most two year olds and three-year-olds and four year olds are just highly sensitive because that’s just where they’re at developmentally. So again, these are all things that make parents more at risk for burnout. So why is this so important to understand? Because burnout happens when there’s more output than input when we are giving more than we have to give. So when we engage in highly demanding parenting activities without taking time to refuel ourselves, we are more vulnerable to burning out. So let’s talk a little bit about this output input and check in a little bit because again, you could kind of tick all those three boxes that I was talking about, but I want to talk about the first one for a second because that to me is the lowest hanging fruit. I think it’s really important to look at our parental output and check in. Is this level of parenting that I’m engaging in regularly, what my child needs? Is it based on an attuned appraisal of my child’s needs, or is it possible that I’m projecting onto my child some of my own internalized pressure to be the perfect parent or to get everything right?

(18:05):

I’m actually not saying that you need to add more self-care to balance all of this output out. I’m actually saying, is it possible that you are doing too much, that you are pouring more out of your parental bucket than is necessary? So that’s a question that I want all of us to ask. Am I watching too many reels on parenting? Am I using consumption of parenting content as a way to reduce my stress and finding that actually it is increasing my stress and increasing this internalized sense of pressure? I really think that before we get into the systemic stuff and the family system stuff, we have to first check in on the singular consumption of parenting content front and say, is that contributing to my burnout? Am I internalizing messages or narratives about what I’m supposed to do as a parent that is not based on what my child’s showing me and telling me that they need from me, but that I am imagining?

(19:06):

And can I edit any of that? Because that’s very, very important and an easier place to start. And I understand that for some parents, probably a lot of parents who are here listening right now, if you have a sensitive kid with higher needs from you, it is possible that you are dead on with your appraisal of just how much they need from you. That is a real thing. And that also leads to burnout, and we’re going to talk about that for sure. But even parents of sensitive kids of those tougher more challenging children, it is very likely that at least a part of your burnout is due to engaging with the parenting industrial complex. And so I want you to first just check in on that and figure out what stories you might be telling yourself. What pressures may not be coming from your child but are coming from social media or other places that can be deconstructed a little bit.

(20:07):

We need to also talk about what all of us can take off of our plates, do less of and still be the attuned present parents that our kid really needs us to be, but not to the detriment of our own mental and physical health. We really need a village. We cannot do this alone. And this gets into that systemic issue that I don’t have a exact answer for here, but I do think it’s important to just state like we were not really meant to parent in this sort of solo silo. It’s not really our biology, it’s not our kids’ biology. Our society has created a system where parents are really kind of on their own and that it’s just we’ve moved so far away from this village approach to parenting and it concentrates a tremendous amount of parenting pressure on one or two individuals rather than a larger community. And that is a really big challenge. We do really need to address that. I’m never going to be able to cover all the things that need to change in terms of that in this podcast episode, but I will put a couple episodes in the show notes that talk specifically about ways to address that kind of systemic problems.

(21:31):

I will link those in the show notes. I want to move now to talk exactly about what burnout is. I would say since 20 17, 20 18 is where we see a concentrated effort in the research to isolate what is parenting burnout specifically from other types of burnout. And they’re really able to find that burnout from parenting was predictive specifically of not just somatic complaints, sleep issues, addictive behaviors, mental health vulnerabilities, but also has an impact on child development and on child outcomes. And because parental burnout is so inextricably embedded in a family system, a network of the entire family system as a whole, it has a different impact than work burnout. So the research on parental burnout identified four key dimensions that is predicting of burnout among parents, and one is exhaustion in one’s parental role. And so that really just means that parents are reporting that they just feel run down by their parenting role.

(22:52):

A second dimension was a feeling of being fed up with one’s parental role, or some described it as a loss of pleasure or fulfillment in that parental role. And then they also found that parents who were burnt out reported that they had very high instances of emotionally distancing from their children. So this is really interesting because it’s not physical distancing, right? Parents who are exhausted and disengaged because they are burnt out are still providing all of the practical care for their kids. They’re just emotionally distanced, right? When burnt out, employees check out from work they physically check out. But when parents, there’s no checking out of parenting, you’re still going to show up. But there’s this emotional disconnect. This sort of numbness and this type of parenting on autopilot can unfortunately really affect the dynamics of the parent child relationship, right? Because if you’re showing up in this autopilot way where you’re doing all the work, but you’re not emotionally present and engaging with your kid because you are so burnt out, that can really exacerbate a child’s distress and their own activation, which can really deepen the problem that’s contributing to the parental burnout in the first place.

(24:29):

So that’s where I’m talking about this negative feedback loop, this sort of tricky vicious cycle that can happen when we have parental burnout. One of the hallmark features of parental burnout, this emotional distancing leaves children actively seeking out more emotional connection and frankly, in a probably dysregulated way, which doesn’t look like, Hey, you seem so tired, mom, can I give you a hug? It’s more like I’m going to throw a fit. I’m starting to sense something doesn’t feel right and I don’t have as a child the capacity to name that or even digest that into something useful. I’m just going to feel anxious and I’m going to feel more destabilized. And so I’m going to start pushing on the cracks to see if I can find some stability. And that is so tricky because then parents feel more explosive and more exhausted, and things in the family system continue to unravel more.

(25:39):

And so this is what I’m talking about when I say that parental burnout can create this entrenched problem that self perpetuates it to continue. And again, we’re going to talk about why understanding that is actually the key to interrupting it, going back to the dimensions that they’ve found. The fourth dimension that is unique to parental burnout is this idea of there’s a sense of contrast with one’s previous parental self. Not every single symptom of parental burnout can be explained only by parental burnout. So we want to make sure that we’re looking at this clearly. If you are experiencing burnout, we also want to rule out other things that could be putting pressure on your system that can result in burnout. But I just think that’s an important piece that they found that you need to have sort of found burnout to occur inside of parenting, and that creates a change in the way you see yourself a parent.

(26:45):

And we want to think about not just why burnout is important for us as parents, because it also has, like I was saying before, it has a big impact on our kids. So we know that parental burnout increases the frequency of neglect and also aggression towards children. It can impact their mental health. Studies have found that parents who experience burnout are more likely to insult or criticize their kids. They’re more likely to scream at their kids. They’re even more likely to physically hurt them or engage in punitive parenting practices. And so we know that when we are burnt out, we have less resources to regulate our own responses to our children. And like I was saying earlier, when we have these more dysregulated responses with our kids, we create this dynamic feedback loop because the less bandwidth we have to parent our kids, the more they become dysregulated, draining our bandwidth further, but also requiring much more bandwidth to help co-regulate with them.

(28:03):

So it’s just very, this cyclical self-perpetuating burnout machine. It’s really challenging. And there’s actually specific research that’s being done on something called a network approach. A network approach is a type of research, and they use it on all kinds of things in the mental health space. Instead of looking at cause and effect of a single two single variables, it’s looking at sort of a cluster of symptoms inside of a network. And that understanding, there’s a dynamic interaction between all of these different things. And so they’re interacting with each other. They’re reciprocally reinforcing and influencing one another. And so in thinking about it, kind of like a web, you can’t pull parental burnout out of a family system, right? Parental burnout causes emotional exhaustion causing parents to emotionally distance themselves from their children as a form of self-preservation. And then that distancing really activates the child’s attachment systems to try to get louder, get bigger, reconnect in ways that might be really unskillful, creating more dysregulation in the parent child dynamic perpetuating the sense of exhaustion and needing to then continue to emotionally distance and disengage.

(29:43):

And so it creates this really tricky loop. So how do we break that loop? We need to understand that traditional self-care practices don’t work in this burnout setting. Yes, we do need to have time to ourself. We need to get space to take care of our basic needs. We need to have a village. We need to be able to ask for help. We need to be able to get support. But we also need to look at when we do have space, when we do have five seconds to take a deep breath in the bathroom, whatever it is, are we actually engaging in strategies that fill us up and restore our nervous system regulation? Because I think burnout is in many ways related to nervous system regulation just as much as it’s managing external stressors. So the way I’ll often explain this to parents when I’m working with ’em, I see a lot of parents who are very burnt out. Either they’ve come to me because they’re burnt out or they’ve come to me to help them with their child. And as a result of us working together, it becomes very clear that the parents are experiencing burnout. And if I haven’t said it already, I want to be very explicit. It is not your fault if you have parental burnout, it is not a sign that you did something wrong or that you aren’t parenting, right?

(31:22):

This is a very natural outcome of all of these things that I’m describing that are stacked up against us. When we are really burnt out, it feels like there’s absolutely nothing left to give. So when we have that sense of complete depletion, when we have a moment to turn off, we often feel like we have to turn completely off. The problem is that you get stuck in this all off loop, and so you can’t really, there’s no middle space, but the problem with the all off, even though it’s like you can just completely no longer feel that intense overwhelm, that’s really the only benefit to the all off. It’s not restorative. Most of the times when we go to that all off space, we’re usually doing some type of numbing out, whether it’s psychological, we’re just dissociating or it’s structural. We’re using our phones to just scroll mindlessly as a way of numbing, or we’re engaging in other sort of compulsive behaviors like alcohol or eating or other things that just help us to just numb out the intensity of the burnout feelings.

(32:53):

That’s still output. That’s the hard part, right? That doesn’t a break from the parenting intensity, but it’s not restorative. It doesn’t fill up our buckets. So a metaphor I’ll often use with parents is like a gas tank. We all know, we talk about how we have gas tanks, but we often think of it as one gas tank. And I always encourage parents to think of it as you have at least three, maybe more, but you have an energetic, a physical energy tank, you have a cognitive energy tank, the kind of energy that requires you to think things through, make decisions, plan stuff that use our executive functioning skills. And then we have an emotional energy tank, and we can be depleted on all three of these, but the way that we reduce burnout is to actually fill those tanks back up. And so chances are when you get into this intense high and extreme pendulum swings of being all in, and then all off the behaviors are not filling up your tanks.

(34:09):

And so we need to start thinking about it in terms of not like, oh yeah, of course we got to fill our tanks. We got to take care of ourselves. We got to fill your cup before you fill your child’s, all that. It’s sure true. But the reason why it’s so hard to actually do any of those things is because you actually need to make a personalized plan that works for you and understands what tanks are depleted, why are they depleted? And what refuels my tanks, what fills my physical energy tank? For some people, it’s taking a nap, and for others it’s going for a run. What fills my emotional energy tank? For some, it’s connecting with a friend or going to therapy. For others, it’s like being alone and journaling or going for a walk with my thoughts or meditating. It might look different for different people.

(35:11):

What fills my cognitive energy tank? For some people, I want to read something that’s interesting to me. I want to have engage in a hobby. For others, it’s again, I just want quiet time to think with low stimulation, low sensory overwhelm, and there can be overlap to how we fill these tanks. Some activities may be restorative to multiple tanks, but you’ve got to figure out what fuels your tanks. And then you have to find a way to intentionally create space for that kind of filling behavior. And that could mean that you need to really audit your schedule and figure out where you could be more efficient. It could be that you need more support to create space. You might need a conversation with your parenting partner and see, can you take shifts so that each of you can have something that is truly restorative time for yourself? Maybe it’s getting a babysitter for an hour on the weekend. Maybe it’s having your mother-in-law help you cook dinner one night a week, whatever. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as much as it’s talking about really looking at your unique landscape, like what’s draining your systems and what fills your systems back up.

(36:42):

If you can figure that piece out for yourself, then you can actually construct a self-care plan that does what you need it to do, and then you can reduce the chronic imbalance that is leading to the burnout, right? People look up what, oh, I am burnt out, so what should I do? And they’re like, oh, well, the research says that meditation is good for burnout. It is. I would never dissuade you from meditating. And also if you find that meditating is really frustrating for you, but going for a walk is kind of like a walking meditation for you, then you should be doing that instead. Not just because something told you that this is what you do for burnout. We have to individualize these strategies. We have to really look at our systems. What are our triggers? What are our depleting moments in our day?

(37:36):

And where can I then be really intentional about amplifying? What fills me up effectively seeking support around areas that tend to drain me, including internal pressures I might be putting on myself that don’t need to be there. So that internal pressure, external pressures, we have to relieve those and then have our energy filling activities be things that truly work for our personal nervous system, our personal ways of refueling. And we’re thinking about it in terms of physical energy, cognitive energy, and emotional energy. All of those things need to be included. A few additional concrete strategies that you can use to help rebalance this output input problem. And especially going back to this concept that we talked about earlier where we’re almost like the pressure to parent on total a game is so high. And I think I want to give you guys some strategies for kind of not just checking that.

(38:50):

I want you to check that, but also counterbalancing it. For example, I think we’ve gotten into this weird pattern in modern parenting where we think of, okay, I have all these caregiving activities I have to do, and then I have to entertain and connect with and help my child learn how to play. That’s a hundred percent of your parenting energy that’s constantly supporting your child, which I love to support children, but a lot of the best ways to support children is to give them space to do what they do best and to step in when they don’t have the skills they need us to take care of them. These caregiving, especially with very young kids, they need us to feed them, to change their diaper, to help them get dressed, to give them this sort of physical care. And as kids get older, they still need a lot of this sort of physical care.

(39:54):

They might need us to help them move from one activity to another. They might really need us to support that transition to scaffold them. So we want to be putting our energy into that because that’s where our kids really need us. But then what I see parents doing is when our kids, once we’ve done those things, then we feel like now we need to connect because our kids need that. But kids also do need some disconnection from us. They need us to be able to step back and allow them to go and explore their world and play. They really don’t need us for the play part. So actually, my recommendation is to kind of think about when you are engaging in caregiving moments, whether that’s physically caring for your child or engaging in these more scaffolding skill building pieces of their day, be totally present with them.

(40:50):

Make that also your connection and attention giving and presence and fill up time. If we can make our caregiving activities, also our fill up time for our kids. And then when we, they do not need us to step back and encourage them to go figure out what they want to do, go play, go be, but not to be completely. Now I feel like, oh, I am supposed to be giving them my undivided attention. Now, the undivided attention part should come with the caregiving moments. That’s doubling up. That’s double duty for us because one, they need both of those things from us. They can happen at the same time. And when we then have space to be apart from our children, even if we’re not physically apart from them, but I mean, we are not actively running the whole dynamic, right? We are not coming up with the play.

(41:56):

We are not keeping them engaged in the play. We do want to teach our children skills for playing independently. And I did a whole episode on independent play. That’s very important because I think a lot of people have a misconception about independent play. But in order for it to be independent play, my kid actually has to be in a different room for me, and my kid can’t tolerate that and play, then they can’t do independent play. Independent play could just be I’m sitting right next to my child, but I am enjoying a cup of coffee and they are playing something independent. Play just means the child is generating the action without our help. And that’s enough sometimes to just get a breather for us. But it also, the more we allow that, the more they can build that skill, build that muscle, strengthen that ability, and they can ultimately start to play for longer stretches away from us physically or with us physically, but not needing us to constantly be on.

(43:01):

We can kind of be in our own world doing our own thing. So put your connection time and your presence into the moments where you are caregiving and then give them some space. And another thing that I think is really important to understand when we’re talking about treating burnout is that burnout is a subjective experience reported by parents. So when we talk about that symptom, that one of those four dimensions, for example, is feelings of being fed up with one’s parental role or feeling a loss of pleasure or fulfillment in the role of parenting. This is a subjective experience, but what we know about subjective experiences is that where our attention subjectively lands, that is where sort of our focus goes. So I think it’s Dan Siegel who coined the phrase like, where our attention goes, our energy flows. If we are focusing on the things that do not bring us pleasure or this lack of fulfillment, we are going to put a lot of our energy is going to move into that space.

(44:15):

However, just because we’re noticing this and it’s very primary for us when we’re reporting burnout, it does not mean that there is no joy or no moments of connection in parenting. It’s just that we’re not noticing them. They’re not getting logged in the same way that things that confirm this sense of the absence of pleasure and joy. So what do I mean by that? I’ll give you an example. I work with a lot of parents who experience burnout. And one of the things that I often will look for when they talk to me about, usually they’ll give me the download of the day and tell me all the things that weren’t going well. And if there’s ever a moment in our conversation where they do share something that was a funny moment, or if I notice anything that they say where their affect changes, they laugh or they smile or they sigh, I always zoom in on that and I really ask them to talk more about that moment.

(45:18):

Even if it was super fleeting, their kid did something cute, or there was right before the fight, there was a really cute sweet moment between the siblings or whatever. Those moments still exist even when we’re burnt out. And one of the antidotes, it sounds small, and it sounds so maybe even trivial, but I promise you this is a very, very important thing, is to actively log those moments. If something delightful does happen and you feel a little brief moment of joy in parenting, but you don’t log it and by log it, I mean say out loud to yourself in your head like, ah, that is a moment of joy that felt good or that was adorable.

(46:06):

I am enjoying this albeit brief moment with my kids right now. We want to make sure that we are interrupting that narrative that this is a drag, this is a dredge. Everything sucks. Why is it always so hard? Because there are moments when it’s not, and we need to make sure that we are inputting that information into our blueprint, into our assessment of the whole global picture of what’s going on. So one exercise I actually have parents who are frequently experiencing burnout, I have them do is I have them set a little timer on their phone. It could be a minute, I don’t care. Five minutes is usually where I start people, but it does not matter how long it is. And you just sit and you watch your child in a moment when they’re, you want to do it when they’re kind of in a flow, but watch them play for five minutes, but not just watching them play. I want you to really watch their fingers. It’s like a meditation on your child’s fingers. Watch what they do. Watch how they pick things up. Watch how they manipulate things.

(47:19):

There’s something. Or you could focus on their features like their mouth or their nose, but you want to just kind of zoom in on a very isolated part of their cute little body and you want to just sit and observe them. And this neutral observation can be really, really pleasurable. And I just want parents to practice finding that delight in their child. How do they solve a problem? How do they manipulate an object? How do they look at you when they’ve done something cool? And just seek that moment of acknowledgement from you observing your child, finding delight in your child. Not only do we know that a parent’s ability to find delight in their child is a very big predictor of the attachment security of that relationship, but we also know that is a big reinforcer against burnout. We have to be willing to try to find a little bit of energy for playfulness and connection, even if it’s just very small amounts.

(48:22):

We just want to find micro moments of joy or playfulness, put on a song, make sure you give your kid a hug, smell their hair, whatever. But these micro moments really are important to seek them out and look for them, especially if being playful can feel so impossible because these micro moments can then get expanded and expanded and expanded upon. But it’s really hard to start with a macro fun and playful moment. I would start with the micro fun and playful moments. It’s much more accessible when you’re burnt out, but it still has a lot of value for yourself and for your child.

(49:07):

I also think it’s really important for parents to learn how to say no to all of the obligations and all that stuff, but also no to their kids. If your kids climbing on you and you’re feeling overstimulated by that, it is okay to say, oh, now I don’t feel like having you climb on me. I need a little space. A lot of times we’re burnt out because we don’t know how to get our kids to give us some space. And that chronic imbalance of output, too much output and not enough input is not healthy for us and for our kids. We are separate beings from our children. We have different needs than our children, and it is really okay for us to say, oh, you know what? That doesn’t feel good to me. I don’t like it when you do that. Or, Nope, I don’t want to sit with you and play that game right now.

(50:06):

I will sit right here and read my book while you play because I like to be with you. We can be with our kids and give them love and attention and our presence without doing every single thing that they ask of us. If we constantly give more than we want to, we’re going to feel resentment. We’re going to be more vulnerable to burning out. And then the last thing I will say in terms of concrete strategies is we need to look at our self-talk. We need to look at what we are saying inside our head about our kid, about ourselves in the moment. If we are thinking things, we’re noticing that we speak to ourselves and say things like, I cannot handle this.

(50:54):

The smallest tweak of this is really hard to handle right now, or I am doing the best I can. This is really hard right now. This language that we use that’s constantly running through our brains, it does matter. It does drain us. And so if we are speaking to ourselves in a way that is depleting or having a fixed mindset, we want to think about ways to tweak that language, to have more of a growth mindset, to be a little bit more compassionate, to have more patience, to be able to contextualize, to say, this is hard right now. This feeling eventually does pass. I will get a moment to take a breath soon. I am doing the best I can here my kids doing the best they can here. That is so much more emotionally restorative self-talk than self-talk that’s this is never going to get better.

(52:05):

I cannot handle this. I hate this. Why is this happening? Those are all things that we all say to ourselves. I know because I say them too, but when I catch myself, I want to put a hand on my heart and say, no, no, I got this. This is really hard right now. It’s not going to be hard all the time, but you don’t have to do this alone, right? You can find a parenting support group, you can find a therapist, you can find a friend. The sense of isolation that comes from burnout is very, very toxic and also perpetuating. And so you need to be able to talk about this stuff and know that you are not alone. Additionally, if one of the reasons you’re feeling burnt out after listening to this episode you can put your finger on is that your child is struggling with some stuff, you can get help, right?

(53:06):

We know that when parents are concerned about their child’s mental health, they are significantly more vulnerable to experiencing burnout. And this might be in part because of the anxiety and stress that parents undergo if they’re worried about their child might’ve heard the phrase before, A parent is only as happy as their least happy child. This is fair, right? And this also maybe due in part to the fact that when a kid has a challenge, a mental health challenge or a challenging emotional or behavioral profile, they just require so much from the parent that it can be so truly exhausting. And so getting support for your child so that they are more regulated, they have more supports, they’ve built up their own internal supports for self-regulating, that you aren’t the only person managing your child’s explosivity on your own. That is something that you can get help for. And it can also reduce that input output imbalance because if you can address it and get the supports for your child, then you will likely feel also less burnt out and less alone in that.

(54:30):

So that is what I think is sort of the core most important takeaway. If you take anything away from this episode, it is this individualized approach to managing your input and your output. And if you can rebalance that with a whole lot of self-compassion and a whole lot of patience for yourself and willingness to try and iterate, that’s more likely to readjust the balance of output and input, and then that will have a subsequent impact on reducing burnout. I hope that you have a wonderful New Year. I hope that you find some time to rest, to restore, go find some delight in your child, even for a micro moment. Be kind to yourself and just do some things that truly fill you up in this new year.

(55:37):

If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, I want to hear from you, share your thoughts and your feedback with me by scrolling down to the ratings and review section on your Apple Podcasts app or whatever app you’re listening on. And let me know what you think of this episode or the show in general. Your support means the absolute world to me, and just a simple tap of five stars can make a real impact in how the show gets reached by parents everywhere. So thank you so much for listening, and don’t be a stranger.