3 Principles to Combat Busy-ness
Parents are busier than ever. Learn to take back your sanity with these suggestions and these great resources on parenting burnout.
Hello Bar-Setters!
This will be a follow-up to Tuesday’s post:
Have We Made it Too Hard For Families to Be Healthy
If you haven’t read that yet, check it out! It is among the more important topics that I’ve covered.
I began that post with a look at the state of overwhelming busy-ness that so many parents deal with today. As I explained:
The number of time commitments, from birthday parties, to evening school programs, to the intensity of youth sports expectations, has only expanded, and parents have less free time than ever to get it all done.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2022 both parents worked in 65% of married couple households with children, up from 53% in 2011. This could be seen as a mark of progress for women, but for many parents it is simply a necessity. To live in good neighborhoods with decent schools, both parents often have to work. Which means that parents have to fit all the responsibilities that are vital to their family’s daily operation—all the errands, chores, appointments, and pickups—into just a few hours outside of work.
Parents often sacrifice their own goals, aspirations, health, and sanity because this is what they think parents are supposed to do. ’m convinced it is not. And I’m not alone.
There have been a few fantastic articles lately that argue against this trend. Today, I’ll highlight a few of those, but first, I want to offer three principles that might help you manage the overwhelm that so many parents feel.
Principle 1: Guard your time
How much of your life is spent rushing between things that you do not want to do? They all seem important, but are they worth never having a family dinner? Are they worth you being so tired that you are never able to be the parent, spouse, and friend that you want to be? Are they worth never getting to play pickleball, learn the guitar, or take your family to a cabin in the woods for a long weekend?
We live in a culture that will convince you that you should put your three-year-old on a soccer team that they have no interest in, and that you need to make a three hour round trip to attend your three-year-old nephew’s soccer game, but that you, who sincerely wants to take a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu class, should forsake that yearning so that you’re able to spectate these three-year-old events. Your genuine interests should always come second to the societal rituals that surround late toddlerhood.
I’m not against supporting your loved ones. Far from it! And I know that parenting is about sacrifice. I just think we’ve fallen very far out of balance.
We sign up five-year-olds to learn every skill under the sun, but most adults haven’t tried anything new in over a decade. Perhaps this culture is a big reason that so many young adults are opting to avoid marriage and kids.
We need to give our kids a vision of adulthood that makes them want to aspire to be an adult—not to dread it.
Remember, there is a cost to every thing that you decide to do. Choosing one path automatically closes others. As Christopher Hitchens said near the end of his life:
“One is always going to regret something; you have to decide in advance what it will be.”
This is your life. It’s the only one you get. This is your only shot to parent this kid. They don’t have to attend every birthday party. They don’t have to be involved in every activity. A little bit is great, of course. But you have to allow yourself not to do everything, because that is what allows you to make time for the things that actually matter!
It is easy to agree to this in theory and then never practice it. Create firm boundaries that free you from the tyranny of busy-ness.
A big part of this is learning to tell people no and to build your tolerance for uncomfortable conversations. I recommend making Sunday a commitment-free day. Keep it as a firm boundary. You don’t have to defend it. But I bet you find people understand and envy it.
I also recommend working to make sure that every kid is in only one extra-curricular activity at a time and that the activities and time commitments are age appropriate. So many aren’t. See the LTAD model to better understand age appropriate sport participation.
Principle 2: Your time is precious, so treat it as such. Don’t be afraid to pay for some things.
As I detailed in my last post, households with two working parents have too much on their plates. I know life can be expensive already (especially if you have kids in pre-school). But you can’t expect yourself to work full time and to do as much cooking, cleaning, and errands as a full time homemaker. Paying for a house-cleaner or healthy meal delivery services like Hello Fresh, Factor, or Daily Harvest might be the best investment you can make. Grocery pickup might save you an hour per week and the headache of walking around the store with kids.
As Ryan Holiday writes in The Daily Dad:
“Take a minute today and calculate what an hour of your time is worth. Think about how much more present you could be for your kids if there were less on your plate. You don’t have to outsource everything… but you don’t have to do everything yourself either.
Get help.
Like health, this is a priority. Cut back elsewhere. Neely and I finally got a house cleaner this year. It’s an absolute game changer.
Principle 3: Experiment with ways to make your life easier.
My wife and get far too much pleasure from gaming our routines. We are always kicking around changes that might optimize our lives. Lately, we’ve had some break throughs.
For the past five years, I’ve started almost every morning by making my kids a smoothie. I’m somewhat militant about this ritual. Even on family vacations, I’ll make sure that our rental home has a blender and that my wife, Neely, adds all the necessary ingredients to our grocery order. I know there is nothing magical about my smoothie, but it gives me a sense of control. In a world where I often feel compelled to let my kids eat foods that I wouldn’t feed them—a world where post-game snacks have been replaced by post-game snack bags and where every school day seems to feature some cupcake worthy event—I can rest assured knowing that my children started their day with berries, bananas, real peanut butter, chia seeds, and a few covert additions like spinach and broccoli.
But this year, we ditched the smoothie except for on Sunday morning. This has made it so much easier and less stressful for Neely to get the kids out the door on time.
On top of that, my wife has started making fun (less nutritious) breakfasts every Saturday. And you know what? It’s a blast. We all love it! And the kids are doing great even without a daily dose of spinach.
As parents, I think it is important to remember that no one thing is make or break. What matters is the cumulative momentum of your parenting and daily model.
I hope those principles help! Now, I’ll move to some brief excerpts from a few great articles on this subject.
A Few Excerpts on Parenting Burnout
The problem is we need a total revamp of our parenting culture that has somehow veered into the danger zone of equating total self-sacrifice with “good” parenting.
Source: Are We Choosing Parenting Burnout?, by Emily Edlynn
Edlynn’s new book, Autonomy-Supportive Parenting, comes out next Tuesday. I’ve had the opportunity to read an early preview and it is wonderful. I’d highly recommend picking it up and subscribing to Edlynn’s substack.
In the above post, Edlynn quotes a fantastic article from the Atlantic called How to Quit Intensive Parenting. I’ll include a quote from that as well:
Rafts of research prove that intensive parenting mainly serves to burn out parents while harming children’s competence and mental health. But the facts are losing. In a 2018 survey, 75 percent of respondents rated various intensive-parenting scenarios as ‘very good’ or ‘excellent,’ and less than 40 percent said the same about scenarios showing a non-intensive approach.
Another great article comes from Melinda Wenner Moyer’s substack, Is My Child the Asshole:
A lot of moms — especially, I think, stay-at-home moms — believe that they should always be tending to their children, and that childcare that’s not absolutely necessary is indulgent. But as Dr. Schonbrun pointed out, this isn’t how raising kids has worked for most of history, and it isn’t how it should work today.
“I actually think more childcare is often better for all parties involved, including the kids,” she explained. “We are wired to alloparent. We're not wired to do it alone.”
Source: The Motherhood Fallacy of Self-Sacrifice
There seems to be a very real problem with mothers feeling judgment for not sacrificing every moment of their lives to their children’s immediate needs. I looked at this before in my post about car line culture, where I highlighted a fascinating study. In it, people were presented with different scenarios and then asked to estimate the amount of danger a child was in:
“Sometimes the subjects were told the child was left unintentionally (for example, the parent was hit by a car). In other instances, they were told the child was left unsupervised so the parent could work, volunteer, relax or meet a lover. The researchers found that the participants’ assessment of the child’s risk of harm varied depending on how morally offensive they found the parent’s reason for leaving (bolding is mine).”
More surprising, still, the researchers found that subjects seemed to believe that children were at a lower risk when fathers left them unattended than when mothers did.
In other words, we are less likely to see anything wrong with a father letting his kids play outside while he works than with a mother who does the same.
As the lead research Dr. Sarneka put it, “It’s not about safety. It’s about enforcing a social norm.”
It seems to always go back to that, doesn’t it my dear Bar-setters? It’s time we change these broken norms.
MUCH more on that to come!
Thank you for reading and sharing!
Carry the fire!
Shane