Episode 392 Transcript
Hello, it is Rachel, and welcome to episode 392 of Your Parenting Long Game.
I want to share something about the parents I support in my programs, and my guess is that a lot of this is going to describe you, too.
See, the parents in my programs are doing a lot. They have a lot going on in their lives. They have jobs, they have projects, they’re managing schedules.
They’re trying to remember which child needs sneakers for PE and which one has a dentist appointment and whether anyone actually filled out that form for the field trip.
They’re dealing with homework and sibling arguments and bedtime and children who have big feelings about seemingly very small things.
Most parents I work with are going to bed every single night depleted and exhausted, and then they get up the next day and do it again.
And I’ve been thinking about something lately and it’s going to relate to the parent who’s exhausted at the end of the day.
But what I’ve been thinking about specifically is what happens when our brain perceives a threat.
Traditionally, when we talk about perceiving threats when it comes to parenting, we talk about fear [00:01:00] for our children. We fear when they’re not doing homework, or when they don’t have any friends, or when they’re rude to us, or when they give up when something is hard.
Our brains, in those moments, immediately see those behaviors as threats, and they fast-forward. We think, “If they don’t do their homework, they’re never going to learn responsibility. If they don’t learn responsibility, they’re going to struggle in middle school and high school and college, and they’re not going to be able to keep a job.”
And somehow, I don’t know exactly how this happens, but almost every parenting fear eventually ends with our 37-year-old child living in our basement, unemployed and lonely. That’s where our brains go.
Because yes, one of the biggest threats as parents we experience is something bad is going to happen to my child if I don’t fix this behavior now.
But I think there’s another threat that’s become just as powerful for parents today, and this is where I go back to parents who are depleted and exhausted at the end of the day…because there’s a threat that I think we are all facing these days that we don’t think about as much, and the threat is when our brain senses [00:02:00] that we are at capacity.
Let me get a little bit more specific about what I mean by this. I have a client, I’ll call her Sarah, and she told me recently about something that happened:
It was a regular evening for her. She’d been working all day.
She picked up one child from soccer. She stopped at the grocery store because they were out of milk, and she was trying to get dinner on the table.
Her nine-year-old was supposed to be doing homework. Instead, he was lying on the floor complaining that his homework was stupid.
Her younger child needed help finding something.
At the same time, there was a text coming in from work and the dog was barking.
Sarah could feel herself getting more and more agitated. But here’s what makes this particularly hard: Sarah knows a lot about parenting.
She knew that her son who was on the floor complaining about homework, was probably overwhelmed by having a long day, and he just didn’t want to think about his homework.
She knew that yelling wasn’t going to help. She knew that she was supposed to connect before she corrected. She knew she should probably get curious about what was making his assignment hard. [00:03:00] She knew that he probably needed some help getting started.
And suddenly, all of that knowledge didn’t make her feel better. It made her feel worse because now there was another voice in her head saying, “You should be handling this better. You know what you’re supposed to do. He needs you to be calm. You haven’t spent enough one-on-one time with him lately. You should probably sit down and help him.”
But what Sarah thought next was, “I can’t. I can’t do that.”
She wasn’t thinking, “I don’t care what he’s going through.”
She wasn’t thinking, “I don’t want to be a good parent.”
She was thinking, “I don’t have anything left.”
And I sincerely think it’s hard.
And it’s because she’s a good parent that situations like this create such a threat in our brains. Because if you are a parent who cares a lot about your kids (like Sarah), being at capacity isn’t just about being uncomfortable.
It is uncomfortable, but there’s something else.
We start to make that mean something about us, about what’s going to happen to our kids. We think, “I’m [00:04:00] not giving my children what they need. I’m failing them. I’m damaging our relationship. I’m not the kind of parent I thought I would be or the kind of parent I want to be.”
And now we and Sarah aren’t just dealing with our son’s homework and all the other demands. We’re dealing with the threats of our own limitations.
It’s like if you’re carrying six grocery bags into the house, they’re heavy, but you’ve got them, and then someone walks up and hands you a watermelon.
The watermelon itself isn’t necessarily that heavy. On another day, you could carry a watermelon…. but right now you don’t have the capacity for it.
And here is where we get ourselves into trouble because instead of thinking, “I don’t have a hand for this watermelon right now,” we think, “What’s wrong with me? It’s just a watermelon.”
And now in addition to not doing what we wanted to do, we’re carrying shame and guilt and worry and the belief that we should somehow be able to carry more.
Then, of course, those beliefs actually take up space in our brains [00:05:00] as well, and they exhaust us even more.
Because when Sarah’s brain or our brain thinks, “I cannot handle one more thing,” our nervous system senses danger, and when our brain adds, “And a good parent would be able to handle this,” the threat gets even bigger.
And now Sarah and we have less patience, less flexibility, less problem-solving ability, less ability to tolerate our kids’ behavior.
So if we go back to our kids’ behavior in that moment when we’re filled with threat and guilt and worry and feeling bad, we might start to give into something we normally wouldn’t.
We might snap, and then afterward we might feel terrible about snapping, and then that becomes more evidence that we are not doing enough, and around and around we go.
Being at capacity creates yuck, and judging ourselves for being at capacity creates even more yuck. And then any additional yuck reduces our capacity even further. That is what I call “the [00:06:00] capacity spiral.”
So what do we do about this?
I don’t think the answer is as simple as, “Well, just take things off your plate.”
Now, of course, if there are things you can take off your plate, please do.
Get support, lower unnecessary demands, say no, rest… all of that matters.
But I actually don’t want to give overwhelmed parents another assignment called “make sure you get everything off your plate,” because that’s exactly the problem.
Instead, I want you to practice something different.
Treat capacity as information, not an emergency and not a flaw.
When you notice yourself thinking, “I can’t handle one more thing,” instead of immediately jumping to, “But I should be able to,” try saying, “OK, I’m at capacity right now. What does that mean I can realistically do?”
Not “What would an ideal parent do?” not “What am I supposed to do?” not “What would I do if I had slept eight hours, had no work [00:07:00] deadlines, and had spent the afternoon meditating?”
Instead ask, “What can this present version of me with this amount of capacity do right now?”
So maybe Sarah doesn’t sit beside her son and have a beautiful conversation about why homework feels hard.
Maybe she raises her voice at her son in that moment, and he becomes unhappy…and this is where I think we get caught because when our children get upset, we see another job, something else to fix, something else to respond to, or something else that we failed.
But sometimes the most capacity protective thing we can do is say, “He’s uncomfortable. I’m not going to solve that right now. I need to get through this moment, and I will figure it out when I have a little bit more capacity.”
And here’s some good news. Sometimes doing less for your child is actually better for your child, because children themselves don’t build capacity by having adults eliminate every uncomfortable feeling.
They build capacity by experiencing [00:08:00] manageable discomfort and discovering, “I can get through this.”
You don’t need to endlessly stretch yourself to meet every need, prevent every problem, and respond perfectly to every emotion.
Sometimes your nervous system and their nervous system need to learn the exact same lesson: This feels uncomfortable. I don’t have a lot left right now. And I can still get through this moment.
So here’s something I’d like you to try. The next time you notice yourself thinking, “I don’t have the capacity for this,” don’t immediately argue with yourself. Don’t tell yourself that you should and make yourself feel bad. And don’t immediately start figuring out how to squeeze out another 10%.
Instead, ask yourself two questions.
First: What absolutely needs to happen here?
And second: What am I adding because I believe a good parent should do more?
Maybe your child needs you to hold a limit…but they don’t also need you to help them feel better about the limit.
Maybe they need you to make dinner…but dinner doesn’t have to be [00:09:00] impressive.
Maybe they need you to help them get started on homework…but you don’t necessarily have to help them make that homework feel good.
Maybe they’re disappointed. You don’t have to talk them out of being disappointed.
The goal here isn’t to stop caring.
It’s to stop turning the fact that you have limits, that you’re human, into evidence that something is wrong.
Because capacity is not a measure of how much you love your children. It’s not a measure of whether you’re a good parent.
It’s simply information about what you have available right now.
And when you stop spending precious capacity fighting the fact that you have limits, you may actually have a little more left for the things that matter most.
So when you find yourself carrying six grocery bags and someone hands you a watermelon, remember, you don’t need to become the kind of person who can carry seven things.
Sometimes you can simply say, “I can’t take that on right now.”
You don’t accept the watermelon, and you don’t beat yourself up for it.
Maybe in the future you’ll have the capacity to pick up that watermelon, but right [00:10:00] now you don’t need to.
Recognizing and accepting your current limits actually reduces stress for you and in many instances, it actually helps your child as well.
That is a Leadership Parenting strategy, and that is your parenting long game.
Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you again soon.
FREE RESOURCE: Does your child have a narrow zone of tolerance?
