Parent Overwhelm & the Habit of Doing Too Much

This transcript has been edited for readability

The Habit of Doing Too Much

Today's episode, I'm going to talk about something that I think is maybe one of the leading causes of parent overwhelm in modern parenting, and that is our habit of doing too much and how that plays out over the years and what the sort of impact is. So it's unintentional. You don't mean for it to happen, but it is one of those things that is a bit of a snowball.

Modern Parenting is Busy

Once you realize that it has happened, it's already a giant mess. So, one of the things that's happening in Modern Parenting is that we are extremely busy. We have long days and that leads to us having low patience, not spending a whole lot of time with our kids between before care, school, daycare, and aftercare.

Their days are actually a bit longer than our days because we drop them off and we pick them up. And the reality is trying to move through transitions is quite tricky. So quite often we will do things to get out the door faster to support a transition, getting through the transition. And before you know it, you're a little bit here and you're a little bit there turns into all the time every month, month after month and year after year.

Older Children Are More Resistant to Being Helpful, But Still Doable

And suddenly you have a nine to eleven year old who you're still unpacking their backpack for them, making sure you line up their clothes, making all their food and they're not helping around the house. And you're trying now realizing that you want them to help, but they're nine to eleven years old. So, they are very resistant because they're not used to it. And it's something that they're not interested in doing the older they get. The older a child, the less likely we are to want to participate in family responsibilities because it's not fun.  Whereas when it's younger and we create a habit and we build the habit into our routines, then we're more willing to do it.

Now here's the thing, if you are reading this  right now and you're like, I am in the nine to eleven zone (or beyond), I am totally toast. Not true. You are able to build things into your life at any age and stage. Here's  the thing. It's harder. I'm not going to mislead you. It is harder when your child is older to build habits, routines, change behavior.

Neuroplasticity and Child Development

That's why so much of the work I do is focused on sort of two to six, because in the two to six range, it's so much easier to build social, emotional skills. It's so much easier to build habits. But it's not impossible. Our brains are, elasticy, plasticy, neuroplasticity.

So if you think of your brain as a sort of superhighway, once your highways are well paved the A to B highway is well paved. You know the route, it's the route you use all the time. And suddenly, you find a new route with a new highway. You're going to retrain your brain to take that highway because it wants to take the super well paved, easy direction, the one that you were always using.

If you want to start taking a new route, you have to think about it, and think about it, and think about it until you change the route. Now, depending on where you are in your life trajectory, if you're an adult, that conversation may have to be ongoing for the rest of your life.

I need to react to my feelings differently. I need to react to my feelings differently.

Whereas if you're younger, you can sort of redirect that neural highway and it becomes your new habit. The younger you are, the easier that is, the more flexible your thinking. So this applies to this too.

So if you're listening and you're like, Great. I have a nine to eleven plus year old who I'm trying to get to be more responsible and I haven't been doing these things. Don't worry. You can do it, but you do have to, in the back of your mind, keep reminding yourself, this is going to take me longer, this process of developing these responsibilities and there's going to be a lot more pushback because you have a different relationship and habit.

If your child is younger, this is going to be an easier process. You're going to build it in slowly. You're going to build it as skills.

Children 8+ and Development

So, one of the things that comes up quite a bit in the work that I do is by the time kids are sort of nine to eleven, there's a few different things happening.

One, they're more independent. They're more sort of in their own space, have their own world and those kinds of things.

But when we start to ask them to do tasks like cleaning, like chores, (I don't like the word chores. Actually, I'll talk about that in a bit) but this idea of like putting away laundry and helping in the kitchen and learning how to cook. When we haven't built those skills up and we haven't taken the time to help them throughout the years, there's a bit of a thing that happens that children think they can do things that they can't do, but we think they should be able to do.

Schools and Skill Building 

And that's really frustrating. It's kind of like the idea when you think about school. We don't expect kids to just start reading. We teach them the letters. First, we teach them to put a couple of letters together. We then teach those letters into words. And then we put some words into a sentence and words, those sentences then become paragraphs, right?

We don't immediately say, 'Hey, you're just going to start reading.' We build the skills slowly. Letters, few letters together, making a word, few words together, making a sentence, few sentences together, making a paragraph, and so on. The same is true of building a child's responsibilities. We have to start little and slowly build up so that they master the skills.

Experience, Expertise and Education to Inform Parenting

One of the things that's sort of really interesting about my family dynamic is one of the things I talked about in Episode Three. The importance of getting information that has a solid balance of expertise and experience. The idea that my Masters in Education is only one component of me, and I did that through research, and I did that in a very scholastic, educational way.

And then my expertise is built on my life experiences, working with families and children in different roles and capacities over the years. Another element of my experience is my relationship with my husband. And one of the things that is really interesting about our relationship that really does inform how I help parents learn some of this stuff, if you will, I think like an educator.

So I think about putting letters together to make a word, to make a sentence to make a paragraph... I think about this. My husband, doesn't because he's not an educator. Now we come from totally different worlds my husband and I. I come from a world of privilege and experience and traveling and I never had for want or any of those kinds of things.

One of the things that's very unique about my husband is he grew up in near poverty and in a war torn country. And so his experiences of the world is very different and his understanding or belief system around how we help each other is also culturally different. Now, something interesting about me is I actually grew up in the Middle East.

So I have a lot of insight into the cultural significance of being supportive of family and the importance of, of those types of relationships. Now, one of the things that my husband has said on a reoccurring basis is. Our children need to know how to do things. They need to know how to clean and cook and put things away.

Being the Member of a Family is Being Responsible

They need to be a member of the family to be responsible. And then what I do is I say, okay, great. I agree with you. I think the kids should be helpful. I do believe they need to be responsible. His idea is that that will happen instantaneously. It'll happen like he'll show the kids how to unload the dishwasher once and they should know how to do it. And then my part of the conversation is, 'Hey, that's more like a six to eight week trajectory' to learn this.

Skill Building Takes Time

So here I put my education brain on the parent expectation. And I say, this is going to take more than one showing or two showings or three showings, things like learning skills to unload the dishwasher. will take repetition and time because kids don't want to do it. It's not fun or exciting. Sure. Can they learn faster?

Absolutely. I'm not saying it's going to always take six weeks, but in your mind, when you're thinking about teaching responsibilities and mastering the ability to do those responsibilities, you have to think, 'Hey, this trajectory is a really long time. I'm going to have to show my children more than once or twice to have them do it the way I expect them to do that.'

And when I talk to parents about things like laundry and dishes, they have very specific expectations. And it's actually one of the reasons that partners struggle so much with helping each other, right? There's sort of a real amazing movement happening in the world, um, around Eva Rodsky work of Fair Play.

Change Takes Time

But the interesting part is, certain people have really strong feelings about how laundry should be folded, for example. And one of the things I'm seeing as an educator and sort of analyzing the change, the movements of change is to say, we are expecting people to make changes too quickly. We are expecting them to master skills too fast.

Because we're not making space for learning trajectories. And when you're thinking about learning trajectories, you don't learn how to read in a, in a moment. You don't learn how to write in a moment. You don't learn how to do math in a moment. There's a reason that these things are built over stages and time, right?

The same is true of things like folding laundry and washing dishes a certain way or... Being okay with them, maybe not being washed your way or folded your way, depending. There's some, some different kinds of balance to strike there, but when we're thinking about this skill building process, we have to take into account that those things take time and whether you're a child or a partner, those things are going to take a lot longer than one or two weeks to be done systematically in the most efficient, effective way.

I'm, I'm one of the people who has a very specific way of folding and it's because it fits in the drawer better.  So I have a reason why the folding needs to be that way. So part of knowing that, is teaching that, but I had to be patient in the process and say, 'Hey, this is not going to be perfect. We're going to have to work on it. I'm going to have to refold a bit for a while until everybody gets the idea of how to do it and why it's important.'

Because, I mean, truth be told, folding is not fun, right? So when we're thinking about building these responsibilities, we want to start young with the basics and build up.

Conversations to Support Change 

So think of all of these things as sort of building and that's where my husband and I have regular conversations where we check in and I'm like, if you want that to be a thing, if you want that to be an internalized skill, if you want that to be the go to, I want my children to do this. Have you committed to the movement of showing them for six ish plus weeks? To do it the way you're expecting.

Punishment Versus Skill Building and Realistic Expectations

Learning how to wash dishes. It's not going to take one week or two weeks and some people say to me, well, it used to be fast. Well, yes, it did. Because discipline and corporal punishment. Fear based punishment is highly effective in getting people to do things.

There's a caveat here. I'm not saying it's acceptable that it's okay, it's not. But when you're teaching children skills and you're teaching them through the learning process and not the fear based process, it is going to take you longer. It is going to take you longer. So one of our comparisons we use is to compare it to the fear based system because that's what we lived under. Or a lot of people lived under. They lived under the fear of threats of punishment, hitting, losing things or 'you got to do this or this will happen.' That kind of stuff. So. that's the model most people grew up with. So their expectation of things getting done is based on that model.

Parenting A New Way

But that's not how they're parenting, they're parenting using the model of progression and learning and emotional validation. The steps in this model, the learning trajectories are more like school. They take much longer because they're actually learning the skills. They're not doing things to please adults. They're not doing things because they're afraid of adults. They're learning to do things by mastering skills. So there's two very different things there.

So the model people are using to help rationalize why things are not as fast as they should be. It's because you're not using fear based methods. And when you don't use fear based methods, you're actually teaching. children skills. And when you're actually teaching your children skills, it's like learning to read. It's like learning to do math. It's going to take some time.

So one of the things that sort of my husband and I regularly come back to is this idea. As we add layers to conversations and it was something I built into my preschool, the importance of getting things done because over the years, people have said, I don't know how you do it all.

Children Are Capable When You Take the Time to Teach Them

I don't do it all. But it all has to get done. And how does it all get done? Well, in my preschool, we had to help each other and we're talking about kids as young as 20 months up to four is when they would go off to JK Those children knew how to get undressed, get dressed, clean up everything, do all the things.

It was part of the group dynamic and everyone's responsibility to do things. The younger ones did less than the older ones. And everybody at some point sort of pitched in and we did the things and yeah. As they aged through the stages and whatnot, they did more. So in the beginning, I would help younger kids with their snowsuits and I would slowly build up that snowsuit skill so that by the time they left me headed off to JK, they did it all themselves.

It's Easier to Do it For Them But...

Is it easier to help your child put on their snowsuit? Is it easier to clean up things? On the outside, it is easier, but when you're looking at your day and tallying your overwhelm and your exhaustion, you're actually creating a system where everybody relies on you to do everything.

And you can imagine there's lots of layers to this conversation. Today, I'm just talking about the habit of doing too much for our children. We can also talk about this in terms of technology. We can also talk about this in terms of emotional overload or emotional executive functioning, problem solving for your children, all that kind of stuff.

And I will be talking about those things, but today I'm just focusing on habit building as a process, as a part of making sure that you're not getting in the habit of doing too much for your children, which is exhausting for you and be not giving them essential life skills. And we have a lot of high schoolers out there right now who don't know how to make food, who don't clean up properly, who don't, you know, sort of contribute to their families.

And once you're in teenager brain, that is an almost impossible time to start teaching these things because they are not interested at all. Again, I said it's almost, but we have to think about sort of how brains work in this process. The earlier you start building expectations, the earlier you get involved in that process, the more kids just come to expect it.

You want to enter the teenage years expecting that this is what I do for my family. This is part of my family responsibilities. And we talk about this. We talk about that being an important thing. So one of the things that sort of where I begin with this conversation is I think of them as family responsibility.

Chores Versus Responsibility

So you've heard me say that. And I never called them chores and I don't know if that's just because I have a negative connotation with the word chore. It was never called chores in my house. Chores sounds horrible to me. It just sounds like this really negative thing. Like that's a chore, which means I don't want to do it where family responsibilities, responsibilities are layered with the idea that we're doing things we don't always love to do.

In my job, I have a lot of responsibilities. Some of them I love, and some of them are not my favorite, but I still have to do them. I think that's the difference when  you set it up as a responsibility, you don't have to love that you're doing it. It's something that you need to do to contribute to your family's mental well being, your family's physical well being, the well being of your family unit.

I'm going to give you some examples of things that I know parents are doing for their children at different ages and stages that we need to step back. And for those of you who are like, great, I already knew all this. I know that my kids should be able to do things but I haven't been able to make it happen.

Transitional Needs and Skill Building

So when I work with families and in my transitions workshop, I talk a lot about this. One of the things about transitions and usually responsibilities fall into the transitions category, because it's often a transitional moment. Things like cleaning up things, like getting undressed, unpacking our bags, setting the table, etc.

These are all transitional moments and one of the things that I know about modern life is that we try to rush transitions because we just don't have enough time. And one of the things I encourage people to think of when it comes to responsibilities is think about building time for them.

Just like you schedule gymnastics or swimming or all the things that you schedule in your life, schedule time to make the responsibilities happen. So instead of trying to get kids to get dressed in five minutes, if they can't do it, figure out how much time they actually need to get dressed and then what's your goal?

If your goal is five minutes, you got to start with maybe 20 minutes. And then your goal is to get to the five minutes by doing the skill building process. Don't start with the five minute allotment. That's something that I did all the time in my preschool, regularly adjust transitional needs by how, where they were, where the kids were in their stages of development, what the team looked like, etc.

In terms of who could lead and do and whatever, right. Cleanup, I would assign different amounts of cleanup as kids who had been with me for a long time, cleanup took very short. In the beginning, cleanup did not take very short. And then how do we make this fun by singing games and singing and, you know, doing that kind of stuff.

Breaking Responsibilities Down by Age/Stage

So one of the things that you need to start with is breaking down some responsibilities and saying, okay, where am I making sure that I'm teaching my kids these skills? So from age two to three, we're talking about the stages of dressing. How am I supporting children learning to dress independently so that by three to four they can do it.

So where am I starting with? I put their feet in, they pull up, that kind of thing. I put their head in the shirt,  they put their hands in, etc. So we're building that up. Cleaning up toys is something that any two plus year old can do even a bit younger than that. So the idea of being more specific. So instead of saying we need to clean up, you need to say clean up specific items.

It's time to clean up the dinosaurs. Okay, now that we've cleaned up the dinosaurs, it's time to clean up the trucks. If cleanup is super overwhelming, it's probably because there's too many things. There's too many things available, and that's a, that actually has another impact that I'm going to talk about, and that's the idea of when you have too many choices available for children, they're actually less likely to play independently.

Mess and Toddlers/Preschoolers

Messes! So toddlers and preschoolers and every age make a lot of messes. How are you helping ensure that they're cleaning up their messes? This idea of like they wipe first, you wipe second on the potty. So they are involved in the process from a really early age of understanding that when you make a mess, it's your responsibility to clean it up and then helping support the learning journey of getting better at more effective at cleaning the mess.

So, you know, the two year old's not going to get all the stuff and we're not going to get upset about that, but we're going to see it as a process that by the time they're three, they're not able to really clean up a spill pretty well. Things like sorting cutlery. Sorting is a great activity for two and three year olds to help with so they can start putting away the cutlery.

I used to have a low shelf for the kids, the preschoolers,  so that they could actually put away their plates in the cupboard at their level and they could put away their cups at their level. So, I actually created a space where I would hand them the items and they would go put them away.

And same thing with bringing after lunch or snack. It was everybody's responsibility to come bring their stuff, put it beside the sink and  then I would teach them the layers of stacking and things like that. It's all about systems. Where are we introducing this? So those are some examples of some sort of readiness responsibilities for ages 2 to 3.

Responsibilities for Ages 4/5+

When we're into ages 4 to 5, we're moving into getting dressed all the way with everything.

All the outdoor gear, indoor gear, shoes, the whole nine yards. This is one that I know a lot of parents do for their children and they don't need to. When we come home from daycare or school, they can unpack their backpack and hang it up. They are doing that at school and daycare. So four and five year olds are having to pack their backpacks, it is their responsibility. The teachers aren't doing it for them. So when they come home, they are fully capable of continuing that responsibility. And that's where we bring our lunchbox to the kitchen. For example, we bring our teacher notes to the table. We hang up our backpack up so we have everything all organized at the end of the day. You need to make sure hooks are at kid height so that they can hang up their backpack or if you have a cubby, whatever your system is, right at kid level because what you're doing here is you are saving yourself time in the outset.

Teaching Your Child Skills That Reduce Your Overwhelm

You're going to teach for a couple of weeks and then you're going to realize that you can come home and say to do these things and they will go do them and you'll be able to prepare a snack. Not you're going to do it all for them and then prepare a snack. And suddenly an hour has passed. This is where we maximize teaching kids essential life skills that support us as well.

Another great sort of four to five is starting to set the table and help in the kitchen. The earlier you get kids involved in food preparation, the sooner they will start to understand the importance that food is not magic. It doesn't just appear. It is a part of a process. And so you just start with little things and build up from there.

For laundry, start with things like cloths, kitchen towels, matching socks, underwear, those kinds of things. If you have a dishwasher, unloading parts of the dishwasher. Put the plastics in the plastics drawer, put the cutlery away, if you have plates that are your specific, for your kids, they've got to put those away.

And then starting to teach putting one plate at a time on the counter because they're fragile and then you are going to lift them to the cupboard. This is where you're starting to teach them how to be cautious with plates if you have breakable plates and you don't have kid plates.

There's lots of different ways that you can sort of do this, starting to do some yard stuff, some raking, some picking up and then packing the backpack. So maybe you put the clothes in and you make it all fit because it's a bit like Tetris, but they have to add their water bottle. This kind of thing.

Involving Children in the Process of Learning Responsibilities that Benefit Them

So we're involving them in the process of things that are for them. And then as we head into sort of the six sevens. Now we're talking about full after-school cleanup.Unloading our lunchbox, putting things in the dishwasher or the dish pit or whatever you do, starting to fold more laundry,etc.

Shirts and pants that can be quite complex. You can teach younger kids to do it but it's a little bit challenging. This is where you get more into unloading dishwashers and start maybe some basic loading and getting them to do things like packing the backpack the night before school. 

By Pre-Teen You Can Foster Autonomy and Independence Around Responsibilities

So getting them more actively involved and then every level is inclusive of the previous level and then by 9 to 11, they've now been in the kitchen for a couple of years. They've been helping with food, so now they can start making some simple meals. They can be fully responsible for their snacks and breakfast, for example.

Maybe now they're going to start to learn how to do laundry, take out the garbage, fully load the dishwasher, learn how to wash some basics in the sink, vacuuming, cleaning, changing their bedsheets. You know that's a bit tricky for younger kids, but by 9 to 11, you should be able to start to be able to do your fitted sheets and things like that.

Now you're helping with leaves and snow and meal planning. Maybe a couple of days a week. And then as you move into the middle school zone, this is where kids can be making their own lunches. So my kids are responsible for making their own lunches and family meals. So throughout the early days of the pandemic, my kids are responsible for making food a couple of days a week. With back to school and those kinds of things they'll be responsible for a meal on the weekend, that kind of idea.

Building Responsibilities to Avoid Parent Overwhelm

So the idea here is when we're thinking about responsibilities that are overwhelming you and become a habit that you're constantly doing for your children, the importance of these is actually a long term trajectory.

It's a long term trajectory because. One of our responsibilities is helping our children build their life skills and one of those life skills is being able to prepare food, being able to clean up after yourself, being able to do things independently, understanding that life is not just done for us, that it's how we have to be a part of it.

Parents are exhausted doing all the things that kids are quite capable of and then when they are old enough to not be home, there are some kids who are seriously lacking some essential life skills like these.

Reflecting on the Habit of Doing Too Much

So today was a chat about how are we understanding that skill building is a process? How are we thinking about building that habit so that we don't get in the habit of doing too much and end up layering onto our exhaustion. It's also thinking about, 'hey, as a parent, one of my responsibilities is to support my child with this life skill trajectory and that after age nine, it gets much harder to get kids to do this because it's not a habit for them. They're not interested in doing it. Their brain development is more sort of self focused again and their willingness to help around is not as active where young children actually love being helpful. And when you, you know, frame it as a family responsibility is something that we do from a very young age, they're more apt to do it.'