The Mental Load of Parenting Ep5

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah hart Hunger. I'm a mother of two and soon to be three and a practicing physician. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to episode five, where we'll be talking about the mental load of parenting, all the things we have to think about as parents, and if there are ways to compress some of this load, or share it, or compartmentalize it or even revel in it occasionally. And one thing we want to talk about in these podcasts. I know that I have a very flexible job. Sarah much less so needs to be in the office with her patients, and we really want to make sure that we are representing all voices in the working mother community, so we especially love to hear from people who do need to be in their office, you know, nine to five or eight to six or whatever it is. Monday through Friday, and how you manage making the pieces of your life fit together. We'd like to have some guests on as well, so you can email me El Vanderkam at yahoo dot com. We would love to hear from you about that. You can also reach us on social media, which brings me to the question, Sarah, what social media are you using these days? Like? What are you actually liking in terms of social media? Well? What am I not using? First of all, I quit Facebook, and I think feb I did in about February of twenty sixteen. It was probably a good time to get off. It was a perfect time to get off, but it wasn't totally for those reasons. She'll go on exactly. I was spending a lot of time on this like group thing. It was called Physician Mommy Group. I don't really like the name, sorry, but it's actually a very interesting group. But for some reason it became this like enormous time suck for me. And my husband and I were talking about and he's like, why don't you just quit? I'm like, oh, I can do that. I could, and I decided to do it for a month and kind of see how that felt. I loved the release of just not being available on Facebook and not having to see it and not having to know what anybody else is doing. And I know that's very anti Millennia of me, but it was great to get rid of it. I am still on Instagram, and I really do enjoy it, but I have a much smaller number of people that I follow and like. At least half of them are like celebrities or figures or people that I don't know. Like, it's not necessarily a collection of my middle school, you know, cafeteria tablemates, so yeah, about the people we didn't like in high school. Anyway, it is like still in your life now exactly. It's like do you really need that? I mean, some people do need that or want that, but yeah, well the thing I just got on Instagram pretty recently, which of course is like I'm discovering everything about five years after everyone else. To make of that what you will, But I love Instagram because it's it's like Facebook without the parts I don't like about Facebook. So it's I'm getting to see people's cute baby photos, but not their sort of links bits and crazy screens about X, Y or Z. So I'm happy with that. I like the baby photos, and that's why I sort of stayed on Facebook. Okay, I mean I use I use social media professionally too. You're not on Twitter, are you. I do have a Twitter handle, but I don't think it's been used since like two thousand and nine or something. I don't know, that's about when Twitter launched, so exactly my early adopter who then stopped adopting exactly. Yeah, I'm on Twitter at elvander Cam. I use it pretty frequently. I find it's a good sort of way to keep in touch with people or if I have questions about stuff, or if I'm trying to find sources for things in my journalism work. I find Twitter very helpful. In fact, I feel like all journalists are on Twitter. I mean Twitter maybe ninety percent journalists at this point. But I was like looking to see what's going on in the world that I need to report on, or else, you know, trying to get people to look at my stories or something like that. So yeah, Twitter, Instagram, and I'm Facebook, but not as much as I used to be. I gotta say I sort of dialed back on that. I mean, are you do you set limits for yourself on how much you spend on, say Instagram, I try, I'm really not that great, No, I'm okay. Usually, so my husband and I both use this app called Moment, which I believe is only available on the iPhone currently, which tracks the amount of minutes you spend on the phone, so I you know, when I'm motivated, which is a lot of the time, I really try to get under sixty minutes in the entire day, so that greatly limits my Instagram surfing. There are definitely times when I fall up the wagon, and it's kind of funny, like some people may fall off the wagon with ice cream or you know, alcohol, and I fall off the wagon with Instagram. That you know, it is what it is. Sometimes it's just stress relief. But I do try to limit it. Yeah, what about you? There could be worse things. Yeah, I try to limit it too, And I find it's when I'm really absorbed in a work project. For instance, I'm naturally on social media less. It's only when I'm kind of bored and unmotivated that I wind up on it. And so I think, partly, you know, there may be negative feelings associated with social media, but partly that's because I'm using it. At a time when I would have negative feelings anyway, I guess there may be a correlation issue with that, but you know, we really find ourselves. It's easy to get distracted in this world. And bringing us to our main topic for today, of the mental load of parenting. I think this is one of the things that drives a lot of women crazy, is that we can be distracted from various things easily with all the details and logistical issues of parenting that we need to deal with, and obviously fathers men have these things too, like we want to. We know that particularly a lot of our listeners are in the sort of partnerships where both parties are thinking about a lot of the mental load of parenting. But even if you're only thinking about half of it, it's still a lot, right, Yes, and you know that's one thing we're going to talk about in this episode. It does tend to by default be a bit more than half, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that way. Yeah. Yeah, So when I say mental load of parenting, like, what examples are you thinking? I was thinking about things like dentists visits or you know, forms for school. Yeah, and this is so timely because you know this is going to air in September, but as we're recording it, it's the end of August and my five year old just started kindergarten. And the number of like forms, the number of things, and now that things are sort of half on paper and half online, I feel like it's actually even worse because it's not it's like neither here nor there. It's almost like fill out this paper and sign up for our online account. It's like, wait, shouldn't one be one be exclusive of the Other's just so many loose ends, and the scheduling activities, and the scheduling of the babysitting, and the scheduling of the doctor's appointments and now my ob appointments too, so like that's you know, childcare for the unborn baby. It's like she's already got her own misses. I know she's already messing with my schedule. So no, it's and it's weird. It's like not any one thing takes any mental energy, but when you add it all up, it can feel like a lot. And it's sort of also just it keeps you from thinking about other things. I know that I was having this issue the other day that I was realizing the time I was putting into figuring out the fall activity schedule is not time I'm thinking about how could I promote my next book, for instance. I mean, those are the sort of things one can think of with open blocks of time. I could be thinking of ideas for promoting a book, or I could be thinking about when we should go to karate. And if I'm thinking about when we should go to karate more often than not, well that's less time I'm thinking about book promotion over the long run. That has an effect. And I think that's what a lot of women worry about with it too, that it's meant a big like urgent versus important dichotomy, And like in my field, it's the same thing. I mean, if I have something that's sort of nebulous but still very important, like I have this potential collaborator for research that I met with once, and I have on my list, like I want to come up with a list of potential things that we could basically do together with a certain population of patients. And because of the school, like that just sort of got crowded out by all these like must do, must do, must do checklist type of things. You know, that happens to be this time of year. But if I sort of let that continue to happen, it could kind of happen add infinitum, right, so that I never get to these important things that will further my career, and then I do important things for patients or maybe even for the world because I'm stuck on the minutia. So I think, yeah, I think that's a really important thing to think about and be purposeful about. Be purposeful about, which I mean. One thing which we've both tried to do, I think is to be proactive about scheduling in those important but not urgent things, right, so you can think about the school permission forms kind of at any point, but maybe there's certain times where you are going to carve out for being really focused on your research question or launching your residency program or things like that, and making sure that those are on the schedule, and then you know, the mental load can happen as it will. But if you sort of wait until the time is left over for the important stuff, well it's hard to know when it's going to happen. One thing that I think is really helpful is to control your input. I learned man my Josh, my husband's getting a lot of shout outs on this one, but actually he does a lot of thinking about these sort of like streamlining and time management and you know, per full choosing of how to how to exert yourself or extend yourself. But he recently got rid of the text message notifications on his phone, which was also us I mean like, so literally his phone does not go off when he gets a text. He has to decide when he looks at it because work was so insane that it was like he was getting erupted every literally thirty seconds, so he couldn't do anything. And if you can imagine if you're in with a patient or doing a procedure, like that's not doable. So he's like, oh, I can just turn that off? You can. I want to look at it. And I do something similar, which is like when I'm at work and I'm attacking my work inbox or when I'm attacking and when I say inbox, that means like all the lab results and phone calls I have to make, or perhaps I am doing like deeper thinking or putting together a PowerPoint. It sounds simple, but like turn off your Gmail, turn off your phone, or have your phone on, like do not disturb, so that only like a phone call from specific people can actually get to you. Because if you do set aside that time but then end up allowing it to get polluted, which it abbs absolutely will if you're not very careful about that, then you've kind of defeated the purpose. Definitely, I think you got to do that. But then there's also ways you can tackle the mental load to make it more doable or enjoyable. And one thing you have definitely talked about is figuring out which aspects of the mental load of parenting you like doing and figuring out how you can take on those and maybe share the others with other people in your life, Like what are what are the mental load things that you like to do. I like to do a lot of the planning ahead kind of stuff, the big picture things, the planning of vacations, the looking at what activities. I don't necessarily like to kind of figure out the intricacies of how to drive each kid and you know, how to get the kids from place to place or how to shop for various things. So I tend to outsource a lot more of that. As long as I've communicated the big picture plan to other caregivers, which my husband's a great idea. And I think both of us have talked about making sure that you have these conversations with your partner and any other caregivers you have about what needs to happen and what you do and what they can do too. And both of us read this book called Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu. I think we're saying that right. She she made a good long list of all the things that you know, she thought were on her plate with parenting their young kids because she thought, you know, I'm the overworked martyred mom. My husband isn't doing enough. Humorous thing happened as she made this list. Then she was like noting who did what, and then her parents, her husband came and added to the list, and it was like all the things she didn't even recognize that he was doing, Which was kind of funny because we all have sort of a blind spot about stuff that we either don't see or maybe don't value as much like I think about it. One of the things that has to happen, The kid's bicycles need air and the tires. Okay, that is just a thing that has to happen at some point if they are going to use their bicycles. I have never done it ever. It's just something my husband does. He thinks about it, he makes it happen. If I was making a list of parenting stuff we both do, I would never even think of that if I hadn't forced myself to say, oh, wait, he does the stuff like this, right, or that he tends to do stuff like the dentist. I perhaps I'm not as placing as high a value on dental hygiene as he does. I don't know what it is, but so he tends to do that. And he's you know, arranged the tryouts for the swim team because he likes swim team and he did that as a kid, so we but I gotta say, he's really probably not that thinking about whether our daughter does gymnastics or not. I'm the one who asked her if she wanted to do that and signed her up for So you know, there's things that both of you might want to do, or you maybe not even know that the other party does. Yeah, and you know, we didn't do a list activity together. But I actually don't think it's a terrible I mean, honestly, it's kind of a great idea because you may find things. Number One, if there are things uncovered that both of you hate doing, then that may be a signal that that's something that neither of you need to do, like maybe that's something that can be outsourced. Or you may gain some appreciation for things that you're not doing, like like I love your example, or for example, I do none of the home if it's home improvement related. It's so funny, like I'll have a friend ask me like, oh, do you know a guy who I'm like, No, I don't even know a guy, Like I don't. I don't do that, Like I just don't do that. But I might not have that awareness unless you bring that up. And on the on the flip side, because this is not to say, oh, actually men are men don't need to help out at all. Men already do a ton. No, that's not what we're saying at all. You may uncover in certain situations that women are, you know, is shouldering you know, an unfair load of sort of the less desirable chores, and then that may spark a conversation about about how to redistribute things, whether that be making things more equitable between partners or outsourcing. Yeah, And part of I think making sure that you're not thinking about these things all the time is designating a time to think about it. And so one thing that I've found really helpful is if there's something I need to think about at a certain date, and I think about it at a time other than that date, I put it on my calendar for that date. So, for instance, my five year old daughter has mentioned several things she wants for her birthday. I mean, this has been an ongoing thing. She's been planning this birthday for like six months now, of all the presents she's hoping she's getting. But I'm putting these down on my calendar in late September because I'm not going to think about it until late September when it's getting toward her birthday. She tells me about something in May, I'm not ordering it then, like it just doesn't. It's going to sit in the closet. She'll find it, she'll probably grab it at that point. So those things go on the calendar for September, and then I know to do them then. But to do that, of course, you need a trusted system that you know you will look at and I know we'll look at my calendar, and so therefore that's a good way for me to stop thinking about it. Yeah, and this is similar to what we were talking about in the previous episode where we were talking about offloading, you know, the work tasks or the work concerns that seem to bleed throughout our personal lives. Well, the same thing happens in the other direction. But there's no reason you can't do the same exact thing. And both Lor and I are devotees of calendars and paper planners, but I'm sure there's electronic ways to do this too. You just have to be one hundred percent confident that you're going to look at said system or else it's not going to work. So yeah, that's I really I kind of can't say this enough because it surprises me how many people don't do this. But yet it's really not that I don't know, do they trust but like, come September, they'll think about X, Y or Z, And I certainly don't trust my brain to do that. I know my brain it's not that good. So I'm no me either writing it down because otherwise it's it's going to be through that mental But the other thing to keep in mind with a lot of the mental loads stuff is there's many things that you actually don't have to do either. So we want to make sure that if you are taking on some of these mental load things, it's a conscious choice and you're not buying a story that you absolutely have to do it. I know, we we were talking earlier about a family. I know, my preschool had this thing where some of the other parents thought we'd do a rotating bringing healthy snack. The preschool was already giving them things like gram crackers and goldfish, but they wanted parents to bring in fruit to supplement this. And I put it on my calendar for that week. We made it happen or whatever. And then I talked to another mom who's just like, oh, we just didn't do that. I was like, what can you do that? But of course you can do that. I mean for years they didn't have the fruit. So it's not like this is some you know, always thing that must have you signed up for when you go to that preschool. It's just something that other parents decided to do and then created a schedule. But you know that doesn't mean that everyone opted into it. And so she just told them she couldn't do it. I was like, well, I guess either they came up with something else or the kids had more goldfish that week. I don't know what which I'm everyone survived fine with. So you don't actually have to do a lot of and you certainly don't have to get sucked up into like thinking you have to make pinterest worthy crafts for every occasion, or to necessarily keep up with peers, whether they be working peers, because I see this competition just as badly with other working parents, you know, just wanting to show that they can do everything, or those that do have a bit more time. Perhaps not always, but sometimes if they're at home. I think, you know, stay out of Pinterest, stay off of Facebook, don't do your own thing. I think that's like really important but not necessary, really thought about all the time. And if you decide there is something that needs to happen, don't just keep spinning your wheels about it, like actually take a next step, figure out what the next step is going to be, and then you can decide if that next step was helpful or not. But I think you often want to be working from real world evidence as opposed to should I do this? Should I do this? You know, and then keep thinking about it over and over. I see this a lot with medical issues and also with things like like a big recurrent conversation among the group of parents and with is like, oh my kids not doing X, Y or Z yet, should I have them in X therapy whether it's speech therapy or occupational or whatever. And it seems like people do a lot of spinning their wheels and thinking about it and like getting a bunch of opinions from friends who really don't necessarily know anything, but exactly A lot of times it's like, well, someone who knows the worst case scenario, they're going to tell you everything's fine, and then you could just completely move on and you've probably still saved time or maybe they find something, you know, proactive that needs to be done. But it just does seem like there's a lot of wasted energy on like rumination that doesn't need to be spent. Yeah, so instead of you know, beating yourself up, like is my kid having trouble in math? What should I be doing? I'm not doing anything. Maybe call the teacher, figure out where things stand, you know, ask if he or she has recommendations for what you should do so, consult the professional who knows what they're doing in this case, and then if you're going to hire a tutor, like try one out, you know, go for a test session and see if you think that works, and like just make these concrete steps. And I think that sense of progress can also relieve a lot of that mental strain that distracts. Like it's a lot of the load is centered around should I yes, and not around actual action, not will I, will I do it or not? So yeah, those are those are a lot of ways to cut down on that. Of course, other things coming to our next segment are our Love of the Week. Talked about distractions, and many of those distractions are news media related, so Sarah, your love of the week has to do that. My Love of the Week totally connects to our social media discussion because since I am not getting my news from Facebook, I had to decide how to get it. Now. We haven't put together show notes, but maybe by this episode we will have. And I'd love to link to this piece by Azi's I'm Sorry who I Love. He's the guy who was in the office and now he's done the two seasons of the show Master of None and he actually he made the sort of declaration that he just doesn't read any news anymore, and that he doesn't read the Internet, and he stopped reading email. Now, I certainly have not gone that far, but I do think there's something to be said for that being another form of rumination. This is this is a bit controversial because some people are going to accuse me of kind of sticking my head in the sand. But just because I'm not reading the latest sort of wrestling match headlines, which I'm not necessarily taking action on anyway, doesn't mean I'm not staying informed. So I have found and for my love of the week that I really like just getting my news through paper and specifically these days magazines. We decided to subscribe to The Atlantic since it's monthly and we can digest that, and we felt like it really has some excellent journalism in it and covers a wide variety of topics. So yeah, that is my love of the week, and I feel less fragmented and panicky when I read that as compared to clicking on CNN. That's a great idea. The Atlantic's great. We subscribe to The New Yorker for a while. Unfortunately, because it's weekly. It was just kind of stacking up, which was discouraging in its own right. That here's yet another thing I haven't gotten through all of it. But certainly a monthly magazine is entirely doable. So my love of the week is not related at all to that. We recently celebrated my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary, and as a present to them, I made a photo book of photos from over their fifty years of marriage. It was so fun looking at photos of them as like these twenty one year old newlyweds, they were so cute, and then photos of them like in the seventies with bikinis and long beards. I mean, it was another fun part look at it before I came into their lives and all that. I don't exactly have huge mad scrap booking skills, and so I used Shutterfly and it was awesome. Like I just uploaded the photos. They can create spreads, So if you just have like three photos on one page and two on another, it would suggest a bunch of different spreads that would artfully arrange three photos on one side and two on the other, with the caption in a good place, and so it took all the design work out of it. And I'm sure some of our listeners are like amazing design people, but that is so not me. And so I was so grateful to just be able to use that software and create a photo book that I think turned out really well. So we've had good luck with Shutterfly in the past. I know there's a lot of different photo share and photo book type sites, but we've used that one. One little pro tip I will say for Shutterfly is that they almost always have some sort of promotion going, and in fact, sometimes I believe they set their prices on photo books on the hope that just somebody will not find a coupon code and actually pay full retail price for it. Every time I look for a coupon code online, I wind up saving at least twenty five percent and often as closer to a forty percent, or get free shipping or something. And since I was ordering photo books for my entire extended family, that really did add up. So just google whatever retail copon code, Yeah, coupon code, whatever retailer you're shopping online, Say, you know, Gap coupon code or Shutterfly, Shutterfly coupon code often retail me not is the site that comes up that I find coupon codes through there, and there might not be anything, but there might be two. And if you've already decided you're going to buy something, like, actually getting a coupon code is money in the bank because that was something you would have paid the price for and now you don't have to pay the full price for. So I find that a fun, enjoyable, free gallony there. And just a reminder, this is completely non sponsored. I have to add that because I also used Shutterfly, and I'm like, this is starting to sound like a commercial, but we view it the same thing. And I love the fact that you can just kind of throw everything in an auto layouts and then you can move stuff around if you feel like it. But this is this is another one of those things where I'm like, you know, if I really enjoyed making an artful arrangement, then I would, But if I just really just want a photo book, it's fast and it's pretty done good. I mean, like, I think we'll treasure them forever, whether or not I initially picked the layout or not. I don't think the layer causes the treasuring, So yes, now for a listener question of the week, Sarah, what do we have this this week? Yeah? This came from a medical resident who wrote how do you manage with stress at work? On How do you manage with stress at work? And she wrote, and also work on resilience, which is a big term by the way, in residency in general. The governing body of residencies is really big on wellness and building resiliency in our trainees. And I am all for that as well. How about just cutting the eighty hour work weeks? Would that be another option? Well, eighty hours was the cut. That's that's the It was actually used to be more. And then you know, when I started and it was eighty all the people that we were doing more were like, ugh, you lazy people working only eighty hour? It was you know, anyway that'd be for another episode. Yeah, exactly. But she wrote, I remember reading in your archives you found with working in New Nates difficult. How did you overcome this? So almost it was actually the the New Nates did not bother me. It was the pediatric ICU. That place used to give me hives. Now it doesn't because I'm not I'm there in a different function, you know, in those situations where you are working extremely high hours. And by the way, I cannot speak to the experience of having done that with a child because I actually was not able to conceive during that time, so didn't get to experience that combination. But you know, for those people that are doing that, all I can say is, I would, you know, spend out on as much support as you possibly can, because this is temporary, and my heart goes out to you, because that's got to be a brutal combination. But I would say for me, it's about being very permissive about self care. And I know that's another buzzword these days. It's about, you know, letting myself exercise without feeling guilty about it because that's just something I need to do to function optimally, letting myself get sleep when I need to get sleep, letting myself, you know, take time to read or reflect and really, you know, having time that is just for me. And that's still something that I do, even if it's scheduling things in advance, even if they're very infrequent that are sort of like complete downtime treats. So even if that's like a quarterly massage. So if you're a resident. You do get, you know, one day off per week. Sometimes that's on a weekend, but sometimes it's during a random weekday. So that's a perfect time to schedule in one of those kinds of treats and kind of recognizing that that's, you know, it's going to be necessary to do these things if you're going to make it through such a difficult time. And I'm sure there are other equally trying times and other careers. I'm just speaking to my own experience. That's what I hope that helps, and I hope you're not guilty about it. Don't be guilty. Don't feel guilty about taking care of yourself, because if you burn out, you haven't really helped anyone. I mean, you have to add to your energy levels in order to have the energy necessary either to deal with your patients as this questioner is asking, or as Sarah has to do, or deal with here customers, deal with you know, your colleagues, if your toddlers rational, your toddlers from a calm, rational perspective as opposed to having nothing left to give. So that's that's a great answer. Well, thank you. This has been episode five where we've been talking the mental load of Parenting. Please join us next week. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.