As you likely have guessed, it is completely normal and very common to feel some degree of overwhelm as a parent, no matter if you are a brand new dad or someone who is enjoying the trials and tribulations of the teenaged years. However, if we don’t learn how to adjust course in the face of this overwhelm, it will become a more frequent occurrence and lead to burnout.
We need to learn how to cope and transform the overwhelm to not only prevent burnout, but to be present so that we won’t miss out on enjoying the gift of parenting.
Many of us may have started to feel the inklings of burnout when the pandemic first started, and most of us had a spring break that turned into a break that lasted until the fall. We weren’t used to having the kids home with us all the time, and suddenly we became not only parents but also teachers and babysitters. All this while trying to maintain an income and go to work as well!
Parents have always felt stress and anxiety, but in early 2020 we all became worried for the social and mental health of our children (and physical health) – this was the last straw that broke the camel’s back for many of us. We got overwhelmed.
In an article published in Clinical Psychological Science before the pandemic, in 2019, parental burnout was described as:
This condition is characterized by an overwhelming exhaustion related to one’s parental role, an emotional distancing from one’s children, and a sense of parental ineffectiveness.
This article looked at parental surveys over two studies, associating burn out with increased thoughts of escape ideation, as well as neglectful and harmful behavior towards their children.
Another study published after the pandemic lockdowns in the journal Family Process confirmed the following intuitive statement:
Household chaos predicted higher levels of parenting stress, which, in turn, was associated with less effective emotion regulation in children through the mediating role of parental involvement. More stressed parents were less involved in their children’s activities, decreasing children’s effective emotion regulation.
Stress is real, and parenting stress is no exception. As parents, we want to reduce our overwhelm not only for ourselves but for the well-being of our children.
It’s not only new parents that will feel overwhelmed
Parents, including myself, have gone through the years thinking that there tend to be “difficult years” in which raising our children seems particularly difficult. The “Terrible Two’s” give way to the preteens, and yet you will find that many websites will say around age 8 is the most difficul to parent.
A review article that actually looked at the data associated with a sense of parenting self-efficacy (or how successful parents felt they were with raising their children) didn’t actually find any associations with age of the children. For both mothers and fathers, they did find that parenting stress reduced their sense of parenting self-efficacy, underscoring our need to help find ways to deal with stress!
What are some of the signs that you can work on yourself to become more present and prevent parental overwhelm and burnout?
In the medical world, “Burnout Syndrome” is characterized by:
– feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
– increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
– reduced professional efficacy.
While these are technically distinct criteria, you could substitute family for job in the second point, and parenting for professional in the second point and come pretty close to what parents may feel if they are getting close to burnout.
In a research article in Clinical Psychological Science depression and work-related burnout were distinct from parental burnout. They did have common symptoms and consequences such as increased alcohol use, poor sleep, but there were unique consequences to parental burnout such as parental neglect.
So what are are the things we can work on to help with overcoming parental overwhelm?
I have made notes on an interview on the Mulligan Brothers podcast where there was an interview with a zen shaolin monk Shi Heng Yi. Shi Heng Yi runs a European branch of the Shaolin temple. For those of you that didn’t know, the Shaolin temple orginally was a Buddhist monastery, that while it was mostly know for its martial arts development, is fundamentally a Zen monastery (Chan Buddhism, or the Chinese word for Zen).
His interview was not at all on parenting, but I have taken a few points that I have found personally to be profoundly helpful in many aspects of life, and put a parenting spin on them.
What do you do if you feel like you are parenting in the dark? Finding light within darkness, or hope within difficult times.
Quite literally, we are all parenting in the dark. We of course have the experience of growing up in our own childhood, but part of the overwhelm that is felt by burnt out parents is that everything still seems so new; it’s not what we expected. Each problem is new. It is like we are walking around in the dark, hoping for some guidance to act as a light to help us see around.
In the darkness, it is hard to see obstacles, and everything is uncomfortable because it is unfamiliar. In such a situation, we can quite literally do one of two things to help us achieve peace.
The first possibility is that we can search for tools that would be analogous to adding some light to the room, so we can search around. We try to find ways to light up the darkness, so that we can see both obstacles and opportunities, so that things become more familiar to us. This might be joining support groups, and learning from the experiences of others. It might be seeking family counseling, so that we can have a professional shed their educated opinion on our specific family dynamics. It might be discussing unfamiliar issues or problems at school, with the teacher. It is about making the unfamiliar, more familiar with the help of other people’s experience.
The second possibility is to work internally, to give ourselves better skills or help us to “see in the dark”. Master Shi describes in his interview that there are martial arts that recognize that sometimes things move faster than what our eyes can take in, and they train to increase instead tactile sensitivity, as an example. The analogy would be for us as parents to work on ourselves – self care – as an option to help us navigate the unknown aspects of parenting. This might be a meditation practice to help us stabilize our emotions, and to help us become more aware of our own feelings as well as empathetic towards our children. We may not be on familiar ground as we navigate raising our children, but that is expected, and instead of seeking external knowledge (eg validating that what we may be going through is normal by confirming with other parents that they are experiencing the same thing), we might train ourselves to be more comfortable with recognizing that nothing can truly be known 100%.
We need to open our minds, and to learn to recognize when we are limiting our own views. We need to learn to recognize that we are creating our own darkness. As we practice this, Master Shi describes that we open ourselves to new possibilities. I can see how this would apply in parenting as well.
In Zen Monastery training, there are not skills to be given, but instead the aim is to take something away
Master Shi describes a common situation in which people who need help from their busy lives and stress think that they can solve problems by adding skills, by adding resources, by consuming more to satisfy a craving. Instead, there is the recommendation to drop expectations. This has tremendous applicability to parental burnout.
We all know from experience that we feel stressed in any situation, not just parenting, when something does not seem to meet our expectation of what should be occurring and what is right. What if we dropped expectations?
Master Shi Yeng Hi describes this dropping as removing everything that obstructs clear view, whether it be something in the mind, or even a belief system.
The warrior mindset of a monk and how it helps us parent more directly
The recommendation is to incorporate into daily life the idea that “this world has not only been created for you to enjoy only the peaceful aspects, and that everyone is going to feel challenges.” The real question is how are we going to approach these challenges.
In preparing ourselves for these challenges, we have to condition ourselves such that we are not running away from a problem. I am sure that no parent would want to run away from a difficulty they might be experiencing if it involves their child, but we could also interpret this as the mindset to not avoid a problem, and to not wish it didn’t exist, or wish that somehow things were different.
If we wish that things were different, we also imply that we don’t have anything to learn from the problem. This is never true.
When we are faced with any difficulty, we have to be honest with ourselves. If we are prepared for the difficulty, then we know the correct action to take. It may be a difficult situation, but if it is the correct action, then hopefully knowing that reduces the stress associated with it.
However, being honest with ourselves might mean admitting and saying to ourselves that “I am not ready for this” and then, we need to prepare. We might need support and outside guidance, speaking with other parents. We might recognize that it is our emotional reactivity that is the problem, and we might have to work interally on calming our emotional storms.
In general, Master Shi’s recommendations when faced with any difficult situation are to:
- don’t run away
- be honest with yourself
- do, or prepare. don’t blame yourself, if you can’t correctly act right now, step back, prepare yourself, and return
To grow and become stronger, is the same as bringing light into the darkness. We become more open to things that are thrown to us. We didn’t ask for an easy life, we take what comes. If it leaves, we let it pass.