How does Recharging affect Parenting?
How does Recharging affect Parenting?
Taking care of ourselves so that we can take care of others
In this newsletter, we provide you with notes on How Can Parents Find Joy and Energy in the New Year?, an episode of Ask Lisa. The Psychology of Parenting with Dr. Lisa Damour.
Dr. Lisa Damour, an author of two New York Times best-selling books, takes your questions, along with her co-host Reena Ninan, a journalist and mom of two.
Read our notes below.
Topics Covered in this Summary
Why Parents Need Time Out to Recharge
Ways to Recharge Yourself
3 Things to Take Into 2023
Parenting to Go
Why Parents Need Time Out to Recharge
It's common for parents to struggle with the idea of taking time out of their busy days to recharge and focus on themselves. It’s normal that your attention will shift from yourself to your children and put their needs ahead of your own, completely losing sight of what you need to be happy and healthy. This lack of self-care can lead to feeling burned out, which in turn can lead to poor parenting.
Every parent needs time to recharge their parenting battery. We all need time to take care of ourselves so we can better take care of our families.
Ways to Recharge Yourself
Taking small chunks of time for yourself is one of the best ways to keep yourself from feeling trapped as a parent.
Here are some ways to recharge your battery:
Hard Fascination: When you focus your attention on an activity that is highly stimulating.
If you find yourself falling down the rabbit hole, engage in a hard fascination activity to take a mental vacation, to change your mental channel from the thing that was bothering you to something that totally engages your mind and pulls you away from something that is psychologically painful to focus on. So it might be like a book that we get lost in or a movie that we love.
Using hard fascination, you're taking a mental break, and that may make it easier to come back to what needs to be done.
Soft Fascination: When your attention is maintained by an activity that is less stimulating.
If hard fascination is something that consumes all of our mental bandwidth, soft fascination is when we do things that are routine or even boring and require very little cognitive energy, such as folding laundry, washing dishes, or working in the yard. All of that mental power is not being used because the work is not that hard or interesting.
Soft fascination means that you don't have to change or add anything. It's not another self-care practice that we need to add to our days. It is easily workable day-to-day, but it makes a huge difference in terms of equilibrium.
3 Things to Take Into 2023
Another great way to reset is to get moving:
Set a realistic bar for what you're going for. There will be good times and bad times and it’s great to have strategies to balance it out.
Embrace the idea that caring for ourselves is part of how we care for our kids. As parents, we have this feeling that we have to choose between caring for ourselves and caring for our kids but caring for yourself is caring for your kid.
Put fun things on your calendar. Having things to look forward to is really important. They go a long, long way to building joy in our lives.
Dr. Lisa’s Parenting to Go
It is absolutely useful at times to do a little internet shopping when feeling frustrated or to go watch a TV show to get past something that's annoying. We should also appreciate that our kids do this too—that sometimes, when they're feeling frustrated with their homework, they might go watch a couple of YouTube videos. This is not all bad, as long as there’s a limitation. It can be a very, very powerful way to maintain our mental equilibrium.
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Listen to the original episode