Is connected parenting accidentally leading moms to burnout?

I think a lot of us have been doing something exhausting in the name of good parenting, including myself. Today, I'm showing you the big shift that stops connection from turning into exhausting, all-day emotional labor.

You’ll Learn:

• What intensive parenting is (and why it’s not required for connection)
• My thoughts on the “Beta Mom” movement
• Why you don’t have to solve every feeling
• The most important gift you can give your kid

The exhaustion that you’re feeling doesn’t mean that you’re not doing a good job. It might just be a sign that you’re doing more emotional labor that is actually required.

Read the full show notes here.

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Related Episodes:

• Episode 82: Simplify Your Life
• Season 2, Episode 16: The Connection Tool

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Connect With Darlynn:

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• Rate and review the podcast on Itunes

Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlynn Childress.

And today I want to talk about burnout, but specifically

I want to talk about how gentle parenting, connected parenting,

the parenting model that I teach on this podcast, may be

accidentally leading to mom burnout. So I want to start

by talking about a specific type of burnout.

It's the, the type of tired that you feel, not

from a day where you've been like running around with your kids and, you know,

just really busy and there's been a lot going on. That kind of

tired is typical mom tired, but there's another type of tired

that's an emotional exhaustion. And a lot of times

that happens when you have spent your day with a kid who has a lot

of emotional volatility and you've done, quote, a good job

with them. You have, you know, been narrating their feelings,

naming their emotions, getting down on the floor, validating, reflecting

back, checking in, making sure everyone felt seen and heard and

understood. And then when bedtime comes around, you're completely wiped out. You have

no emotional energy for yourself, for your partner, for anything

at all. You were just, cuz you were on the entire time.

So if that's familiar to you, this episode is for you because I think

a lot of us have been doing something exhausting in the name

of good parenting, including myself. And I want to talk about it honestly

today. I want to talk about how burned out we are from

the parenting practices that I teach on this podcast. And I want to give you

a better approach and a better way to view

your children's emotions so you don't have to do so much emotional

labor. Because I know you're tired. I know you're burned out.

And I've seen it even in Instagram and TikTok

trends, and even in the Wall Street Journal. There's this beta

mom movement. It's like the opposite of the alpha mom, right?

The tiger mom. Moms are saying, I'm burned out. I don't want to

hyper-manage and hyper-control and hyper-engineer

my child's childhood because I don't think it's healthy.

And I'm telling you it's not. And also And you're

tired, right? And so there's this pressure in the past

that women have been told that they need to optimize every single

part of family life. And there's a movement against that

pressure, right? We're burned out and you're probably

burned out yourself, but you also wanna do right by your kids and

you're just not quite sure what does that even mean and how are you supposed

to do that? That's something I wanna talk about today. So

here's what I keep thinking about, like a lot of the burnout conversations,

They focus on logistics, right? Scheduling

activities, the mental load of running a household. And that's a really

important part of parenting. And I know for me personally, we made choices

to not have our kids in club sports, to only have one sport at a

time, to not do too much extracurriculars and not

worry about like whether our kids were gonna do well getting into college and things

like that. We did not hyperfocus on academics. We did not

hyperfocus on social engineering. Or enrichment. We

hyper-focused on emotional maturity and emotional health in my

family. Uh, I've talked about it in Simplify Your Life, which is

one of the best podcast episodes, the most popular podcast episodes, where I

talk about how I kept my life really simple when I was raising kids so

that I didn't feel burned out. But there's this other part

of burnout that comes from emotional

over-functioning. From believing that a good connected

parent needs to be emotionally available and responsive to

every single feeling that moves through your kid's body. And I

want to get you out of the belief that you have to do that,

that you have to be— in order to be a good emotionally connected parent,

that you need to be attending to every single emotion

or even a lot of them, right? I want

you to begin to see your family as a little more

holistically and how does emotion fit into your family? What

does self-regulation mean and what's your job in that?

So if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you've heard me talk

about emotional coaching, right? I even have a tool,

the connection tool, and it's, you know, narrate, name, validate,

regulate, right? It's like I've taught you a tool

that helps you help your kids emotionally regulate

and self-regulate. And I still believe in

that tool. It's really important to help your kids move

through big feeling cycles. It works, it's real, and it's a very

great tool. But I think somewhere in my own teaching

and in the broader gentle parenting conversation or connected

parenting conversation, the message got a little

distorted. It went from your child's feelings

matter to something closer to it's your

job to attend to, name, and soothe every

feeling your child has in real time, and—

or you're not doing this right. And the second version

of it's your job to attend to every

big feeling cycle that your child has and manage every emotion they

have, that That is too big of a job. And it's

actually a job that our kids need us to do less.

We need them to struggle more. We need them to work through their big

feelings without necessarily an emotional coach

attending to and problem-solving alongside of them. So today I

want to recalibrate. I don't want to abandon connection by any means.

I just want to talk a little bit more about How to

have emotional regulation and connection be of value in your family without

it leading to so much burnout and hyper-intensive

parenting. So a few things are true at

once, right? Right now, mothers are spending more time with their kids

than mothers did a generation or two ago. It's intensive

time. It's not just time spent. They're also

parenting intensively. Right. And part of what I've

been teaching is maybe made you think that you're supposed to be this intensive

parent and be really attentive. So intensive parenting is this

belief that a mother has to actively attend every facet of a

child's development. And that's the bar, right? It's pretty much

perfection is the bar and anything. If you don't help your kids emotionally regulate,

if you don't plan their curriculum, their academic journey, their social

life, their extracurriculars, all of that, that they're going to be set up for failure.

Right. And I want to free you

from that, that children are really resilient, that your child has

the ability to learn to self-regulate and self-soothe, and

it's actually their job to figure that out. So it's a funny

time because we have this intensive parenting trend, right? Mothers in the

'80s and before that, '90s, they were not taught to like

care about their kids' emotional life, and they were just you

know, making sure their kids went to school, ate food, went to bed, you know,

kind of the basics. And we've added this emotional coaching piece

to children's childhood experience because we recognize

that if you grow up without having anyone talk to you or validate,

validate your feelings, you can grow up not knowing about your feelings, not knowing

how to manage your feelings, squashing them, people pleasing, you know,

doing destructive actions, things like that. So it's really important that

we have this new part of parenting But what's happened is it's

created this intensive parenting and there's this pushback against it.

So I wonder if you as a parent right now on social media

and, you know, reading TikTok and magazines and whatever, you know, articles

and blogs and all the things and podcasts, right? All this stuff, you're like taking

in so much information. I wonder if you feel confused because on one hand

it's like, yes, you need to be their emotional coach. And then on the other

hand, back off and let them, you know, figure it out themselves. It can be

very confusing. So I want to reframe today as

a— I want to make a distinction between connection and

what we're going to call management. So there's a difference

between connection, which is, I see you, I'm here,

your inner world matters to me. When I first started

teaching parent education 15 years ago, maybe more now,

I would have to say to parents, hey, your kid's feelings matter.

Now I find myself saying rules matter. So we've done a good job

at recognizing that kids' inner world matters and that

I want you as their parent to recognize that they are having

an inner experience and they are having an authentic emotional experience and

it is hard for them to figure out how to cope with

the world. But on the opposite side, we have management, which

is when you take on The job of

identifying their feelings, naming it correctly, validating it in the right words,

helping them processing, making sure they're regulated, all

before you can move on with the day. If you are in a chronic

state of management of your kid's emotion, the problem with that is

that they end up not becoming self-managers,

self-soothers, self-regulators. The more

you support them. I want there to be almost a give and

take. You coach them, you teach them about their feelings,

then you let them have their big feelings without necessarily the

connection tool being applied. The thing is you don't need to manage your children's

emotional experience. I want you to be connected to them,

connection through a relationship, but I don't want you to see their feelings as

something you need to manage, predict, plan for,

Accommodate. That's just so much work for

you. It's a job that has no time

off, right? Because your kids have an emotional life all of the

time. So your kid, they really don't need you

to manage their emotional experience. What they need is

for you to let them know that their feelings matter,

and you give them the belief that you— that they can manage those

feelings. So you want on one hand to say, your feelings

matter in this family, and on the other hand say, and you can manage those

feelings even when the circumstances are uncomfortable.

The second part is the piece that I think is getting skipped often.

We're focused on proving that the first part, your feelings matter, I

see you, I validate you, then we forget to communicate

the second part, which is actually the part that builds capacity.

Capability that builds resilience. If I believe as your parent

that you can handle this problem, then I don't have to jump in and fix

it or soothe or even acknowledge what's happening.

I can trust that my child can figure it out and come out on the

other side. Now, sometimes, of course, kids have

really big emotions and they do need support. So I don't want you

to start ignoring those big emotions. But I want

you to stop worrying so much about emotion,

about negative emotion. We all have it. It comes and

goes. So let me make this a little concrete because I think it'll be

useful for you to have some examples. So, you know, you don't have to solve

every feeling. So if your kid is frustrated that their tower fell

down or something like that, or they can't finish their assignment or their

picture didn't come out the way they wanted it to, Or it's, you know,

earlier bedtime than they wanted it to be. You don't need to always

swoop in and say, I see you're feeling frustrated. That must feel so

disappointing. Sometimes that's true and it's helpful to

narrate a name out loud. And sometimes it's just a

shitty circumstance and your kid is allowed to feel annoyed

and then move through that feeling, rebuild that tower, or

go to sleep. Or start their project again or their picture

again. Not every frustration needs to

be a moment where you self-regulate, right? Where you

co-regulate. I want you to allow

for some frustrations to just be normal. And the

more okay you are, I've always said that, be comfortable with your kids'

discomfort. When they're upset or annoyed or

frustrated, just let it be okay. Yeah. So you also don't

have to validate every feeling out loud. This is something I think

when people first start working in my program that they'll feel a little bit confused

about because you get gung-ho about the connection tool. And the

connection tool— narrate, name, validate, regulate—

can be done aloud, and it can also be done silently

within yourself. And I think if we don't

feel like we have to perform parenting, that we are just in a

state that is compassionate, that We are recognizing,

yep, that's frustrating, I hear you, and you can figure this out.

Whether you say that or you just give them a face and you give them

a look, that can be enough. So

if you validated every single feeling that moved through your child

today, you'd both be exhausted and there'd be no room left for

just living. So sometimes being silent, giving a warm

look, continuing to make dinner while your kid is grumpy near you,

That's also connection. It says, I'm not worried about your feelings.

I don't need to fix them. I trust they will pass. And that is

a form of co-regulation, actually. Your calm nervous

system is something that they can just kind of tap into and borrow

for the next 90 seconds until they get back to a regulated state. You

don't have to intervene when your kid is bored or grumpy

or having a minor conflict. It's like, We don't have to

attend to every moment that our child has discomfort. They

don't need it to be narrated and processed by an adult. They need

to know you're steady and present and that they're allowed to have the feeling

without it becoming like something that you are hyperfocused

on. So your presence is the actual

intervention, not the commentary. So a lot of emotional

coaching at its best, it's, it's not about the words. Right.

It's about your calm nervous system in the room and your kids

co-regulating off of that. That happens whether you say

something or not. So you can be deeply connected to your child

without doing much, and that will prevent burnout. When you just

allow negative emotion and you obviously teach your

kids the best practices of ways to process that negative

emotion, the ways to move through those big feelings. Yeah. Then your child

learns to internalize those methods and they are able to

practice those on their own. So yes, you do need to teach a little bit

and you need to co-regulate, but I want you to feel like you don't have

to do it all day, every day. So I don't want this to sound like

stop paying attention to your kids' feelings, because that's not it. When a feeling is

big, real distress, real fear, real grief shows

up, I want you to get close, get calm, Help them find the

words if they want them. That's still really, really important.

It's worth the energy. You will continue to emotionally coach your

children, but what I want to invite you to is only needing to do that

when the feeling is so unmanageable for them that they need

support. I don't want you to go in and manage right away

because this will build the foundation that your feelings matter here,

and I trust you to handle these hard things. So you can start to

say that sentence to your kid or some version of it. You can say, yes,

it's okay to be upset. I understand. And you can handle upset.

You can handle disappointment. So in that validation

piece, in the connection tool, you're validating their emotion, but you're also

validating their own agency, their own autonomy, their own

capability. You're validating their resilience. Now don't

bypass, don't rush it. If your child needs to move through their

feeling, they can, but trust that they will and that they'll do it

on their own. So the shift is that you're,

instead of being the emotional processor for every feeling,

you are a steady foundation underneath your family

that feelings matter and feelings can be handled, that we

can handle our big feelings. That

is the bigger shift I want you to take from this episode is that you

don't have to always be doing connection.

When you have a really big feeling cycle, I'd love for you to be

able to be compassionate. But if you are in your own state of dysregulation

or burnout, or you're overwhelmed, you can also communicate to

your children that they can handle this, that they're going to be okay.

And that will teach them how to self-regulate and self-soothe. Soothe,

which is the most important thing that you can give your kids is the gift

of self-regulation. So here's what I want you to walk away with

today. The exhaustion that you might be feeling isn't a sign

that you're not connected to your kids or you're not doing a good job.

Your burnout might be a sign that you're doing more emotional

labor than the relationship actually requires.

You can let your kid have a grumpy hour without narrating

it. You can let boredom sit there without solving it. You can

let a small frustration pass without validating it out

loud. None of that makes you less connected or not doing

your job. It makes connections sustainable and it teaches your kid that

they are capable of having a feeling and getting through it. So this

week I want you to try this. I want you to think about the next

time that your kid has a small, like garden variety negative

feeling, like bored, annoyed, mildly grumpy. Try saying

nothing. Just stay near them, keep your own energy

calm, and see what happens without you managing it.

You might notice that they're more capable of overcoming that

emotion than you give them credit for, and

you might notice that you have some energy left at the end of the day.

So that's it for today. I want you to go be steady,

but don't give all of your energy to your kids. I want you to hold

back a little bit. So that you don't end up in a burnout

resentment cycle. Okay, I will talk to you next

week. I hope you have a great week as we wrap up these last few

weeks of summer. I hope you enjoy the time, and if you

aren't enjoying it also, that's fine too. It's okay. Sometimes

being a mom is kind of frustrating and boring, so I wanna normalize that for

you as well as we wrap up these few last weeks before school

starts. All right, uh, we'll talk to you next week.