HAPPY PARENTING
It is possible to take care of yourself as a parent and create a healthy home for your kids.
Somewhere along the way, parenting has become an endurance race that lasts at least a couple of decades.
Consider that more of us than ever hold down jobs outside the home, yet, remarkably, we spend longer hours directly supervising and interacting with our kids. We take them to an amount of extracurricular activities and playdates that would make our grandparents shake their heads — if only they were here to behold our jam-packed calendars.
Many parents don’t even have a single babysitter in their phone contacts because they never get out without their children. Sure, they might go to an occasional yoga class or pickup hockey game, but they struggle to make their own well-being a consistent priority.
“Sometimes we have the idea that the parenting years are about total selfsacrifice and if you’re not burning yourself out, you’re not doing it right,” parenting author Ann Douglas said when I caught up with her recently. “I just wanted to counter that message.” She does so with her latest book, Hap
py Parents, Happy Kids, in stores Feb. 19. It makes the case that we’ve been taking too narrow a view on what self-care looks like for parents.
Douglas shows us that it is indeed possible to take care of yourself while raising kids, and that there’s compelling evidence to show how doing so is a benefit to children and grown-ups alike.
“Part of being an effective parent is getting into the healthiest, happiest place you can be personally so you have a lot of resources to give to your kids.”
Friendships are essential, not a luxury
So what are some of the things we need to put in place to ensure we can operate at the high level that parenting demands these days?
For starters, Douglas makes the case that we need to see making time for our friendships not as something to file under “nice to have,” but as a vital part of functioning well as human beings tasked with bringing up other human beings.
A mother of four herself, Douglas knows just how hard it can be to prioritize social time, given that life with kids contains so many surprises that can upend your day.
“What always got cancelled and sacri- ficed were the plans to meet friends for lunch,” she said.
Douglas has since come to understand, both personally and through her research, just how important it is to overcome those scheduling hiccups.
“Women in particular rely on those friendships for validation, for support, and those friendships are what elevates you, takes care of you, so that you in turn can bring your best to parenting.”
We benefit from the support we get when we join groups for new parents, Douglas said, but research shows that we actually need it most in the preteen and teen years when we’re trying to make sense of the changes happening with our kids.
Whatever stage of parenting you’re at, it’s especially vital to make those connections when you consider that so many of us live far from extended families who could lend a hand or an ear.
Douglas encourages parents to seek out other parents in the neighbourhood, and be willing to take a chance by asking to exchange contact information. “You will find other people are hungering for those connections as well.”
Likewise, while the friendships we form online can be great, it’s even better if you can make the effort to bring those virtual relationships into face-to-face settings, she said. This way you can journey together instead of just reporting back at the end of the day.
“Until you’ve seen somebody else’s toddler have a meltdown in the grocery store, sometimes you can feel like it’s just yours who does that, when, well, you can both sympathize and say, ‘It’s just a stage — we’ll get through together,’ ” Douglas said.
Parenting as a shared community responsibility
We need to take that togetherness much further, and it’s going to take bigger-picture change — starting with the way we view the role of the parent, Douglas said.
There tends to be an overarching societal attitude that goes something like this: “You decided to have kids — you figure it out,” she said.
“But we need to shift from thinking of parenting as a personal problem and start embracing the idea that raising up the next generation of citizens is both a hefty responsibility and an exciting opportunity that we should embrace collectively.”
Bigger, structural forces are making parenting really hard, Douglas said. In most two-parent families, two people work as opposed to one, and additionally there are more single-parent households than ever.
“The whole landscape of parenting has changed so much, and yet there isn’t infrastructure, there aren’t supports in place to recognize that there isn’t a full-time parent at home able to take children to daytime appointments or otherwise keep the wheels on the family bus moving forward.”
It’s important to keep these things in mind when deciding how much to berate ourselves over a ball that gets dropped or cupcakes that don’t get baked.
But it’s also got to inform the work we do to advocate for things like better access to quality, affordable child care — or, at a minimum, the survival of our hard-won full-day kindergarten program.
“I think we need to recognize that parents are actually providing a vital social function. We are providing the next generation of citizens and workers, and we’re actually asked to subsidize that single-handedly as individual family units,” Douglas said.
“My kids will be working in your company and paying taxes to pay for your hospital care. Let’s take good care of those kids.”
To get there, she said, we need to encourage the community “to embrace its role in making things a little better and easier — at least not harder — for parents.”