😑 How To Save Your Sanity
We interrupt regularly scheduled programming to bring you a topic that every parent desperately needs right now.
👋 Intro
It’s been about a month with school being back in some fashion and as feared, parents continue to be pushed beyond their frayed limits. What is the worst is that no help is on the horizon. So we have to fix things in everyday ways and we have to fix them now.
Today we’re pushing our scheduled topic to share tangible, immediate ways to carve out critical time for yourself.
We are helping each parent/caregiver find 3-5 hours a week, primarily for themselves. Not for work, ideally not for sleep, but for a break, rest and rejuvenation. And dare we say, ✨ joy? We’ll say it, and work towards it. It’s the only way, seriously, that we’re going to be able to stay in this for the long haul. For ourselves, for our partners, our kids and our communities.
💡 Quality Time 101
It might be as little as 1 hour, 3 times a week or half a weekend day. The goal is to create and protect this time each week.
⏰ Set standing, weekly SCHEDULED times - No they cannot be ad hoc, no they cannot be “we’ll see” when we can fit them in. To work, these blocks have to be planned and protected. We offer some schedule options below.
📆 Smaller weekly over longer monthly - If need be, choose shorter chunks of time each week over doing a longer period each month. Right now, with each week being really intense, you need to know that breaks are within reach.
🧘🏽♀️Make it meaningful - choose a time and a length that will actually give you a break. Ideal but practical is probably between 2-3 hours but even 60-90 minutes can be sanity saving, especially if it’s used for a good workout.
🏄♀️ Only rule: No work/family things - Once the time has been carved out and protected, figure out how you best want to use it. It can be glorious nothing scheduled and just sitting in your room reading a book. It can be an art class, a workout or a weekly catch up with friends. Just make sure no work or home logistics creeps into it.
🎶 3 kinds of quality time - With kids, setting aside time for yourself can feel impossible and selfish. So we recommend you take all the time you have together and create 3 deliberately planned blocks:
Individual: For 2 partner households: each parent individually has block(s), while the other partner cares for the kids. For single parent, try a kid swap with another parent or find a caregiver.
Relationship: Relationships are taking hits all over the place. Carve out the traditional “date night” even if it’s locking yourselves in the bedroom and binging Netflix.
Kids: Plan “date days” with each individual kid - eg with two kids and 2 parents, every other weekend, each parents takes one kid, the other takes the other. For other family configurations, find what works for you, but the point is to create intention and scheduled time. Then, have the kids
Feel overly “Type A” and formal? You better your strained sanity it is. We’ve never seen this level of collective exhaustion and wit’s end. Only the most focused, deliberate efforts are going to help. Get to it.
✨ Your Options
🔁 The alternating break. For the many, many families that don’t have external help right now, this one is for you. You and your partner (or another single parent you band together with) will methodically, ruthlessly create alternating blocks of time each week. We offer 3 structures here but mix, match and modify your way to what works for you:
Evenings: Dinner and bedtime can be black hole that sucks everyone in. Create a schedule where in 7 nights, 3 evenings are family nights (perhaps Fri, Sat, Wed) and 4 evenings are split - 2 each. While one partner handles dinner and bedtime, the other is able to work a bit later and then use the latter part of the evening uninterrupted for their personal time.
Weekends: Each partner takes a weekend morning, from 7-10am. While one partner deals with the kids (with maybe pancakes and Sat cartoons?), the other gets time first thing in the morning to workout, write, read.. whatever. This is a fav in our family. Best part is, you still have plenty of family time, but you feel like you’re in a better frame of mind, which makes the day with the kids go smoother as well.
Family swap: Partner up with one other family that shares a similar COVID risk tolerance and where the kids get along (it doesn’t have to be perfect, just workable). Each week, decide on one 4 hour block where kids will be dropped off at the other family’s house. Done right and regularly, this not only gives you the time, it gives you an important feeling of community and solidarity right now.
🕺Enlist the set sitter. If it’s an option, call in grandparents, a neighbor or a friend without kids. Otherwise, if you can, get a paid sitter and create your me-time each week with a scheduled sitter. Again the key is to have a standing, weekly arrangement - whether it’s every Saturday from 8am-noon or a rescue from dreaded bedtimes for 1-2 nights a week.
👩🏽🎨 Take a class yourself or with a friend - Force yourself into keeping your time. If your life circumstances make it really hard to carve out “theoretical” time each week - sign up for a weekly (virtual) class that forces you into the time and the habit. Better yet, sign up with a friend. My husband and I used to do this and call it the Thomptel Betterment Program - he took guitar lessons, I joined a writing class. But each Thurs evening, we forced ourselves to do our things. We’re reinstating this this fall.
🧘♂️Barring all of this? Find 10 minutes a day, lock yourself in the bathroom, and do a meditation. No, seriously. See below for some options.
🧰 Toolbox
🧘♂️Meditation apps: Headspace, Calm, Peloton, 10% Happier - desperate times call for desperate measures. The more skeptical you might be about meditation, the more we suggest you give it a shot for a couple weeks.
📚NPR Book Concierge - for all that reading you might actually be able to do.