Protect Yourself (It’s Not What You Think)
Happy Thursday! You made it!
I sat down to write to you about kids’ mental health– a topic that is very close to my heart– but that’s not what happened. What came out of me has less to do with our kids and more (everything) to do with how to parent kids with mental health challenges. It is, in a word, brutal.
That brutality is what led me to investigate what helps parents survive the day-to-day challenges of walking a very unexpected and difficult parenting path. I’ll be honest– I found a bunch of fluff. I love hot tea and baths as much as the next person, but what I wanted to know was what REAL self-care looks like. More specifically, what protective factors can parents put in place so we don’t buckle under the weight of parenting in general and parenting kids with challenges in particular?
In my 30+ years of professional experience, 20+ years of being a mom, and approximately 45 years of reading everything I can get my hands on (including cereal boxes, which can be surprisingly informative), I’ve identified a powerful set of eight Protective Factors that can help us not lose our ever-loving minds. Each is critical in its own right, but together, they can inoculate us against the overwhelm and despair that many parents feel, especially when parenting high-needs kids.
Here they are:
Sleep- Adults need 7+ hours/night. That 5-6 hours you convince yourself is enough isn’t. When we do not sleep well or enough, our risk factors for mental health challenges multiply.
Nutrition—Consuming nutritious food is critical for cellular health and overall physical wellness. Eating standing up while cooking, eating highly processed foods, and eating your children’s leftovers do not count as nutrition.
Physical Movement—Exercise is great for cardiovascular fitness and is also amazing for releasing aggression. As we discussed earlier, exercise helps the body process excess adrenaline by accelerating adrenaline metabolism.
Focused Time—Focused, concentrated time without interruption is crucial for feeling settled and effective. It’s important to set aside time to practice focusing without interruption. That includes avoiding interrupting ourselves with our phones' constant dings and distractions.
Play—which includes laughter, creativity & pursuits of pleasure– helps us focus on things we enjoy and encourages cognitive and emotional flexibility.
Connection—We spent a lot of time earlier in the course discussing how crucial connection is for people. It’s basically an emotional and physical lifeline. I’ll extend the idea of connection here to include not just others but also a connection to nature, which has incredible healing properties, and to animals, which are basically nature’s furry, feathery, or scaly healers.
Time Out/Time In- This refers to creating time for reflection, thought, and sensation through meditation, prayer, service, or silence. This is hard to come by when you have children, but it is crucial for self-care. There are a million and one studies about the importance of meditation or prayer practice, so I won’t get much into it here except to say that this doesn’t have to mean engaging with organized religion, and it certainly doesn’t mean sitting cross-legged in a field of dappled sunlight for an hour a day, though both of those are fine if you’re so inclined. It’s possible and necessary to find ways to breathe and recognize our thoughts and feelings amid the chaos of life so its intensity does not totally overcome us.
Meaning- This is a big one, based on the idea that humans have a primal drive to find or create meaning in their lives. This has had a profound impact on me and is partly responsible for my becoming an elementary school teacher and creating the kind of classroom environment I would have wished for my childhood self. If I had to guess, I would say that it is also largely responsible for my decision to train to become a parent coach and spend years working with families to help them make meaning out of their circumstances, as I have tried to do with my own.
Tip of the Week: Pick one protective factor to work on every week and by the end of March you’ll feel like a totally refreshed human being. You’re welcome.
Resource or Activity of the Week: I made a cute downloadable poster for you to remind you of the protective factors. Check out the attachment!
Want to explore how I can help parenting make sense, even when you don’t know where to begin? Reach out for a free one-on-one session to see what we can accomplish together.
You’ve got this,
Cari
One more thing– Please forward this to any other parents who might love some short, sweet, and useful weekly parenting tips! (If you got this from a friend, good job for having such thoughtful people looking out for you! Please head over to my website to check it out, or click here to sign up for the weekly newsletter.)
