Self Care for Parents 1: Why Self Care Matters and Why it is Hard

Many parents feel like self care is a time-consuming luxury they cannot afford. Who has the time to have a half hour soak in a candlelit bathtub, or enjoy a regular massage? It can be hard to find 15 uninterrupted minutes to do a guided meditation, let alone a full yoga session. Any moments you get to yourself are precious and rare, and it might feel counterproductive to spend them doing something so self indulgent when it means putting off the mounting laundry that keeps looking at you and reminding you of your failings, or leaving your online shopping basket with its bottle of gin and rubber gloves placeholders precariously close to actually being what arrives on your doorstep on Tuesday. 

Plus, you never really know how long you've got; at any moment your baby might wake from their nap, or your toddler might need a poo, or any one of the thousands of ways in which you are needed by your children might come to the fore. Part of your job is to be constantly "interruptible" (Stadlen, 2004). 

But more than this, even if you do have someone who can take your baby or child out you might not want to leave them. We talk a lot about babies needing to be close to their safe place, especially in the early months, but parents too might feel the need to be close to their baby. Too often people offering support assume that what is needed is to give the parent time to themselves, when often parents really want someone to look after them, so they can continue to look after their baby. Amanda Donnet uses a metaphor that if parenting a baby is like going underwater, help can look like apparatus to breathe underwater, rather than needing to come up for air (The Good Enough Mother Podcast, episode 41)

So parents don't need long lists of all the many things they can do for self care when they have  child-free time; what we need is self care that fits into real life as a parent. This may feel even more true right now, when help from outside the home is, at best, much trickier and at worst, impossible. And if self care feels like yet another thing to add to our to do list, yet another thing we are just setting ourselves up to fail at, it ceases to be self care and becomes just another unrealistic expectation on parents. 

Self care doesn't have to be all or nothing. There are things parents can do, with our children present, that can help to refill our emotional fuel tank and help us to keep regulated and manage our stress. Things that can help to ground us when we feel stressed out, and energise us when we are flagging. 

Ashley Davis Bush talks about "micro self care". Micro self care are the practices we can fit in between the tasks of our day,  taking just two or three minutes. They don't replace the need for macro self care - bigger self care practices like taking time off,  doing hobbies - but they help us to avoid a boom bust cycle in which our stress level builds until we have no choice but to do something about it, or we become so depleted that we face burning out. Simple Self Care for Therapists gives loads of examples of these micro self care practices. It is written for those working in the helping professions, to avoid burnout by weaving self care practices through their working day. But the idea is relevant for parents too. 

And besides these specific practices, these momentary activities of practicing self care, self care is also about attitude. It's not as simple as "if you feel X, do Y for three minutes". Self care might be about resisting unattainable standards and saying "I am good enough". It might be about learning to unhook from difficult thoughts and feelings and just allow them to be without needing to react or get rid of them. It might be about practicing talking kindly to ourselves, in the way we would talk to a friend, or to our children, rather than berating ourselves for not being perfect. 

(I'll talk more about some specific ideas to do with micro self care and adopting an attitude of self care in my next blog)

Why is Self Care important for parents? Can't we just continue to get on with things and power through? Parents are used to self sacrifice. It's part of parenthood to have to adjust our lives significantly. We are balancing an extra set of needs when we are caring for a child, and their needs are many and important. We spend so much time focused on the needs of our wee one, it is easy to let our own needs fall to the bottom of our priorities.

But prioritising self care makes sense for a number of important reasons:

1. You need fuel in your emotional tank
You might be familiar with the metaphor that parents need to put on their own oxygen mask first, or that "you can't pour from an empty cup".  Parenting requires us to give to our children - to give our time, our presence, our support, to help them regulate, to learn and grow. Taking care of your own needs will allow you to use all of your own internal resources so that whatever challenges you're facing will be easier to manage. If we want to be parenting from a place of abundance, it's just not possible to do that when our own resources are depleted.

2. Self Care helps us to be the parent that we want to be
We can only be the parent we want to be to our children if we also notice our own needs, respond to our own feelings, and help ourselves get back to a state of equilibrium. We don't parent from a place of reflection and thoughtfulness, and in line with our values, when we are operating in threat mode. 

3. Self care is good modelling for our children 
Children see us and how we respond to our own feelings, as well as how we respond to theirs. Self care shows them that feelings can be responded to and allowed to come and go, rather than giving a message that feelings are dangerous things that need to be squashed. Children will learn their own self care practices from what we do for ourselves, as well as what we do for them. If we want our children to grow up with self-compassion and the ability to be kind to themselves, we need to model self compassion and self kindness. 

4. Self care helps our children to be more cooperative
When we get stressed, children get stressed too, and then everybody is reacting from their threat system. When we are able to respond to our children from a place of calm, they are much more likely to be cooperative and responsive. Their ability to regulate their emotions will depend on how well we regulate ours when we interact with them, especially when they are upset. If you can stay grounded and regulated yourself, you'll be more empathic, more able to be curious about what is going on for your child, more accepting of their difficult feelings. Your child will respond with more cooperation.

5. You deserve it 
We don't need to justify self care - though I know many of us feel we need to. Self care isn't a reward for good behaviour. We know we want our children to feel worthy and loveable, and that they deserve care, but many of us find it much harder to really believe this about ourselves.  Every one of us is worthy of love, attention and care, just as we are. 

So self care for parents is important, but we might need to rethink what self care is - it can be about our approach as well as specific practices. 

I'll talk more about specific self care practices in my next blogs: Self Care for Parents 2: General Tips and Self Care for Parents 3: 10 Self Care Practices for Busy Parents 

References
Ashley Davis Bush (2015). Simple Self Care for Therapists: Restorative Practices to Weave Through Your Workday. Norton

Naomi Stadlen (2004). What Mothers Do: especially when it looks like nothing.  Piatkus

Dr Sophie Brock and Dr Amanda Donnet (2020). The Good Enough Mother Podcast, episode 41: Allying the Needs of Both Mothers and their Children. Download from: https://soundcloud.com/user-40...

 

DISCLAIMER: 
The contents of this blog is for information purposes only. The content is not intended to replace professional services, including but not limited to, any medical, psychological or legal services. Any engagement with this blog does NOT constitute services, advice or consultation and therefore is not in any way considered a professional relationship. I am a Clinical Psychologist, but I am not your Clinical Psychologist and I don't know your personal circumstances and needs.  Please consult with a mental health services provider for support or consultation regarding the personal health and well-being of your children or yourself. Accessing such support is best done via your GP in the first instance.