Managing Parenting Stress

[00:00:00] Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: Welcome to The Parenting Brief. I’m your host, Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez, an Arizona working mom and Chief of the Office of Children’s Health at the Arizona Department of Health Services. We’re here to share expert advice from our parenting community that you can bring home with you.

[00:00:32] Having a growing family, let’s be real, is stressful. Between juggling the daily responsibilities, your family’s schedule, and the day-to-day of raising kids. It’s normal for parents to feel overwhelmed. Learning to be aware of your level of stress and how to manage that stress can be a game changer.

[00:00:54] Today we’re talking to Karissa Whitlatch, a Licensed Professional Counselor who specializes in [00:01:00] parenting therapy. Thank you so much for being here today. 

[00:01:03] Karissa Whitlatch: Yes, thank you for inviting me to come today. 

[00:01:06] Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: Everyone knows that you can’t escape general stress if you’re a parent, so everyone is going to experience that. What would you say are some of the most common stressors that parents face during the birth to five years? 

[00:01:19] Karissa Whitlatch: Yeah, that’s a great question, and it can be an array of different things. It can be just like feeling really fatigued, just because sleep’s a very basic need. So anytime that gets disrupted, it can cause more anxiety or more stress.

[00:01:37] Feeling overstimulated is a pretty common experience. Just having too much coming in and it causes me to react or I have more anger than I used to have. Sometimes because there’s such a huge shift, it’s just a whole major life transition, relationships and partnerships can have more [00:02:00] discord or just communication struggles that we just didn’t have before we ended up bringing and expanding our family. 

[00:02:08] Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: And what do you see is really the impact of that stress, of being tired and overstimulated or not being able to maintain and strengthen those relationships? What do you see is really the impact of all of that stress? 

[00:02:24] Karissa Whitlatch: I noticed that especially for moms, it could feel like a lot of just like, self-esteem struggles, where I kind of had all these expectations of what motherhood, or even for fathers, these expectations about what I thought fatherhood would look like, and it feels like it’s just not hitting that mark of what I thought it would be.

[00:02:48] Or I just feel like I’m supposed to be able to do all of this on my own, right? But the hard part is no one handed us a manual that showed us how to do this right. [00:03:00] And we tend to do things on our own instead of reaching out to friends or support or family when we weren’t meant to try to navigate parenthood on our own. We were really wired for community, which makes it really hard when, you know, sometimes we can isolate from the community that could support us. 

[00:03:22] Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: How do you feel that those societal expectations, and even our interactions within social media and how parenting is portrayed in social media platforms, how do you feel that that plays a role in the stress that parents feel?

[00:03:40] Karissa Whitlatch: I feel like it plays a significant role, even just outside of parenthood. There’s just so much research and data out there that shows that there’s such a strong correlation between mental health struggles and anxiety and stress and social media use. Or even just watching the news and [00:04:00] different things like that.

[00:04:01] So just as a whole, it has an impact. Then if we zoom it in down to the parent role, especially in those early years, I can try to cope by trying to doom scroll through Instagram, but then I’m also seeing all these pictures of all these parents who look like they have it together, right? They’re able to take their kid to the splash pad every day, and they all look so happy, and they’re having so much fun while I’m here, exhausted and feeling like I’m just trying to get to the next hour and to the next day without exploding or yelling at my kid.

[00:04:36] So I feel like it just exacerbates the unrealistic expectations that we’re supposed to just be able to do it all and do it all perfectly. 

[00:04:46] Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: I’ve never even really thought of the cycle that that plays in—that downtime or just trying to take a break and scrolling social media as part of that, thinking that like, “Okay, I have a few minutes. I’m [00:05:00] gonna take a break. I’m gonna take care of myself.” But then the activity that you do in order to do that then just feeds that stress and that anxiety and that, and all of those feelings of overwhelm, and we just put ourselves in these perpetual cycles. 

[00:05:14] Karissa Whitlatch: Yes, and oftentimes we think social media and scrolling, it feels mindless, but it’s actually incredibly mindful, because we’re actually taking in more than we think we are. 

[00:05:26] Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: How can parents recognize when they’re getting too stressed? We know that we can’t avoid it, but what is that threshold, or how do we really recognize when we’re getting to that point that we just can’t handle it anymore? 

[00:05:41] Karissa Whitlatch: I think that’s a really great question, and I feel like it really in some ways depends on the person and there’s some ways that we can kind of, broaden it out to have general application as well, because we’re all gonna mess up. We’re all human, right?

[00:05:57] And we’re gonna yell when we don’t want [00:06:00] to yell, or we’re gonna say things we don’t mean or don’t wanna say. And we may not be as patient as we would like to be, or, I’m just tired. My kid asks me to play and I just don’t feel like it. So I think, I wouldn’t put red flags around all of that because in a lot of ways that’s all kind of normal.

[00:06:20] When I feel like it kind of tips over the edge is when it feels like I’m not able to make a repair with my kid. So like, if I yell when I wished I wouldn’t have, if I’m not able to feel like I could reconnect with my child and repair that experience. Or I may pass on playing with my kid once or twice, but I don’t feel like I’m engaging with my kid at all, you know? Instead, I’m just kind of stuck to my phone instead of actually being able to redirect and focus on them.

[00:06:52] Or sometimes the thoughts and anxiety just kind of feel debilitating, and I just am [00:07:00] isolating more and more where I don’t really have that support anymore. Those feel like some major, some tipping blocks that a lot of parents can experience that might mean, “Huh, I think this is kind of going a little bit outside of the norm to where I probably need to reach out and get some support.” 

[00:07:17] Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: And how do we do better in teaching our children these strategies so that they grow up and aren’t learning them in the moment that they need them. But how do we really teach our children to be prepared with these coping strategies as well?

[00:07:33] Karissa Whitlatch: Absolutely. That’s a great question, and part of it is doing it ourselves first. It’s hard because it’s kind of on-the-job training, right? It’s not necessarily where we get the benefit of sitting in a classroom and learning it. So it’s a little bit of on-the-job training where I’m trying to practice it myself.

[00:07:53] And the thing that’s helpful is kids watch and learn, right? So if they see [00:08:00] me practicing, like I’m starting to get really mad and I’m noticing there’s a lot of tension in my chest and I feel like, “You know what? I just really wanna yell right now,” but I’m trying to stop myself and I actually pause and either take some deep breaths or just kind of remove myself and go into a different room and calm down.

[00:08:19] Our kids, watch us and watch how we manage our emotions and the different things we experience, and so intuitively they will learn from us. And then once we feel like we have a handle on it ourselves, we can then intentionally teach them too.

[00:08:45] Jessica Stewart-Gonzalez: Thanks for tuning in. Take a moment to share this episode with parents you know, because they are feeling the stress as well. The show notes have more information on family stress tolerance. Until next time, this is Jessica. You’ve got [00:09:00] this.