JudyCares.com » Judy Cares About the Frazzled, Maxed-Out Parents of Young Children

Judy Cares About the Frazzled, Maxed-Out Parents of Young Children

Parents of young children, how many times have you heard it said that you are doing the “most important job in the world”? In a perfect world, you would hear those words daily. You would see public service announcements on your Internet home page in praise of good parenting; friends and relatives would be sending you Mothers Day and Fathers Day cards throughout the year; strangers in the supermarket aisle would smile and give you the thumbs up as they pass by; skywriters would spell out messages like “k-e-e-p o-n – p-a-r-e-n-t-in-g o-n!” In the real world, you are more often than not, sleep-deprived, sex-deprived, lonely, lacking proper exercise, financially strapped, always feeling disorganized and “behind” on various obligations, and much criticized. It would be hard to imagine or create a more pressured situation. And yet every day, through much sacrifice, parents help their children grow and develop in every way, often without realizing the significance of what they are doing. When their home and schedule are in chaos, parents feel that they are accomplishing nothing for themselves or for their children. By contrast, when parents of young children are able to regain a measure of order and sanity in their homes, they usually find it easier to notice the good work that they are doing.

The first thing to consider when trying to regain a sense of order and sanity in the home, would be to ask yourself a couple of questions. Do you consider yourself organized, disorganized, or a little bit of both? Do you feel organized at work, and disorganized at home, or vice versa? Some feel organized after they have spent an hour or two in one setting, but feel completely scattered during the transition from one location to the other. As a parent of a young child, you have probably noticed that the home and the workplace are organized very differently, so that the skills you have developed for an organized work life are not transferable to a home with small children. Some of the frustration parents of young children feel comes from the hard work their brains are doing to transition into or out of the home setting, while employing a new skill set that includes baby care, additional housework, pediatrician visits, and emotional caretaking, just to name a few.

Many parents who are not organized by nature have tried and failed with organization techniques that work for people who are already quite organized by nature, and become frustrated when the many details of child-rearing seem to pile up in an endless to-do list. On the other hand, the parents who consider themselves disorganized are often more flexible about changes in plans, for example. Organized people find frustration with the immediacy of their child’s needs. When your little girl bumps her head on the table leg, all schedules and lists are jettisoned in favor of stopping everything and comforting your child. A bad case of colic can make scheduling almost impossible for weeks, causing the organized parent to feel rudderless. However, the organized parent seems to receive less criticism for how their home looks, or for being late with household management tasks. In other words, there are advantages and disadvantages to being organized or disorganized by nature. Both types of parent face challenges and make sacrifices in adjusting to life with small children, and both are on a steep learning curve. Whether you are organized, disorganized, or have trouble transitioning, you can work within your style to regain a sense of control over your home and your life.

Recommendations for Organized People
Organized people feel more calm and productive knowing when they and their family members will do each activity in the day. They become stressed not knowing what comes next. When you are in an organizing frame of mind, some of the ideas below might come in handy.

1 – Collect organizing tips from books, websites, and friends. Implement them, and innovate upon them. Flylady.com is a good website to try, but after implementing their system for a week or so, you may want to make innovations of your own.

2 – Note the time it takes to do various tasks, especially the odious ones. You can use this information to refine your schedule, and also to motivate yourself to do some of your least favorite tasks. If you know, for example, that it only takes five minutes to clean your toilet, you can steel yourself to complete the task.

3 – Develop a workable schedule for yourself and for your children. Do not try to schedule your spouse, who may not find this helpful but intrusive! A workable schedule is not a “reach” for you, full of lofty goals, but a realistic plan based on your family’s needs and goals. Develop a family calendar, and make it accessible to your spouse. Paper or online schedules work equally well. An online calendar allows a parent working outside the home to interact with the schedule while at the workplace.

4 – Make one To-Do list for the week, not for the day. Keep your weekly To-Do list accessible. Your spouse may take interest in the list, and may offer to help you. Or your spouse may find it appropriate to add items to your list; however, that is only with your consent! If an item for your list comes to mind when you are busy doing other things, then you can simply add the item and go back to what you were doing. You are the best judge of when the weekly list is full. Some items may need to go on to next week’s list, and this is fine. Some items may be impossible to get to without your spouse’s help, or hired help. If something is really important and you need help, then definitely feel free to ask for help. Being realistic is a sign of maturity, not a sign of weakness or laziness.

5 - Be flexible. Just because something is on your schedule does not mean that it must stay on your schedule. Allow the weather or a child’s request to influence your plans. The peace of an ordered home provides short-term satisfaction, but if you can’t relax at all without everything in your home being scheduled and orderly, this may indicate that you are having trouble with anxiety. You may need to talk with a psychotherapist or a trusted friend about ways to feel at peace even when your home is a bit disordered.

6 – Touch each piece of paper once, and read each email once. Most of the organizing systems being promoted today include this advice, because the few minutes of time spent when the paper mail and email arrive, pays off in much time saved later. This habit involves taking the paper mail from the mail box, and then immediately putting it down in designated places. For example, the bills go in the bill box; the catalogues and magazines you want to read go in their own basket; the mail with your personal information, or credit card offers, go in the shredder, and so on. Another way to conquer the paper monster is to buy plenty of file folders, and a file cabinet/file box, and develop a system for organizing them that suits your family’s needs. Don’t waste a lot of time trying to get your files and your desk area perfect. Good enough is good enough. Reading each email once involves reading the message and then answering it, printing it, and/or erasing it. Saving it to another file or forwarding it to yourself, so that you can respond to it later, may cost you more time in the long run.

7 – Set aside some time for a mental and spiritual refreshing time each day, even if it is only twenty minutes per day. Stay-at-home moms seem to have the most trouble doing this. But whether a parent is home all the time, or juggling responsibilities in various locations including the home, they need some time away from others in order to maintain a sense of identity outside of their current roles. A strong sense of identity is a really good thing to be able to model to one’s children. Furthermore, the human brain and emotional system simply cannot function well when demands are being made upon it every waking moment. We all need to refresh and recharge daily to maintain a sense of well-being. Everyone has his or her own way to refresh, including a bath, some reading time, prayer or other spiritual activities

8 – Set exercise time into your schedule every week. Physical refreshment restores the body as well as the mind. Running after the kids doesn’t count! Modeling self-care to your children in this way can help them to develop good habits too.

9 – Allow yourself a preset amount of time for entertainment, such as TV, DVDs, Internet surfing, etc. If you stay within your preset limits, then you will most likely feel the benefit of a little entertainment break, without feeling guilty that you wasted a large block of time. An organized child will take to this system well. He/she can remember how much TV/internet/DVD time they have logged, and how much they are still entitled to. Some children can remember this data for the whole family!

Recommendations for Less Organized People
Less organized people feel more calm and productive knowing that they have spent their time well, and have been faithful to their obligations and the needs of their family. They have a love/hate relationship with home organization, because they often feel suffocated by schedules, To-Do lists, and pre-set plans. Less organized people possess the gift of being more flexible and open to the last-minute changes that are part of the scenery for parents of young children, and yet, ironically, feel harshly judged and criticized in the area of home organization. Whether you are characteristically not an organizer, or you just feel less organized at home or when transitioning, some of the ideas below might help you to regain a sense of your time being well-spent and your family’s needs met.

1 – Use transitional activities to move your brain into the next important task. Do you remember Mr. Rogers? Do you remember what he did when he entered his home? Most people born in the 1960’s can easily recall that he hung his sport coat on the hanger; removed his shoes and placed them in the closet area; he then laced on his comfy tennis shoes, and … put on his sweater! Develop a couple of enjoyable transitional activities, such as pouring yourself a glass of cold water with a lemon slice, reading a poem or psalm, or reading one story to your children.

2 – Use the “power hour”. This is simply setting a timer, or playing a music CD, or playing 12 songs on your portable music player, while you complete as many important tasks as possible in one area of priority. Areas of priority include cleaning; paperwork/emails; laundry ; de-cluttering your home; tasks one child needs you to do, such as set up doctor’s appointments; home repairs/maintenance. Your children might be napping, playing on the computer, doing their homework, or doing their own “power hour”.

3 – Develop, with your spouse, some short, medium and long-range goals for your family. Then during the day, when you notice yourself adding too many things to your day, or having nothing to show for a long block of your day, filter out activities that do not fit into your goals.

4 – You could use a list or not, depending on whether you find that helpful. The important thing for you is to see a task through the beginning, middle, and completion phases. If you are taken away from your task to take care of something else important, you can use a transitional activity to ease back in to the original task, until you have completed it.

5 – Be as disciplined as you can, but know that your worth as a parent is not measured by how organized you are! People usually feel constrained and suffocated by schedules that are too demanding or do not match the family’s overall goals. If your organizing system is reasonably flexible and in line with your family’s goals, then it will work for you, not against you, and will contribute to peace in your home, and goals being accomplished.

6 – Put all papers on one place.
Put all bills in one place.
Put all of each child’s things in their room/space. Teach them to do the same!
Even if your piles are not neat, you will be far less likely to lose important things. Although it may be momentarily frustrating to have to dig through a pile in order to find that insurance paper, there is no harm done by it as long as the document is there in that pile. If you are not a natural-born organizer, it may have taken you much longer to file it systematically. After you have used it this time, you can put it into the proper file, and into the file cabinet/file box, thereby reducing your search time in the future.

6a – As a corollary to #6, put important things in the exact same place each and every time. For example, where are your house keys? Where are the children’s immunization records? Mom, where is your engagement ring? Dad, where is your wedding ring? If these important things always go in the same tray/basked/box each and every time they are not on your person, this will simplify your life greatly.

7 – If you truly can’t carve out some time for mental and emotional refreshing, you may need help from your spouse, or a friend, or a hired helper in order for this to happen. A lack of personal time in the day is not a punishment for being disorganized; neither are you destined for martyrdom. You will always be at your best for yourself and your family if you have regular times of mental and emotional refreshing. Use your support network to get that.

8 – Exercise regularly. If you haven’t exercised in the last few days, get your spouse to help you by taking care of the children’s needs for 45 minutes, or hire a babysitter, so that you can get your essential physical refreshment. Lots of people are getting exercise buddies and scheduling time to work out together, with great success.

9 – Kill your TV. More realistically, decide what things you will watch, and use a recording device to save your shows. Only watch a preset number of the shows you have prerecorded. Never channel surf, as this will affect your brain waves – I’m not kidding! – and suck you in for hours of sloth followed by guilt because you wasted time and didn’t meet your obligations. Develop similar limitations with other forms of entertainment. You could watch a preset number of DVDs, or set your timer for a preset amount of time surfing the Internet. A child who is disorganized,or has HD or ADD should probably be allowed TV and electronic entertainment only when they do not have any other obligations pending, because it is so difficult to transition their brains from TV and electronics into tasks.

Finally, whether you are naturally organized or naturally disorganized, or have trouble transitioning from home to work, or work to home, bear in mind that ultimately, the primary purpose of your home is to be your home, not just to be an organized home. Your home is where you rest from the pressures of the day; where you express yourself and your values, and pass those down to your children; where you connect intimately with your family members; and where outsiders who enter will either feel peace or strife. All of these goals are better met in a home that is relatively clean and attractive, where meals are consistent, and deadlines are met. You may still feel disorganized as a parent, despite your best efforts, due to the surprises inherent in child-raising. But you, your spouse, and your children will still benefit from your dedication to your overall goals as a family .

Try to remember that your spouse is not the enemy. There is just simply an overwhelming amount to do, as parents of small children these days. The spouse who is more task-oriented is not a killjoy of a drudge, and the one who wants to rest is not therefore lazy and not contributing. The more you can bear with each other, help each other, and ask for what you need, the better you and your marriage can grow through the experience of raising young children. Remember that the societal expectations for a perfect home, perfect children, perfect resume and perfect body have not relaxed since our parents’ day, but have strengthened. Resist the urge to answer to those who would place pressure on you to be perfect, and remind each other of your personal and family goals and priorities. This is one way that both parents can model a strong identity to their child. When you possess a strong identity, this helps your child to develop confidence and self-esteem.

Notice that even when you have failed by adult standards, you are still doing a lot of important things by small-child standards. All day long, parents interpret language for their children; they make eye contact and physical contact; they listen, empathize, and act on their empathy, and much of the time this occurs “under the radar”. Parents quietly carry out the critical task of teaching their child to be human, almost without noticing that they are doing it. Some children have huge limitations physically, neurologically, and/or emotionally. Sometimes these problems cannot be rectified, and the parents feel like failures as a result. But whether you are blessed with a child who is developing well in every area, or a child who will always have to accept some big disappointments developmentally, you are helping your child reach his or her individual potential emotionally, physically, spiritually, and mentally.

Will your child remember how often you made the beds, or changed the sheets? Possibly. Will your children remember how often you listened and responded to them when they were hurt by something that happened at play group? Most definitely! Will your child remember whether the family dined on freshly roasted chicken versus Basket-o-chicken? Possibly. Will they remember that you sat down and ate with them? Most definitely. They may not notice or remember your computer filing system for their baby photographs, or that big pile of laundry that bore a strange resemblance to compost. But they will most definitely remember who taught them to be human. You are doing the most important job in the world. K-e-e-p o-n p-a-r-e-n-t-in-g o-n !

Additional resources:
Gordon MacDonald – Ordering Your Private World (Thomas Nelson Press)
Anne Morrow Lindberg – Gift of the Sea (Random House, Inc.)
John Gottman – Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child (Simon and Schuster, 1997)
John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman – And Baby Makes Three.
Website – Flylady.com