116: Turn Work-Family Conflict Into Work-Family Balance

Work-family conflict can seem unavoidable - especially in the era of COVID when we're either working from home with children underfoot all day, or we're an essential worker who has to leave the house and can't find childcare. In this conversation with licensed psychologist Dr. Yael Schonbrun, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Brown University, and co-host of the Psychologists Off The Clock podcast, we acknowledge that we must enact policies that provide more of a safety net for families.  But even in the absence of these policies, we can make choices that allow us to live in greater alignment with our values, and also find a sense of peace. If you enjoyed episode 113 on Dr. Chris Niebauer's book No Self, No Problem, then you'll find that the tools we discuss in this episode flow directly from that one.   Here's a link to the Choice Point tool that we discuss Here are some Psychologists Off The Clock episodes that discuss Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in greater depth: https://www.offtheclockpsych.com/podcast/acceptance-commitment-therapy https://www.offtheclockpsych.com/podcast/the-heart-of-act https://www.offtheclockpsych.com/podcast/take-committed-action   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen  00:02 Hi, I am Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast where I critically examine strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting. In this series of episodes called Sharing Your Parenting Mojo, we turn the tables and hear from listeners. What have they learned from the show that is helped their parenting? Where are they still struggling? And what tools can we find in the research that will help? If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a FREE Guide To 7 Parenting Myths We Can Safely Leave Behind 7 Fewer Things To Worry About, subscribe to the show at yourparentingmojo.com. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you will join us.   Jen  00:59 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Regular listeners might remember that a few months ago we talked with listener Kelly and Dr. Moira Mikolajczak on the topic of parental burnout. And we discussed how parental burnout is a constellation of symptoms that can include mental and physical exhaustion and emotional distancing from children, loss of feelings of being effective as a parent. And it can lead to an assortment of risks for both the parent and the child including shame and loneliness and the risk of neglect of the child or violence towards the child. And the feeling that the situation can only be escaped through divorce or abandonment or suicide. And we talked about how one of the big causes of parental burnout is the unrealistic expectations that we put on mothers to somehow sacrifice everything for their child, and also lead a fulfilling life for themselves. In the show notes, I gave a link to an assessment the Dr. Mikolajczak and her colleagues developed to help you figure out whether you might have burnout because it might not be as obvious as you think. And after the interview, I emailed with her and we discussed how powerful self-compassion can be as a tool to deal with burnout.   More recently, I was listening to a podcast that I really enjoy called Psychologists Off the Clock which features four psychologists discussing the principles that they use in their clinical work, and how they can help the rest of us to flourish in our work and our parenting and our relationships as well. And one of the hosts is Dr. Yael Schonbrun, and she is here with us today. Dr. Schonbrun Brown is a licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice. She is also an assistant professor at Brown University. And she is writing a book on the topic of work-family conflict, which can be an important precursor to parental burnout, which is how these topics are connected. So I got to chatting with her about this by email and I realized that not only are a large proportion of my listeners, working parents, but the ideas that she's thinking about are actually applicable to anyone who feels tension between their family and some other aspect of their life. So, she is going to talk us through this and also give us some new tools to deal with the days when our lives just seem a little bit out of control. So welcome, Dr. Schonbrun.   Dr. Schonbrun  03:00 Thank you so much Jen for having me. And I just want to take a quick moment to compliment your podcast, which is awesome. I love that you integrate data and compassion for parents and the work that you put out there is amazing. I am really honored to be a part of it.   Jen  03:11 Oh, thank you. It is great to have you here. So, I am always the first to admit, as far as working parenthood goes, I have it pretty easy. Even when I had a day job, I worked from home and so I never had that struggle of the commute time and the physical rushing from one place to another that I know a lot of parents and families find really stressful, that even though I no longer have a regular day job, as it were, and the podcast and this business is my work, I sometimes feel really conflicted because I really, really, really love doing this work and I also really like spending time with my daughter. But sometimes I feel distracted when I am with her. Often because I am thinking about the writing that I could be doing, or I should be doing. If I was not out collecting fill bugs in the garden, and now that she's not in preschool for nine hours a day. And so, I wonder if you can maybe help us to understand why is working parenthood's so hard?     Dr. Schonbrun  04:07 Yeah, I think it is great that you're pointing out that not all working parent challenges are created equal. Some of us really are more privileged than others. But it is also helpful to point out that the vast majority of working parents do experience challenges, just as you're describing. So, it's a great question, why is working parenthood so hard for so many of us? And the way that I frame my answer is a little different than the way the popular press typically talks about it. So, I sort of look at it from two different directions. The first is from the outside in, and the second is from the inside out. So, I'll tell you a little bit more about what I mean by that.   So, the outside in is the part of the dilemma in working parenthood that has to do with challenges that exist outside of us that leak into our individual lives. So, these are factors like how flexible and supportive your workplace is and whether your colleagues and work environments support balance between work and non-work time. Whether you have a partner, and if you have a partner: how supportive he or she is capable of being, or willing to be in sharing childcare and household responsibilities, and in supporting your professional effort. Whether your kids have special needs or physical or mental health issues, things like whether you have financial stressors, or whether you live in a country with reasonable family leave policies, and so on. So, the outside-in  factors matter deeply because when those kinds of structures aren't in place in ways that are reasonable and humane, we're going to encounter painful, often insurmountable challenges. And that tends to be what gets talked about most of the time in the popular press, and in most of the books that are out there about work-family conflict. But as a clinical psychologist, I tend to emphasize the importance of the other direction. So, this is from the inside out. So, these are factors that exist inside of each of us. These are human psychological elements, things that make each of us tick, and I like to quote Sigmund Freud here because he famously said, Love and Work are the cornerstones of our humanness. And I like this quote, because it really symbolizes the fact that most of us feel a drive to engage deeply in relationships. And most of us feel a drive to engage in some kind of productive or skillful enterprise, you know, not necessarily paid, but something that is sort of outside of our private family lives.   And these are both wonderful drives. And they are both associated with positive effect with healthy bodies and minds. And they are both individually and jointly able to create rich, meaningful, rewarding life. So, they are both important. But each tends to demand a lot from us and to demand things that sort of pull in opposite directions in which interfere with one another. So, for example, work really wants us to engage in future thinking, to be competitive, to be ambitious to get things done. Rr is parenting really requires us to be present and connected and very patient. And then of course, both roles require an intense amount of time and energy. So, by the fundamental nature of being human and wanting to participate in both work and love, most of us are going to experience conflict between those two roles. And so what a lot of my work focuses on is making sure...