You Can Get More Work-Life Balance After Becoming A Parent

The Lessons in Parenting that make our lives better

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

Part of the Home ↔ Work Loop series, where I explore how lessons from parenting can make us better professionals and vice versa. All while making us better humans.

The Real Reason Behind a Meltdown Over a Hole on Bread

I’ve become a bread snob.

I look for bakeries with the fanciest sourdough. When I look at that bread with the most splendid crust and perfect squishiness, it makes me feel like a healthy person and an amazing mother who is bringing her family amazing benefits, despite paying up to $15 per loaf. Ouch, a little.

One afternoon when we returned home, my daughter asked for bread. I gave her a piece of this very fancy bread, while tapping myself on the shoulder for being such a good mom. But no. She exploded into tears.

“The bread has a hole in it. Whaaaaaaa!!”

As other sourdough enthusiasts might know, sourdough bread slices often have a hole, and my daughter did not like it. It was not the first time I thought my daughter had overreacted to something. My blood flooded my brain, bringing up past lessons to help me decide the best course of action:

Option A (making it about you): I could have thought, “ungrateful child, I buy you the best and want the best for you, and you complain about a hole in the bread.”

Option B (the right one): Thinking goes to “what has been taking place over the last few hours that got her to the point she would melt down over a hole in her bread, even if it’s fancy.”

Having gone with option B, calming down helped me realize it was funny, so I laughed a little letting tension go. But then turned my attention to the problem at hand.

I found myself thinking less about the bread and more about the hours leading up to it. Hours that were decisions entirely made by us, the parents.

We had been out.

She had not had a snack in a while.

She had missed her nap.

It made me think of the times when, after being tired and/or hungry, I have snapped at my husband for the most ridiculous reasons.

The meltdown was the drop that made the cup overflow. And as parents, part of our job is to ensure the glass does not reach that point. And when it does, owning our responsibility in it happening.

The bread was not the story, but the result of a chain of decisions by us the parents.

Adults are Children Capable of Disguising Emotions

Photo by Олег Мороз on Unsplash

Human beings are constantly making assumptions on another’s behavior, without considering whether we are right.

I know, I’ve done it, and you have likely done it too. For example, you probably think I’m a snob because I like fancy bread, but in reality, the bigger reason is mostly medical. Ha. Got you!

But it’s more nuanced than that. Consider this:

• If I send a short email, it is because I am busy, BUT if someone else sends a short email, they may be upset with me.
• If I am late, the traffic was terrible, BUT if someone else is late, they are inconsiderate.

Psychologists explain this tendency to explain other people’s behavior by focusing on their character while explaining our own behavior by focusing on circumstances as the fundamental attribution error.

The beauty about children is that they make it difficult to maintain the illusion that behavior can be understood without context.

A toddler’s emotions are often visible in a way adults’ emotions are not. Hunger, exhaustion, overstimulation, frustration, excitement, disappointment — everything surfaces.

As parents, we quickly learn that behavior rarely exists in isolation. We start looking for patterns and circumstances because doing so is our saving grace once we figure out the formula to avoiding meltdowns. Doing otherwise would also mean spending our days taking things personally.

The Workplace Parallel

Photo by Tomas Sobek on Unsplash

For a long time, I thought this lesson applied primarily to parenting.

Then I thought:

What if I used all these new skills to optimize my time and energy at work?

The ability not to take things personally has shifted my energy from inventing interpretations of other people’s behavior to doing my work efficiently. In drowning the noise that my ego creates, I have more time and energy to do my job well and to support my colleagues.

Learning to consider context more often has led to:

• Finding gaps: Helped me realize that I was missing information that I needed to excel at a task
• Clearing misunderstandings: I quickly realized that a colleague and I were looking at different documents while discussing the status of a project.
• Learning from mistakes: In looking into how my own behavior contributes to a misunderstanding or issue, I learn how I can change to avoid that in the future.

The Energy Cost of Taking Things Personally

Since I started applying these parenting lessons, I feel more at peace at work.

The realization surprised me because motherhood is many things, but peaceful is not usually the first word people reach for.

As these lessons have helped me to stop replaying workplace interactions in my head by leaving my ego aside, in the quietness of my mind, I shift towards asking more questions like:

• What am I missing?
• What information do they have that I do not?
• How might my own communication be contributing to this misunderstanding?
• Could there be another explanation?

Taking things personally requires enormous energy. It turns us into detectives investigating offenses against ourselves. We become focused on assigning blame rather than understanding problems.

Curiosity creates a different dynamic, where growth and efficiency become the norm.

It shifts our attention from judgment to investigation. And in that process, energy flows through, instead of creating a constant loop of self-doubt that consumes our energy, leaving little for the second shift, and the more important one — the afternoon with the kids.

What Research Suggests

Interestingly, researchers have found that the ability to create some distance between an event and our interpretation of that event is associated with better emotional regulation, stronger relationships, and greater resilience.

Studies on psychological flexibility suggest that people who can experience difficult emotions without becoming consumed by them tend to report greater well-being and lower stress. Research on psychological distancing similarly suggests that stepping back from our immediate interpretations can help us respond more thoughtfully rather than react.

I find these findings compelling, but I am not sure I needed a study to begin noticing the effect.

I can feel it.

The less time I spend assuming that everything is about me, the more energy I have for the things that matter.

Silver Lining of Parenting

Parenting is one of the most important jobs in the world. It’s one of the hardest, as we are not given a guide or significant training on how to parent.

Children are work, but they bring with them the gift of drive and strength to become better people, because they are worth it.

As we dive into the deep end of learning when we become parents, we might as well maximize its impact so we can conserve energy to continue growing as parents while raising the next generation that will take care of our world.

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you liked this post, so I can keep posting the lessons from home to work and vice versa.