Parental duties are important, especially during this pandemic when the whole family is at home. As parents, it is their responsibility to look out for their children and family, guide, and take care of them. To do this, parents must also take care of themselves.
According to Laura Gray, a pediatric clinical psychologist at Children's National Hospital, strong parenting requires patience, quick thinking, limit-setting, consistency, gentleness, and all of those things require energy. However, chronic stress drains energy that leads to fatigue, making it difficult to use the logical mind.
Recharging energy through self-care activities
Whether it is baking, taking a relaxing bath, or a bike ride, energy-boosting, and mental-bandwidth-expanding activities will mean different things for different people.
However, self-care does not have to take that much of a time.
Maybe every so often during the day, you take 30 seconds to stretch, meditate, or do a few yoga poses.
Whatever it is that you consider relaxing and calming, depends on you. After all, it is yourself we are talking about; you should know how to take care of it.
Staying healthy and sleeping on time
Part of taking care of yourself is also taking care of your physical body.
Gray recommends exercising, eating healthy, staying hydrated, and getting good sleep. She also mentioned that as parents, you need to be protective of your sleep time. This means monitoring when you need to shut down your electronics, making sure that you are going to bed on time.
This is important because you know for sure that your children are going to wake up at the same time in the morning, whether you get enough sleep or not.
Good coping skills for children
During this pandemic, it is a bit difficult and complicated to keep up social connections. However, despite it all, Gray said that even if it requires a lot of creativity in this current situation, parents must try to keep up social connections.
For family resilience, she recommends parents to model good, coping skills for children.
This means that parents can verbally express their emotions; be it a positive or a negative one. Gray said that parents can label their emotions and tell their children how and why they got frustrated. Also, it is important that after expressing such emotion, a calming solution must be followed by verbally expressing to yourself and your children how you can resolve your frustration.
Emotional validation
Gray also emphasized the importance of emotional validation, how parents should identify and validate the different emotions their children may be feeling.
Asking your children how they are feeling, will go a long way. And with their response, assure them that what they are feeling is okay, valid, and understandable.
Little did you know, your children may be one of those kids that are grieving and need someone to talk about it.
It is important to take note of these things to do a better job as parents. However, it is also okay to rest for a bit and take care of yourselves as well. After all, taking care of yourselves is what helps you to bring your best self to your parenting.
