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 that we aren't trying to solve inside-out problems with outside-in solutions, because that tends to get us into trouble and ends up making us feel more conflicted, more frustrated, more guilty, more overwhelmed.   Jen  07:08 Yeah, and I think that that distinction is so important and that they can affect each other. It is sort of like the Yin and the Yang, right, that the work that we do internally, is what shifts our culture. Our culture is not some kind of nebulous thing that is out there. It is a collection of how we all interact with each other how we think and how we interact with each other. And that by doing this internal work, we can shift our culture even if it might not go as fast as some of us might hope.   Dr. Schonbrun  07:35 Yeah, yeah. I love that you just mentioned Yin and Yang, because a lot of my thinking about working family conflict and working family enrichment, which we'll get to is really informed by Daoist thinking about Yin and Yang and I love that you're pointing out that it's not just the system that affects us, but we affect the system. But yes, it can be slow progress, and I think that can be immensely frustrating. I certainly feel that frustration too.   Jen  07:58 Yeah, well, that leads us into your story, right? I mean, you got here by a path that had you exploring how these tensions exist in your own life. Right? Did you want to spend a minute telling us about that?   Dr. Schonbrun  08:12 Yeah, sure. So, I was on the tried and true academic path. I was a researcher. And before I had kids, I was really hell bent on staying on that tried and true path. I really, I love science. I love psychology. I was at a wonderful institution, so actually there. And when I became a parent, to my first son, who is 10, I now have three boys. I was just sort of shaking because it was sort of surprising how hard it was to stay motivated and focused on my career. And yet, I didn't want to back away from my career because I really did love it, but I also wasn't comfortable, sort of maintaining the same kind of position that I had had before. And it was surprising to me because I had always been surrounded by amazingly brilliant academics who were also terrific parents. It was not like a judgement of how anybody else was parenting, it was more that I didn't want to be away from my kid for 40 to 50 hours a week.   And so I went through this long year of really painful self-reflection and using a lot of the skills that I talked about in my writing to really dig deep and figure out what was possible, you know, given my situation, given the financial constraints of my life, given my partner's work, and given who I am, which is an ambitious person who really likes to be creative in the outside world and use my intellect in ways that for me are interesting. But also, you know, a person that really wanted to be really deeply engaged as a parent. And at the end of that year, I ended up backing down from sort of pulling back a little bit in my effort in my academic work, and that was a really difficult position to be into. So, it was really privileged because I had supportive mentors and colleagues who are totally fine with me pulling back a little bit It ended up being really hard for me socially because I did not really fit in anywhere. In academia, you do not have part time people. And there is a good reason for that. I mean, academic work is really intense, you have brilliant people working day and night to make progress. And part time effort really doesn't cut it is the reality. And so, I wasn't doing as well as the truth. And I felt that, and I also socially felt kind of out of it. Like I was not really inside of the academic world as much as I used to be. And I also was not at all a stay at home parent. And so, I didn't really fit in there. So socially, it was really interesting.   And so, but I did a lot of thinking and a lot of sort of, again, reflecting on my values and which way I wanted to go. And I ended up in 2014, writing an essay about it that landed the New York Times, totally random lightning strike of luck. I actually wrote it during my kid’s, I at that time had two kids, I wrote it during their nap time. And then at the end of that time is I heard them calling, I Googled "submit op ed piece" and at the top it said you know instructions to say submit to the New York Times and amazingly got in and it sort of just opened up this new career path of writing about working parenthood from kind of a combined academic, scientifically informed perspective, but also one that was really clinically informed as well as personally informed.   Jen  11:16 Okay. And so, I know that you now have a private practice. And you are also in academia. And you are also a parent...   Dr. Schonbrun  11:25 ..a podcast co-host.   Jen  11:27 Yes, yeah. Yeah. As I know it can be...   Dr. Schonbrun  11:30 ...as you know, it does not take any time.   Jen  11:32 No. Yeah. And so, in a way, it seems like you've kind of multiplied the kinds of conflicts that have the potential to exist in your life. And I wonder if Is there a way to segue from the tensions that you've experienced into one of the more general topics that are ways in which families experience with work-life conflict, which of those have you experienced?   Dr. Schonbrun  11:55 All of them. No..   Jen  11:57 All of them are the same. .   Dr. Schonbrun  11:58 Yeah. At the same time. Well, and if Interestingly, I mean, I think you are pointing something out that is really true, which is I do experience a lot of work-family conflict. And I also experienced this other phenomenon that I write a lot about, which is called work-family enrichment. I experience both. And what is I think underdiscussed in the public sphere is how parenting and professional roles can really complement one another. And that does not mean that they do not also conflict I mean that that is a true reality. And Jen, I hope it is okay for me to disclose we this is our second recording of this episode. Because what happened in the first recording is I botched it. And the reason they botched it is I tried to do it at home, it was kind of a gamble. I put my three-year-old to bed to nap and I told my oldest if he is not sleeping, can you just take care of it because I need some quiet to do this interview. And my oldest took care of it. But my three-year-old had to go to the bathroom and I heard the shuffling in the background. It was really distracting, and I could not focus. There is just sometimes where I do it very badly. It is the truth. And I think this gets to something that you said in your introduction, which is the role of self-compassion. And so, I engage a lot of self-compassion when things do not go well. And I hope that you, at some point have an entire episode dedicated to self-compassion, because it is such a powerful construct.   But in brief, it has three components. So, the first is mindfulness to kind of making space for whatever it is that you are feeling, in my case, embarrassment and sort of frustration and disappointment, sometimes kind of anger. Like I wish I had more help with the kids, especially now that we are in a pandemic, and childcare has gone out the window. So, the first component is mindfulness. The second component is self-kindness, to sync the kinds of things to yourself that you would say to a friend who is struggling, so you wouldn't call up a friend who had botched an interview and say, “Wow, you did a really bad job. You should really be embarrassed, and you know, have your tail between your legs.” You'd say, “You know what? We're all human.” Like you were carrying a lot that day. You did as best you could. Forgive yourself, you can see if you can rerecord. You would say kind, supportive, encouraging things. And so if you can say those kinds of things to yourself, and, and it is like a muscle, I think for a lot of people who have that really critical voice, it's a really hard thing to do but practice and it becomes easier. And then the third component is common humanity. So, remembering that many working parents, so I would say, I would venture to say all of us, especially now, have had those really hard days, like you're not alone. Sometimes you feel alone when you are having a rough day. But just remember, you know, this is the plight of the working parent, we are all in this soup together. And knowing that really does ease some of it, and it does not undo it, but it makes it a little easier to tolerate. And then it makes it easier to sort of connect back in and figure out what makes the most sense to do with whatever the frustrating experiences is.   So that's kind of on the side of work-family conflict, but on the side of work-family enrichment. You know, I think I am really fortunate. I am incredibly privileged because all of my roles really do feed one another like my academic and scientific background, helps me do better clinical work. My clinical work helps me to do better, more applicable sort of digestible writing. And my writing helps me to do podcasting, they will, they will really feed each other. And I think my parenting and my perspective on parenting and my interest in parenting, and in my professional work helps all the roles as well.   Jen  15:22 Yeah, yeah. And that, I think, is a really important thing to recognize that it can feel as though  were being torn in 15 different directions. And in some ways we are and you know, if there's work-family conflict from the number of hours that you're working, and