Podcast Episode 245: Busting the Myth of Spending One-On-One Time With EVERY Kid Transcripts

Please note: Transcripts for the No Guilt Mom Podcast were created using AI. As a result, there may be some minor errors.

Brie Tucker: we put so much of that on our shoulders because like you just said, default parent, like so much of it falls on us. And sometimes dads aren’t given that opportunity to come in and have that time and that bonding with their kids because of societal expectations. But that’s where we have to advocate.

JoAnn Crohn: Welcome to the No Guilt Mom podcast. I am your host, JoAnn Crohn, joined here by the delightful Brie Tucker.

Brie Tucker: Why, hello, hello, everybody. How are you?

JoAnn Crohn: Brie, you can’t see off camera, but I actually have my foot up and an ice pack.

Brie Tucker: And,

JoAnn Crohn: I think it is so, like, I hate saying this because it makes me feel so old. I think I have a bunion.

Brie Tucker: uh,

JoAnn Crohn: And they’re not like, I look, I had a very odd conception of what bunions were, but it’s actually the joint becomes misaligned and that’s like the bump and, but I have it like on the pinky toe side, which is rare instead of the big toe side. So my foot just hurts. So I’m just trying to ice it and be nice to it.

Brie Tucker: Oh, I was an old lady a long time ago. I had one in high school that was bad enough. I had to have surgery. And, yeah.

JoAnn Crohn: do you know they’re actually attributed to, and I took a big offense about this because I was reading an article, they’re like, bad decisions in footwear. And I’m like, you know what article, do you know what shoes are considered acceptable in the workplace for women? Let me tell you, like they’re all pointed toes. They’re all like misshapen. Like it’s crazy.

Brie Tucker: the last place, the last school district I worked for, it was a, uh, public charter here in Arizona. And. We had to go through a class about the dress code and, uh, yeah, it was very, very ridiculous. They’ve gotten better, like they got better right before I left. But I mean, like we had to go through a class where they actually like showed us.

They had a fashion show to show us acceptable clothing, not acceptable clothing. And they were very mean about the shoes. Like no tennis shoes allowed for women, but men were allowed to wear them. Um, and their argument is like, well, we could just wear flats, but they had to be closed toed flats because you weren’t allowed to show toes because that was unprofessional,

JoAnn Crohn: Yeah, and the toe is not

Brie Tucker: exactly. And even though we live in a place where it is easily 115 for over 30 days out of the year, they’re like, do not show those toes. No, no, but enjoy the athletes what you get from sweating it up in a closed toed shoe, but the men, again, they’re fine. they’re fine.

JoAnn Crohn: They’re fine. Were the men allowed to

Brie Tucker: Um, no, they weren’t allowed to show their toes, but they were allowed to wear breathable shoes, like, like, tennis shoes and whatnot, not these, like, closed toed, closed end. You know, dress flats that was the best we could get out of them.

JoAnn Crohn: I think this not showing the toes thing is so funny, like you can make so many jokes about that. It’s like, oh, they didn’t want anyone profiting from foot pics at their school. No, no sly foot pics under the desk are making that side

Brie Tucker: toes, no exposed shoulders. Like, it was a lot. But that has nothing to do with our episode today, But it’s still very interesting. it does. Like how? How

JoAnn Crohn: kind of does. It’s expectations for women. Expectations for women. There’s expectations for women here. Um, today we’re talking about this recommendation about spending a specific amount of time With every child you have each day, because this is something that comes up a lot in our balanced community, a source of guilt for moms that they just don’t have the time in the day, nor when they try to spend this time with their kids, their kids even seem to enjoy it. So we’re really going to break this recommendation down today. So look forward to that and we have a shout out this week from our no guilt mom newsletter. If you get the no guilt mom weekly, you see that as soon as you bring another friend on board, no guilt, mom, we give you a

Brie Tucker: Whoop whoop, baby! Sorry.

JoAnn Crohn: if you want, yeah, and no, it’s good. Calls for a whoop whoop here I am trying to be so efficient and you’re like, JoAnn, let’s just take time for some fun and some celebration, which I need some more of. I definitely need some more of. So let’s pause for the whoop!

Brie Tucker: wait, if there’s any video of this, whoop whoop! That’s my little like, party thing.

JoAnn Crohn: I wish that had a noise. I wish that had a

Brie Tucker: think it’ll blow my mic.

JoAnn Crohn: We want to shout out Alyssa this week. Alyssa is a longtime No Guilt Mom member. She’s part of our balance program. We know her personally because she’s been to our retreats. So shout out to Alyssa. And, uh, if you want to join the newsletter, please, there’s a link in the show notes of this episode and now let’s get on with the show.

So Brie, there’s this recommendation out there from parenting quote unquote experts that you should be spending One on one time with your child and I see this a lot of places like on Instagram There was this graphic that said signs that your child doesn’t have enough connection and it listed all of these common traits that children have, like interrupting you in the middle of sentences, asking you for more quality time, and these things that are just general kids stuff, that I feel this one on one time that’s recommended is So guilt heavy for moms, and I don’t even think it’s based on scientific fact.

And that is what we went into this episode with, and I did the research and found the answers. So what do you think, Brie? You’ve been in the early childhood field, before you came on to No Guilt Mom, and you’ve seen all of these recommendations too. Like, what’s your feelings?

Brie Tucker: okay, so there are We do. Okay. So first of all, we’re not saying that you don’t need to spend quality time with your kids. And we’re not saying that spending one-on-one time with your kids is not beneficial. But what we are saying is that trying to add it another item to your checklist might be a lot.

So I, I need to preface it with that. But I’m smiling for anyone that can watch this video because all of my years of early intervention. Early childhood, newborn follow up, all that, um, this is something that we always would share with parents because it’s not common knowledge to every family or to every parent that they should be spending one on one time with their kids.

It’s not common knowledge that having their child sit in front of the television all day long without having any interaction could have a negative impact on them. So we’re not, we’re just talking about when it’s. Another thing on that to do list, you have, you’ve, you’ve been at work all day. Like you, you helped get the kids up in the morning.

You got them ready to go to school or daycare. You went off, dropped them off. You went to your job. You come home, you pick them up from school, childcare, you bring them home, you make dinner. Oh, that’s a cute drawing. I love it. Oh yes, I promise. We’ll play Barbies here in a little bit. Oh, now it’s bath time. Duh, duh, duh, duh. then you’re like, oh, crap, my kids crying because they don’t want to go to bed and they’re saying that they miss me so much. It’s because I didn’t do the 15 minutes of one on one. That is what we’re saying is BS.

JoAnn Crohn: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That’s. That’s good. Big BS. And I like that you mentioned that it is not common knowledge because something that I found in the research is that the most impactful thing on a child’s wellbeing is actually not the amount of time that parents spend with their children. It’s actually the mother’s.

Income and education level. yeah, which I thought was really, really interesting. That comes from a study by Milky, uh, which was referenced in a Washington post article by Bridget Schulte in 2015, that it was the income and the mother, mother’s educational level are most strongly associated with the child’s future success.

And so I wonder back because I spent a lot of time in title one schools as a teacher. And, um, it was a very, very low income area where the parents were just, you know, trying to get by. Like, they would be working three jobs. Their kids would be alone most of the time. And I know when you did your work in the Early Childhood Center, it’s It’s served low income families as well.

And so I’m wondering, like, is there a correlation, did you see, with like, this knowledge of spending quality time with your kids, and also the income level? Because maybe time wasn’t, time was a luxury in that sense.

Brie Tucker: I would say that you’re right. So I would bring this back to, The ACEs study, which is Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. It was done in the 90s in California by, Oh, gosh, I’m forgetting the name of the insurance company that did it. But it’s a study where, like, there’s all of these items on this checklist, and if you’ve been exposed to a certain number of them, it increases your likelihood of, having, Negative outcomes in

life. Yeah. Yeah. So negative outcomes in life, like, um, you know, if your parents, if one or more of your parents were incarcerated, if one or more of your, if an immediate family member had drug or alcohol issues, if you’re divorced, single parent household, there was a lot of things on that list and every single one that gets checked off, you’re at a higher rate for, or higher exposure for heart disease, depression, things like that.

JoAnn Crohn: It’s stress. yeah.

Brie Tucker: And so I would say that if you’re in a household that is worried every week about where we’re going to get our next like paycheck, whether or not we’re going to have enough to pay the, pay the rent, pay the mortgage. pay for groceries. Oh my gosh, you need a new pair of shoes. These have holes in them.

Where am I going to find an extra whatever to buy shoes for, for you this week? it is a lot of stress and yeah, in those cases for sure, time is a luxury. Time is a luxury that a lot of families don’t have. but with that being said, and all the programs I did, most of them, was based on somebody’s, um, risk factor.

So in the very beginning, I worked with disability. So if your child had a disability, it didn’t matter how much money you made, I came out to see you. and then over time, I went into different programs that had to do with risk factors. And I could tell you that because of the areas I served, In the Valley. So in, in the Phoenix area, I was a, uh, I was an East Valley provider, so I served Scottsdale, fountain Hills, paradise Valley, Chandler Mesa, and Tempe.

JoAnn Crohn: Which, if you know those areas from outside of Arizona, you might know the Scottsdale area is very

Brie Tucker: So I, so in my case, I had several families that had well off time income education, and they still needed support. but still, I think that this comes back to us talking about if you are stressed out and because I was that mom, I was that mom because I was a home visitor. So, like, I also like smile a lot when you talked about doing this episode because I, I remember sitting on the couch after having taken my kids off to daycare. going to work all day, coming home, trying to find all that time and then still trying to do the one on one with them. And you know, my two kids, they were attached at the hip for me. So me getting to spend time with one and the other, not being there. And they’re also only 15 months apart. They did.

They, they would have none of that. None of that. Like, no, you do not get mom’s exclusive attention. And I just constantly felt like I was failing, like that. They were. They were clingy, my daughter was having problems at childcare, and that it was all my fault because I wasn’t giving enough one on one time. And that’s what we’re fighting. And

JoAnn Crohn: I feel like a lot of parents, a lot of parents feel that way. And we’re gonna go get into some of the research right after this. Okay, so when digging into this, like, I knew I got so upset, every time this one on one time was mentioned. So upset, and so upset when other people brought it up, and, I could see, like, the guilt and the stress on mom’s faces when they talked about this. But I didn’t have anything to back it up. I just had this own feeling in my mind being like, Uh, that’s not right. That’s not right. And so, Digging into the research, I did find the source of this recommendation. but not completely. 

And let me explain. So it came from a research paper from the American Pediatrics Association. It’s called the power of play with kids, a pediatric role in enhancing development in young children. And it said the mutual joy and shared communication and attunement, harmonious. serve and return interactions. Think of like a tennis game here where you’re like kids and parents are communicating with each other that parents and children can experience during play regulate the body’s stress response. And this was the paper that most pediatricians refer to, to be like, Hey, spending time together is good. It’s good. Which I think both like we can agree on it is real, real good. 

And there was also a Chinese study that came out that said the effect of time parents spend with children, um, has an effect on the children’s well being. So overall, we know spending time with kids is great, but in no place in the literature did it say anything about one on one time. I could not find it. so like that guilt breed that you were feeling about not being able to spend the one on one time with each child, it was Not research based at all, those recommendations coming out, which I’m sure you heard, like, do you remember where you might’ve first heard it? Like, was it a pediatrician’s office

Brie Tucker: No, no. My brain don’t work that way. You know that. Like, all I can tell you is

JoAnn Crohn: no,

Brie Tucker: can pull it out of my toolbox of, I know that I was trained on it. I, but where,

JoAnn Crohn: it’s fully

Brie Tucker: but where I was trained on it, that I don’t know. It was definitely something that I knew before I had kids. So it definitely was something I was formally trained on. But.

JoAnn Crohn: could it be a

Brie Tucker: No, because that came after. Nope. I, like, right? I have, oh man, my road. It’s such a long, long and long yellow brick road of Brie’s brain. It would be very scary. You know, I would love to one day see like a, a dramatization of my brain and how it works and the things that are in there. Like, it would be very interesting.

But yeah, no, I know that it was something that I was actually formally trained on, but, I couldn’t tell you Where it came from and again, even if I was formally trained, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t somebody said to me, you know, it’s important that you share this with families and maybe it was somebody that they got from their.

Their predecessor who gave it to them from their predecessor. Like, I’m not sure. I do know that my husband teaches a class for parenting. Parenting dads is out of the University of Chicago, I believe, and they do cite a study, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t say how much time, it just says it’s important to spend time with your kids, like you just read on the, the paper from the American Academy of Pediatrics, so I think it’s, maybe, maybe it’s kind of like a game of telephone where, you know,

JoAnn Crohn: somebody hears it and then changes it a little and then it’s like the

Brie Tucker: because maybe, yeah, right, because sometimes, and you know this with my brain too, I’m the kind of person where you need to give me specifics, like sometimes you’ll be like, hey Brie, you Why don’t you do this?

And I’ll be like, how many words? How long does it need to be? And when does it have to go out? And you’re all like, ah, just whatever. And I’m like, nope, I need criteria. So maybe that’s where it started. Maybe somebody was like, I don’t get it. I, I hung out with my kid.

JoAnn Crohn: your need, for criteria made you like, they’re like, no, I need it. I need it. They’re like 20 minutes free. 20 minutes.

Brie Tucker: Yeah, right. Fine! Just 20 minutes and they throw the clipboard and run out of the room. Like, who knows? but I do, I mean, and again, like, we both can agree that, like, yeah, like, that back and forth, like, when I’m having a, even with my teens, and I know you feel the same way too, like, when we’re having a good time and we’re back and forth chatting, I’m calm. I’m relaxed. I can see it in their faces that they’re relaxed and they’re feeling better.

JoAnn Crohn: Yep. Quality time is great. there’s one other thing I found when I did the research in it, because I was interested that one on one time wasn’t mentioned in this initial stuff. But what I did found was an article from Psychology Today by a doctor, Kyle D. Pruitt, who is a clinical professor of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Psychiatry.

School of medicine and he emphasized the importance of making time for each child individually. It was in this article and he says, using a homogenized approach that fits all our kids works about as well as the one size fits all jumpers fit our bodies. The small intimacies that are unique to the way you parent a particular child at a particular time of life are more likely to appear during one-on-one time, and I mean, he’s not wrong, but.

Also, this isn’t saying that you definitely need to do it all the time and that this is the only way. The other thing I found on one on one time is from fathering. com and um, it recommends that one on one time lets kids know they are very important because you are taking that time out of your busy day just to spend it singularly with them.

And I think here is where. The guilt really starts to come in, especially in women with multiple kids who cannot have that one on one time necessarily with every child, every day. Um, I don’t think it’s fair.

Brie Tucker: especially when like, and I think another example is this kind of brings back to something that people have heard us talk about over and over that it’s not all mom’s responsibility. Like, because all of these articles are talking about parents in general, and even though you found that article from fathering.com, it doesn’t, it still says that one on one time lets kids know that they are important. It doesn’t always have to be mom. It doesn’t have to be.

JoAnn Crohn: yeah, fathering. com is talking to dads right there and Dr. Kyle Pruitt, a man making a recommendation. But I think that it gets filtered to moms because for some reason we do get I don’t want to say saddled with the childcare, but it is kind of that way. We become the primary caretaker. We become the default parent and a lot of that comes, comes to one thing that happens right at the beginning of a child’s life.And we’re going to talk about that right after this break.

Right now I’m reading this book called Wellness by Nathan Hill, and it’s fiction, um, but it, it talks about, like, it’s following this couple who meet in college and have this romantic life, and right now I’m in their child rearing era, where things are not so much romance anymore, but they’re about taking care of their kid, and the, the, The woman, Elizabeth, she is at home with her toddler, Toby, and she got a PhD in child psychology.

And so it’s her going through all of her worries and stuff, and then citing the articles that the worries came from. It’s so amusing to me because I feel like this is what we do here at No Guilt Ball. We can go back to the paper and like, kids need this because of this. Kids need this because of this.

Because of this and one thing in particular is she talked about this thing called the sacred hour Which was mentioned in this research paper. And honestly, I don’t know if these papers are real. They might be real But it is a work of fiction I need to say but it illustrates so perfectly and the sacred hour is This time right after the child is born where it’s put on mom’s chest to like help regulate their breathing and, you know, the skin to skin contact.

But this particular article said the first hour after birth was so important. And in her particular labor situation, she was in labor, baby’s heartbeat dropped, her blood pressure rose, called for an emergency C section where then like they drugged her up, they cut her open, and then she fell immediately asleep because she was exhausted.

And so she was dealing with all of her toddler’s temper tantrums, and she’s like, This is my fault, because I fell asleep, and I wasn’t there for the sacred hour of that skin to skin contact. Um, and it’s such, like, a mom guilt moment, and I felt so much for this character, because we do it all the time! and another thing about Us being the default parent and the caretaker, like we think always this is our fault.

We, we’ve taken on too much. We haven’t let dad become a role in our child’s life. well, actually who is there for the child for like at least six weeks because they had maternity leave and who couldn’t be there for the child because there was no paternity leave allowed by

Brie Tucker: It’s right. It’s definitely a back and forth. All right. I am going to tell you the sacred hour is a thing. It is a thing. and again, it’s one of those well intended recommendations for, for individuals that have no clue, had never heard of it, wouldn’t even occur to them that it would be important to have skin to skin contact.

But yeah, and I would totally be, I was that person, you know, my birth story with my first kid, like my first kid, I had placenta previa and I was in and out of the hospital from like 21 weeks on. And I went into labor at, um, full on labor at like 27 weeks and I, in the middle of the night and I remember them trying to stop me.

So I was drugged up to like, I. Barely remember the situation, but I do remember fighting with the nurse refusing to sign the form to put me in a helicopter to send me to a hospital that could that could care for me and my soon to be born. Very preemie, baby, because I could cite at least 15 families I had worked with where the mom went into labor early was life flighted somewhere.

And that child had a major disability. So I was positive that that was going to happen. I was doped up quite a bit at one point. I do remember my, my ex husband coming over to me and being like, Hey, if you don’t get this shit together, they’re going to like take away. Yeah. They’re going to make me sign that you’re a mentally incompetent.

JoAnn Crohn: Oh gosh.

Brie Tucker: So, and, uh, yeah, I just remember going, but I’m just saying like, yeah, I, and I did the same thing too, when my kids were little, like when they were little, I was mentally going through that checklist. How much tummy time have we had? Did we roll over correctly? Like, Oh, you know, what developmental milestones are we hitting? Oh, his articulation doesn’t sound right. Maybe there’s a speech delay coming, you know, and again, I have a history of speech delay in my family. So,

JoAnn Crohn: Yeah.

Brie Tucker: but I think

JoAnn Crohn: be the

Brie Tucker: So like, so that sacred hour, like I didn’t get that sacred hour. My baby was whisked away when I finally had him at 35 weeks. So hats off to all the middle, all the, uh, prenatal care there. Like, but he was whisked away because I wasn’t well, I was reacting badly to the anesthesia for the C section and he wasn’t breathing well. He was breathing, but not well. So, but those, but those things do make you come back and be like, Oh my God, if I had just done that differently. And we, and we put so much of that on our shoulders because it, like you just said, default parent, like so much of it falls on us. And sometimes dads aren’t given that opportunity to come in and have that time and that bonding with their kids because of societal expectations. But that’s where we have to advocate.

JoAnn Crohn: and like, knowing it beforehand. Because when I was reading the book, I’m like, wait a minute, like, this skin to skin contact, it could be done by any human. It doesn’t need to be done by the mom. And like, in this Scenario in the book, like they were in a relationship and I was like, where was dad? Dad could have come in and did they do the kangaroo care during that sacred hour and it would have been fine So it’s not like the mom’s primary job. It’s so much of the literature out. There is saying mother It’s the mother It’s the mother. It’s the mother. Oh, come

Brie Tucker: Or it just says, or it just says it needs to happen. And because of the way our society is set up, we all go, Oh, well, that’s mom’s job. yeah, the kids like mom. So it’s mom’s job to play with them individually. That’s what my wife does.

JoAnn Crohn: Something interesting that I just learned is, because a common pushback is that, you know, women are biologically attuned because they just had the baby and all these hormones or whatever. I learned that actually fathers, when their baby’s born, their testosterone drops so that they can become better caretakers. Yeah!

Like, it dr No, I just found it out too. It was in this book, On Our Best Behavior, by Elise Lunen, who I’m reading right now. And I’m like, that is so interesting. So, actually, dads, biologically, are ready to take care of the kids as well. Uh, they just need the time and the space to do that in our society.

Brie Tucker: Which is hard. So, yeah, yeah. It’s funny. The only thing I knew about in terms of like hormones and whatnot is that, you know, women are genetically engineered to be irritated. To be, uh, discomforted when our children cry,

JoAnn Crohn: Mm.

Brie Tucker: especially during that first year. Like, we are genetically wired to have that bug us, so that we didn’t abandon our babies back in the cave

JoAnn Crohn: Yeah. And because we were

Brie Tucker: And that stupid trait, that stupid trait is still there, and that is why. Nails on chalkboard when our kids cry, and our husbands can sleep right through it, and we’re like, what? I didn’t hear anything.

JoAnn Crohn: They need to be hit. They need to be hit hard. Take that stress and irritability and use it on your husband, who’s right there asleep beside you.

Brie Tucker: just let the baby cry. I don’t know why you let it bother you so much. Gah!

JoAnn Crohn: recommendations, what we’re saying is that there are a lot of, like, unmet needs by the parents during these situations. And, the, this Washington Post article that I referred to earlier, from 2015, it says that the study Showed that quality time actually trumped quantity.

it says, in fact, it appears the sheer amount of time parents spend with their kids between the ages of 3 and 11 has virtually no relationship to how the children turn out and a minimal effect on Uh, and this comes from the Journal of Marriage and Family. It was a study published there and it also includes children’s academic achievement, behavior and emotional well being.

No correlation between quantity spent and quality. one of the study’s authors said, I could literally show you 20 charts, and 19 of them would show no relationship between the amount of parents time and children’s outcomes. And that was from Melissa Mielke, who’s a sociologist at the University of Toronto.

But, but, but, One study found one key instance when parent time can be particularly harmful to children, and this is like the surprising thing. That’s when parents, mothers in particular, there’s that mothers, are stressed, sleep deprived, guilty, and anxious. I mean, that is a bomb drop right there. Because how many of us are guilty and anxious? Hi, me.

Brie Tucker: Oh yeah, right? Sleep deprived? Every parent, especially if, especially if you’re in the situation where only mom can stay home with the kid during that maternity leave. Like, oh my God, that’s hard.

JoAnn Crohn: Yeah, it’s so hard. And so this recommendation about spending 20 minutes of one on one time with each child, if it’s making you guilty and anxious, that’s not good for the kid. It’s not good for the kid. Like, it’s better to drop that expectation.

Brie Tucker: and in most cases, and nope, nope. I take that back. Not even most cases. And in a lot of cases, not even most, there’s, there is more than one caregiver. So don’t take it all on your shoulders. It’s not all your responsibility. I don’t care that you’re a stay at home parent. I don’t care that you’re the one that the kids prefer to go to. I don’t care that the other parent works really hard and is stressed out from their job. We all have stressors. We all do. It doesn’t all have to be on one parent. It is a shared load. It took two people to make that baby. Two people! Two people can share in the, in the child rearing.

JoAnn Crohn: It, it, it’s crazy because like I have these discussions with my husband all the time. Like his job is nutso. I mean just the other night, he came home at 8pm and he came into the kitchen and I was like, Oh, I get like a little free time and I’m like, I’m just gonna like go get changed really quick.

And he looks at me and he’s like, I have 15 minutes till I have to be on a call. And I’m like, are you kidding me? And he’s like, no, I don’t. I’m not. And he felt bad about it because it was a project that had to be done. And then he was on a call from 8. 30 to 10. 30 that night when I went to bed. So that was like my only time to spend with him.

Is in those 15 minutes. so the thing is, is that a lot of times we see those and we’re like, Oh, we’ll just take on more and more and more. And because of this work we do with no guilt mom and all of this stuff, I am a big pushback. I push back a lot on the corporate culture. I push back a lot on the expectations of like a job like that and how it’s just ruining family life. Um, and you know, he works for the same company. My father in law did my father. In law and mother in law got divorced, so my mother in law is also in my ear being like, that company ruins families.

Brie Tucker: chirp. Yeah, yeah, that doesn’t help.

JoAnn Crohn: No, I have a lot. I have a lot of pushback on it. And it’s honestly, the only way we can make change is pushing back on these expectations for men and for women. Because I know, like, it’s easy to say, like, don’t take it on yourself, but there’s also, like, societal things that are happening that need to be pushed back on to make change, like, really possible. And I think a lot of us women are being gaslit into thinking it’s just us.

Brie Tucker: oh, that is 100 percent true. And I think a lot of it too, like, our lives are ebb and flows. Like, we really have to, to like, take a moment sometimes and look at it and be like, listen, every stage of parenting is hard. Like, the, The part where you’re growing the human being, and you’re throwing up all the time, and you’re exhausted, and if you’re like Brie, you literally fall asleep at the dinner table.

That’s a hard time. Newborns, you don’t get any sleep because they need you constantly. Like, preschoolers, school age, teenagers. Once you just left the nest, once you’re coming back into the nest, once they are off having their own families, every single stage of life is hard and there are ebbs and there are flows and there are times when things are going to be smooth and you’re going to be able to adjust it.

Like I, we had an episode where we talked about it and I remember, um, Oh, who was it? Was it Eve Roski? Someone was talking about, no, it wasn’t. It was, um, Brene Brown about how, like, listen, I’m coming in at a 20 today. Like I, I really could use you to help pick up the other 80 percent because I’m just, I’m strained.

I’m strained. I’m just at my wits end. And if you both come in and like, listen, I’m at a 20 and then your partner looks at you and goes, dude, I’m at a 20 as well. Okay. Well then we got to figure out where the other 60s coming from.

It’s all about, like you said, it’s, because I think sometimes when we say pushing back people are like, Oh no, that’s rude. That’s disrespectful. I can’t do that. And we’re not talking about that. In some cases, you might need to like shove, but most of the time it’s a conversation. It’s like what you just said. It’s like about talking about it. And

JoAnn Crohn: accepting it as, like, this is how it is and I just have to deal with it. It’s, I’m not happy with this, we need to find out something to change. Yeah.

Brie Tucker: parenting partner wants you to be happy. They don’t like it when you’re miserable,

JoAnn Crohn: No, no.

Brie Tucker: So we’re here to tell you it’s important to spend time with your kids, yes, but you’re not going to break them if they don’t get 15 minutes a day individualized attention from you every day.

JoAnn Crohn: yeah, we hope we have helped dispel that myth and let you in on a bit of a nuance to it. So, until next time, remember, the best mom is a happy mom. Take care of you. We’ll talk to you later.

Brie Tucker: Thanks for stopping by.