“Mental Health Tips for Working Parents in the School Holidays” - not my snazziest title I’ll admit, but I bet a whole load of you read that and internally said ‘omg yes, I know exactly what you are talking about.’ The school holiday / work juggle struggle is real.

To be clear, I consider all parents to be working parents whether that work is paid or unpaid, because being a parent is incredibly hard work.

**Artist credit:** Brian Gordon, **Fowl Language Comics**

Workplace mental health challenges for parents

You may fit into any of a number of categories here.

The main caregiver during the holidays, trying to juggle about 50 different things at once and feeling like you are failing at all of them. Dropping kids off to an activity at 9am and meeting a client at 9am. Too early for one and running late for the other. Important work project booked and your childcare arrangement falls through. Completely forgetting an appointment and snapping at the kids. Feeding them cheesy pasta for the fifth night on the trot and wondering how many nutritional bases are covered by alphabet-shaped macaroni. You’re throwing 100 balls in the air at the same time and inevitably you drop some of them.

**Artist credit:** **Jodi L. Milner** aka Tsuchigari

The main breadwinner, and you don’t get any time with your kids. Even when they’re home for a fortnight, you’re traveling for work or leaving at 6am to beat traffic then getting tied up in the afternoons despite your best efforts to get out the door on time. Maybe you long to cut your hours back but that feels more impossible with every interest rate / petrol / food price rise.
You are co-parenting or have access issues due to a broken relationship and you either struggle to book time with them during the holidays or you are away from them for longer periods than usual because the other caregiver/s in the picture have them over the holidays. You may feel lonelier or more conscious of your relationship status than usual. You might be jealous of your colleagues who complain about the difficulties of juggling kids and work, because you would do anything to see more of yours.

Your family status is not heteronormative - maybe you are caregiving for siblings or grandchildren, childfree not by choice, single parenting, fostering, or any other family type that is outside the shape most of society sees as representing ‘family;’ so you have the same or similar challenges and stressors, but with less access to support whilst experiencing more ‘othering.’

What are the Mental Health risks?

Stress - self-explanatory really ! Juggling a million things at once is stressful. If you have the kids at home while you’re trying to work, you will be splitting your focus and dealing with more noise and distractions while working (remember the clip of the newsreader live on air when his daughter ran into the room?)

**Artist credit:** Adrienne Hedger, **HedgerHumor**

Burn-out: burnout is defined by the World Health Organisation as an occupational syndrome (italics mine) that arises from mismatches between a person and their job - for example, an unmanageable workload with poor controls - so strictly speaking, home issues do not cause ‘burn out’ per se. However let’s be real here, nobody leaves themselves at the front door to the office. This is not an episode of Severance. Whatever level of stress you have on your shoulders goes with you into your workplace so unmanaged home stress will contribute to burnout. Especially if those stressors feature a lack of control and autonomy.

Anxiety - if you suffer from anxiety; having more commitments to juggle, less free time and an increase in scheduling issues will ramp up anxiety levels.
Loneliness - particularly for anyone who is either away from their children during this time, not by choice, or anyone who is full-time caring for their children but missing other important social interactions due to caring responsibilities.

Depression
Impostor Syndrome - juggling multiple conflicting priorities whilst also being bombarded with images of ‘perfect families’ enjoying their holidays together (with all their work commitments miraculously sorted) is absolute fodder for an exaggerated sense of guilt and perceived under-achievement.

The solutions

What can parents do?

A solution in three words. ACT: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (pronounced act as in actor).

Whereas positive psychology tries to find the positives in any situation i.e looking on the bright side, ACT revolves around accepting the situation that you’re in and committing - not to changing your situation, but to living the best life you can regardless of your situation.

ACT means accepting the fact that sometimes life serves you up a poop sandwich and you can take that poop sandwich and live a meaningful, rich existence even while that poop sandwich is sitting right in front of you.

ACT is having awareness that your situation right now is not ideal, but you can control how you respond to it, and you can choose to find meaning and purpose and enjoyment in your life even while you live through an un-ideal situation.

**Artist credit:** Connie J. Sun aka **Cartoon Connie**

Things aren’t always easy. Sometimes, things are really bloody hard.

Sometimes, no matter how good a parent you are, you lose your temper.

Sometimes, no matter how good you are at your job, you forget an important date, or get distracted when you’re on a phone call to an important client.

Sometimes, even when you do everything ‘right,’ the wrong things happen.

**Artist credit:** Debbie Ridpath Ohi aka **InkyGirl**

The honest truth is that you can’t have it all. What happens in one moment does not define you. Losing your sh*t one evening because the laundry mountain is out of control does not make you a bad person. You’re more than your relationship status, more than your parental status, and more than your career. You have value as a human being even when you are not managing all the complex variables in your life with absolute precision.

Maybe you are alienated from your kids and desperately want to see them in the holidays. Maybe you would sell your soul to any deity that wanted it in exchange for someone else’s laundry mountain, if it meant you got the holidays with your kids.

ACT can help you to accept that even when things are really, really tough, you can live a meaningful life. Feelings will come and go and situations will be tough at times and easier at other times, but like the grass that keeps growing or the sun that rises and sets, we can learn to accept each moment for what it is and then let it go, and no matter how we feel at any given time, we will commit to taking action that will result in maximising the potential for richness in our lives.

How to practise ACT

Mindfulness and visualisation can help.

‘Accepting’ something that is pretty damn well rubbish can feel like a tough nut to swallow. Even monks on mountaintops spend decades training for that level of zen.

Try visualising yourself accepting and letting go. You might imagine a river, with all of life’s challenges as flotsam and jetsam, traveling down stream. A difficult situation becomes a large piece of driftwood, and you watch it swivel and bob through the water, watching with curiosity as it disappears out of sight.

ACT contains 6 core principles. For the sake of simplicity here I will cover three of the most basic principles that beginners to ACT can try at home now, with a link to further research and tools to follow up on for a broader and more in-depth understanding.

Defusion: this means distancing oneself from thoughts and emotions and seeing them as what they are rather than what they seem like in the immediate moment. For example, if you are feeling harried, making dinner while thinking about your schedule for tomorrow, and you feel overwhelmed, step back mentally and think ‘I notice that I am feeling overwhelmed. That’s interesting. My pulse is high and my mood is low.’ Observe your feelings as if you are standing outside of yourself looking in. Perhaps imagine a David Attenborough accent. This will take time and practise, but eventually, you will find yourself calmer in these situations and able to accept your feelings rather than be overwhelmed by them.

Acceptance: Rather than ‘I want the kids to enjoy the holidays, but I am too stressed and anxious to relax with them,’ ‘I want the kids to enjoy the holidays, AND I am too stressed and anxious to relax with them.’ The difference is that in ACT we accept our thoughts and feelings as simply things that exist (transiently, though often uncomfortably) in the world. We don’t see them as things we need to fight against. We can let go of ideas about how we should or ought to feel or how we could feel differently and accept how we feel and commit to living as well as we can alongside our difficult feelings.

Contact with the Present Moment: Anxieties and worries tend to be centred on our ruminations or assumptions about either the past or the future. Being in the present moment means we stay engaged with what is happening right now. Again, this takes practise. Start by being aware of your breath, or noticing the sounds in the room without judgment. The more often you do this, the easier it will become.

For a review of meta-analyses about the efficacy of ACT see here (across 20 meta-analyses and close to 12,500 participants, ACT was not a cure-all but showed as effective across a range of conditions including depression, anxiety and pain.)

For a basic book about how to begin practicing ACT, try ACT made simple by Russ Harris. The book is fairly pricey in NZ but you can download the first chapter free from Dr. Harris website along with a number of resources on how to get started.

What can Employers do?

Show empathy
Don’t presume anyone’s family situation. ‘Family’ comes in a raft of different shapes and sizes each as valid as the other.
Provide the same appropriate, flexible supports to everybody. One of the ways in which employers can promote inclusion, close the gender pay gap, and improve mental health at work and home for all genders is by offering the same flexible working opportunities to everybody. That means not simply offering the flexibility but ensuring that taking advantage of flexible options does not mean missing out on promotions or career opportunities (either overtly or not), or experiencing negative comments or judgments (e.g jokes and banter about ‘being a part-timer’).

**Artist credit:** Mary Catherine Star, **Mom Life comics** (author of the ‘flip the script’ series

Flexible working - TRULY flexible working. Not sure what your employees need? ASK them. Take a consultative approach to your Psychosocial Hazard management. This means checking in regularly to find out what the risks to your people are and check if your controls are working and making adjustments accordingly.

**Artist credit:** Liz Climo, **The Little World of Liz**

Workplaces, and people’s lives, are dynamic. What works for one person may not work for another, and what works one week may change in another week as your people get married, get divorced, have a kid, experience loss, get a puppy, get sick, get well, win the lottery or get absolutely floored by one of life’s unexpected knocks. Be an employer who supports their people and your people will reward you with better engagement, higher levels of community, higher levels of presenteeism and better retention.

Need help assessing, preventing, and supporting for anxiety, stress and burnout?

Glia is here for you.

We are a team of highly experienced registered Psychologists who are experts in the world of work.

Contact us for Psychosocial Risk Assessments, Burnout Recovery Coaching, and virtual or in-house workshops to support mental health in the workplace and reduce the impact of stress, anxiety and other psychosocial hazards at work.

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Follow the writer, Ngaire Wallace, on LinkedIn here.