Sustainable Parenting

103. Self-Care Bulldozing: How We Get in Our Own Way

• Flora McCormick, LCPC, Parenting Coach

Share episode

Today we explore the concept of "self-care bulldozing" – how parents (especially mothers) create more work for themselves by making it difficult for partners to help effectively. 

Breaking these patterns can remove what feels like "50 pounds of bricks" from your shoulders and create more sustainable partnership in parenting.

• Self-care bulldozing typically shows up as micromanaging, gatekeeping, or not voicing needs. 

• The solution centers around direct communication rather than expecting mind-reading. 


• Two key phrases to remember: "Wishing will not make it so" and "It never hurts to ask"

• Practical tools and ideas for better teamwork will be discussed. 


Join us next week as we dive into "parenting from the neck up" and how this common error creates challenges with our children.


✨Want more?

1) Use this link for a FREE 20 min clarity call with Sustainable Parenting.

2) Download the FREE pdf. on getting kids to listen.

3) Buy a 3 session Coaching Bundle (saving you $100) - for THREE 30-min sessions 1:1 with ME, where we get right to the heart of your challenges, and give you small, powerful shifts that make a huge difference fast.

Speaker 1:

You're listening to episode 103 of the Sustainable Parenting Podcast, and in my work as a parenting coach and being a mom of two kids and being married for almost 15 years, I have experienced and seen many people get caught up in what I would call self-care bulldozing, and what I mean is that we are working really hard but we're kind of creating a new mountain. That is also going to just be more work and in terms of self-care bulldozing, what I see most of all is that we can make it really hard for our partners to help and we do a lot of things that take a lot of energy, thinking it's going to make it better but actually might be making it worse. So I want to talk about that today, because when you can correct this and get in the right pattern of how to make it more likely that your partner can truly help you, so long as you have a partner really willing to do that, it can be like having 50 pounds of bricks taken off of your shoulders, and I would love that for you today and this week, mama. So let's talk about it. Hello and welcome to the Sustainable Parenting Podcast. Let me tell you, friend, this place is different. We fill that gap between gentle parenting and harsh discipline that's really missing. To parent with kindness and firmness at the same time really missing. To parent with kindness and firmness at the same time and give you the exact steps to be able to parent in ways that are more realistic and effective and, for that reason, finally feel sustainable. Welcome. Okay, before I get too much farther and we get started here, I want to remind you that I am a live parenting coach that works every week with real people. So if you have more questions after this episode and are looking for more support, please reach out via the link you see in the show notes to set up a clarity call with me. Also, I want to remind you that if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure you have subscribed and you have left a review. You could do so by clicking the stars at the bottom of all of the episodes and share what this podcast has meant to you or any feedback that you have.

Speaker 1:

Now on to self-care bulldozing. Now on to self-care bulldozing. A bulldozer, I picture, is doing a lot of work, but like pushing everything into a mound in a different area. That is just going to have to be dealt with later and is additional work. So I want to talk about how we interact with our partners and the things that we want them to be doing to help our teamwork and make sure we're not bulldozing, but instead we're building solutions. We're going to stop bulldozing and move into building solutions. Here's what I mean.

Speaker 1:

Bulldozing typically in my own life looked like micromanaging, being like you have to do it exactly this way. Or it looked like gatekeeping and saying no, no, no, you can't do that because you're not going to do it right. Or it looked like not voicing what I really needed help with. Let me tell some stories of each one of these. So the first one, in terms of micromanaging, I can remember telling my husband that he needed to clip my son's nails in just this exact way. You need to use these nail clippers and you need to use this file, because if you clip too close, then it's going to hurt him, it's going to be terrible and you have to do it at this particular time, while he's distracted in this way, and he was like I don't want to do it that way, and it actually also combined with gatekeeping. I was like, well, if you don't do it that way, then it's not going to work. I've tried it, I promise you. Well, guess what, friends? He had a different idea, which was that he wanted to clip the nails while our child was sleeping and I was like, oh, it's going to wake him up, it's going to be terrible. It didn't, and it worked better and he wasn't pulling his hand away, so it actually led to less likelihood of clipping it wrong because he was just there flopped, sleeping. So if I had been able to approach it at first without micromanaging and gatekeeping, it would have just been something that he did and we would have all moved on happily. And instead it was this battle and I had to be proven wrong first. But the good news is, after that situation, it really impacted me, thinking, moving forward Okay, let me figure out how to not micromanage and how to not gatekeep that. He might have a different way to do it. That will be okay, and it might even go better than how I would handle it.

Speaker 1:

The third aspect that it typically can look like when we're bulldozing and making life harder for ourselves is not speaking up for what we really need, and an example I can think of is I remember just morning after morning, scathing looks at my husband while he would sit and drink a cup of coffee while I was getting three people dressed and fed for the morning. So he was working. I was a stay-at-home mom and so in my mind I made this assumption that that's my job. His job is to get ready for work and go to work, so if he's sitting there and drinking a cup of coffee, that's part of him doing his job. I'm the caretaker, a little bit more the more primary parent, but while being a stay-at-home mom, so it must be my job to have to feed and dress and get everyone going in the morning. But it really felt unequal because if he had a moment to sit and just slowly sip a cup of coffee while looking on his phone and reading an article, and I was like furiously trying to put out fires of a hungry child and a child running away while needing to get dressed and my own belly being super hungry and just wanting something to get going as I was nursing and needing extra calories, all the things you know, you know all the things moms, I, I, I realized wait a minute. I am really frustrated at this situation. But I have not asked for what I would prefer here and let me just be clear.

Speaker 1:

I think a lot of us women I'm going to super stereotype for just a moment If you're in a partner arrangement between a man and a woman or it could be same sex, but you just have these different dynamics between you two, I typically find that there's one person for me it was the woman myself that is very attuned to the environment. I think the nurturers in our relationships tend to be people who really just tune in intuitively who needs what? And I'm looking at these little signs. I'm seeing someone rushing around. I'm thinking, oh, I bet that person wants help. I'm going to speak up and say that.

Speaker 1:

But not everyone is wired that way and especially in our partnership. My husband is not naturally wired that way and I see that in many men that it's like oh, if someone says, will you do x, I will do x. But I don't naturally just like interpret things the same way of like seeking how I could be helpful or what this person might need from me. If they don't say what they need from me, they don't need anything from me. That's I'm kind of paraphrasing my husband's overall view. But so if you're in a dynamic like that, like it's not good guy, bad guy, these are just differences of how we're wired and what I recommend is that you get better at voicing what you really clearly need.

Speaker 1:

So in my situation it was coming to my husband and saying you know what, if you have the ability to like sit down for 10 minutes to 15 minutes and drink your coffee, I wonder if it's okay sometimes for me to say, hey, could you help this one kid with something? So then we both get to sit down and drink coffee for at least five minutes, like, can we split the difference? Me zero coffee, you 15 minutes of coffee? Can we meet in the middle and he was like totally, oh my gosh, yeah, like yep, and from that day forward we have had a better balance.

Speaker 1:

In that I always think of one of my favorite professors in college that I was taking this leadership course and she said there are two main rules that I live by that have helped me to be more successful in so many areas of my life, and they are this wishing will not make it so, and it never hurts to ask. And oh, those two phrases have really served me in a lot of different places in life and they certainly do with my solutions with my partner is if I'm not having space for self-care, rather than just be in my head and like why doesn't he know? Why can't he just see that obviously he's not doing anything and I'm doing everything? To pause and say to myself hold on, it never hurts to ask. And wishing will not make it. So that served me so well to remember. Okay, I can't just imagine he should be a mind reader. Wishing it in my head is never going to change anything, so let's just ask. And worst case scenario he says no, it doesn't work for me for X, y, z reason. And then we're still where we're at. Best case scenario, he says, yeah, I just hadn't thought to step up in that moment in that way. Thanks for being clear with me. And we get to move forward with more partnership. So wishing will not make it so and it never hurts to ask.

Speaker 1:

So, friend, in order to be more solution focused with your partner, instead of, you know, being in a space where you are just assuming they should read your mind or micromanaging or gatekeeping, I want to encourage you to open the gates, say what you need and be clear about how you guys can better partner. Two key little tools that I want to give to you. I'm not being sponsored or anything like this, but I just love these two tangible tools that help. Partnering in responsibility so that then you have space for more self-care is number one to check out the app called AnyList. This is something that has helped us.

Speaker 1:

I was told about this by my sister in law. She's like oh yeah, this way we can both equally pack the diaper bag with what's it, what it needs, because we just have a diaper bag list and it has all the things that need to be in there. We have another list for when we're going swimming and all the things that need to be in there, and the items can get crossed off and then just unchecked very easily to use as a checklist again the next time. It's an app that we both have on our phone and have equal access to the exact same lists, and that makes it so. I'm not oh, did you bring this? Did you pack that? And then he's like God, why don't you just do it yourself? And so that app is really helpful.

Speaker 1:

It's also helped us to share grocery shopping more often. It used to be that we kept a list on our refrigerator, but then it felt again like the default was always on me, as the stay at home parent who was closer physically to the refrigerator list, to find a time to take that list and go shopping. But when we put it electronically on any list it made it so that there were. If my husband got off work 20 to 30 minutes early, he was able to say, hey, I'm going to just run by and grab the groceries and I'd say thank you so much. That's fantastic and I don't have to give him any information. It's all on the app already of what we are needing and what's missing from our fridge. So AnyList super great app.

Speaker 1:

The other app that I really love if you're in a phase where you have nursing or feedings or naps going on for your young child is Huckleberry. This really helps share the information so that if the baby's crying, the non-nursing partner doesn't have to say when did the baby eat last or when did they sleep last. The information is all tracked in this shared area and you get to say when the naps are starting and ending. So there's this mutual information about thinking about when the naps are starting and ending. So there's this mutual information about thinking about when the next nap is going to have to happen or the next feeding is going to have to happen. Love that app, huckleberry.

Speaker 1:

If you have any other suggestions, I would love to hear them from you. Please go to my Instagram or Facebook at sustainable parenting and see a post related to this episode and drop us a line, or you can DM me. What are the resources that you find? Help partnership so that there's more equal, shared partnership and you have more space for self-care, that you're not creating other challenges by gatekeeping, micromanaging or not speaking up and using tools to solve problems. All right, friend, hope this helps you this week to have more kindness and firmness in your parenting so that parenting finally feels sustainable. And in our next episode I'm diving into parenting from the neck up and how that error can be really getting in our way with our kids and the challenges that we face with them. See you next time.