February Roundup: Even Marie Kondo Isn’t Tidy After Kids
It's okay to throw your aspirations of perfect habits and tidy houses in the garbage
Welcome to the February 2023 Recap! Below are links from the best things that I’ve been reading this month about parenting, caretaking, and building a business* (that is, building a business when you have kids). Plus, links to things that made me absolutely double over laughing. If you have reading recommendations to add to this list, please share them in the comments! Also, our book club is this Friday all about organizing digital information. Speaking of organization…
Children are endless entropy.
Marie Kondo admits to giving up on tidying up now that she has three kids. See!? Being tidy is an impossible goal when you’re fighting the entropy of children with boundless energy. Why does this feel like a Schadenfreüde moment? More practically, I love her tip: “Come up with a doable joy routine and stick with it for 10 days, then see whether the daily habit changes are making you feel better.” It’s not about the perfect morning routine, it’s about first, is it do-able, and second does it actually make you feel better to do it? If not, it’s garbage. Thank you.
LAUGHING
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“Put me down drowsy but awake, please.”
Drowsy but awake is not about the babies, it’s actually the default description of what it’s like to be a parent. This made me laugh out loud. Some kids are easier to get to sleep than others, and your parenting style may not be what actually got your kid to go to sleep. Humor write Lucy Huber calls this out—and the replies are delightful.
READING
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Breaks are part of my survival strategy.
10 minute breaks are important for creative work. Yup. I need breaks to survive. For me, thought, the challenge is finding a 10 minute break when children don’t abide by standard employment laws. There are no 15 minute breaks that you can count on. That, and I also am spending my willpower bank down so fast that night-time turns into scrolling on my phone in an infinite endless loop of laundry, dishes, and reels.
But if I need a break on the weekend, I try to turn to delightful parent hacks like the one Asha Dornfest shared one about setting up a “Tattoo Shop” for your kids. It goes like this: you lie facedown on the floor and let your kid draw all over your back with markers. Tell them they’re in charge of giving you tattoos. These are the innovations I need.
More pressure to provide child care?
To gain access to federal funds, companies will need to provide child care. That’s an interesting incentive. After two years where congress failed to alleviate the childcare crisis and provide much-needed support for parents, children, and caregivers, American employers are sounding the alarm. In 2022, a bipartisan group passed the CHIPS Act, “which devoted $39 billion to directly boost U.S. semiconductor factories as part of $52 billion in subsidies for the industry, in hopes of making the nation less reliant on foreign suppliers for critical chips that power computers, video games, cars and more.” From The New York Times:
“American employers, including manufacturers, are increasingly raising concerns that a lack of access to affordable child care is blocking millions of Americans from looking for work, particularly women.”
“On Tuesday, the Commerce Department will announce that any semiconductor manufacturer seeking a slice of nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies will need to essentially guarantee affordable, high-quality child care for workers who build or operate a plant.”
WRITING.
Why we need other people to see us
Other people can see you in ways that you can’t always see yourself. It’s one of the reasons why we need each other. There's a false notion that you have to love yourself before others can love you. Dr. Emily Anhalt, a psychoanalytic psychologist, says this is a total myth. We don't start alone and learn to love ourselves independently. We need others to give us love and reflect back to us. We are a networked, social being. "We learn to love ourselves through the love we receive from others, ideally starting with our caregivers," she explains.
Parenting builds leadership skills
Your journey in parenting is building you into the next-level leader that our world so deeply needs. It turns out the skills you get through parenting are the top skills we need from CEOs and leaders.
Parenting expands your ability to understand other people, to weather the storm, to attend to internal and external emotional hurricanes, and it asks you to cultivate patience like none other. In Western cultures, however, mothers and caretakers are mostly rendered invisible, bound to the home, and isolated from one another. As a result, this type of skill-building is often invisible and unrecognized. At Startup Parent, we want to remind you of all of these newly-acquired skills.
The projection of motherhood sets us up for failure
Think about the media messages you get about pregnancy and parenting: “it’s all worth it," “you’ll want to be just a mother,” “pregnancy is glow-y and natural,” “breastfeeding is easy, free, and natural,” — oh boy, do those set you up for a rude awakening. I’ve come to see these motherhood myths as a trap that keeps parents (especially mothers) underpaid and stuck. These myths seep into our unconscious, and we start living like we need to prove them right. It's why women end up competing against each other. It looks like striving to do it all (sending thank-you notes, looking cute, losing the weight, home for dinner, intensive parenting, plus a top job).
PODCASTS
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How childhood stress affects adult health
Dr. Michelle Stephens (she/her/hers) is clinician, scientist, and entrepreneur who is passionate about mitigating ACEs. She has a PhD in early childhood stress physiology from the University of California, San Francisco. She is the co-founder of Oath Care, a company that provides community-based healthcare to support new parents and reduce childhood stress.
"When kids experience stress and it's not buffered by a caring adult, the adult and themselves put themselves on a worse health trajectory,” says Dr. Michelle Stephens. “...They're even multiple times more likely to die earlier, like, ten to 20 years earlier." Listen to the interview with Dr. Michelle Stephens.
The journey through grief and healing
Marisa Renee Lee is the author of Grief is Love: Living with Loss, a book that guides readers through the pain of loss and offers a unique perspective on what healing truly means. A former appointee in the Obama White House, Marisa has served in various leadership roles, including Deputy Director of Private Sector Engagement and Senior Advisor on the Domestic Policy Council. In this episode, we talk about how grief shows up, why it doesn’t look like we expect, and how we can support each other (and ourselves) in this lifelong process. Listen to the interview with Marisa Renee Lee.
OVER TO YOU.
If you have reading recommendations to add to this list, please share them in the comments! Join us at our next book club gathering this Friday all about organizing digital information.
That’s all for today.
— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent