These Charlotteans found a solution for parent burnout, then wrote a book about it.
For parents, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant more than a temporary stay-at-home order and face masks.
It has meant remote learning. Closed daycares. Balancing childcare and schoolwork with full-time jobs. Canceled activities and playdates, school at home — and then back in class again.
Two local parents, a teacher and a physician, came up with a solution, called Power Switch Parenting, which they documented in a book to help other parents struggling with raising children and working in the “new normal.”
Dr. K. Nicole Mims, a sleep physician at Atrium Health, is the mother of two children, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old. When daycare closed during COVID-19, she was trying to see patients remotely while her husband was also trying to work from home.
“There was a lot of tension initially because it felt like we were often fighting about whose work was more important, when in fact, both of us working was equally important,” Mims said.
Anna Sink, a teacher of nine years and founder of Pathways Tutoring, is balancing a job and raising her 3-year-old and 1-year-old alongside her husband, who started working at home during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I was trying to figure out online tutoring, taking care of a 3-year-old and a baby on my own, and not being able to go anywhere or have much help. It was tough,” Sink said.
Mims and Sink, who met via church as they both had children the same age, realized they were both experiencing a similar issue, which has become increasingly prevalent in today’s pandemic-ridden society: parent burnout.
Parent burnout: Another pandemic side-effect
“Instead of giving ourselves some slack, whether it comes to productivity levels or parenting standards, many of us feel like we’re failing at, well, everything — even though every article we read, every friend we talk to, tells us otherwise,” read a recent New York Times article by Anne Helen Peterson.
Perfect parenting doesn’t exist, but the societal pressure to achieve it makes it appear otherwise. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, parent burnout has become an even more stark reality, as parents are balancing not only work, but also childcare, Zoom sessions, meals, screen-time monitoring and more.
“I think parent burnout — like most other types of burnout — is a symptom of being pulled in too many directions at once. Burnout seems to be a term coined in our lifetime, which I attribute to the emergence of being able to accomplish anything, anywhere,” Mims said. “There are great advantages to this — especially in a pandemic — but the disadvantage to doing all things at once is that it can blur the lines between personal and work time.”
Mims believes that parent burnout is fueled by easily-accessible examples on the internet of the expectations of the “perfect parent.”
The COVID-19 pandemic added to this stress, as parents needed to become teachers at home and find ways to balance their own work with their children home throughout the summer.
When Mims’ child’s daycare initially closed, she called Sink, her friend from church (Dilworth United Methodist, for anyone wondering), and together they started brainstorming, then coined their solution: Power Switch Parenting.
Designing the Power Switch Parenting method
The Power Switch Parenting method describes periods of “On” time, during which parents are actively engaged with children, interspersed with periods of “Off” time, where parents focus on achieving “self” goals (e.g., work) while their children do the same.
“The best thing about the Power Switch Parenting method is that it provides a roadmap for how to re-establish boundaries between our parenting role and our ‘self’ role,” Mims said. “We intentionally buck the trend that parenting requires being ‘on’ all the time.”
The duo believes that it’s healthy and appropriate for children to learn to operate individually to nurture their independence — kind of like removing training wheels from a bike.
“It’s doubly important to use the method during the pandemic because it can provide guidelines for when to schedule work meetings and virtual visits with clients, and when to engage our children so they feel supported,” Mims said.
Both Mims and Sink used their respective areas of expertise to develop the Power Switch Parenting method.
Sink’s background in teaching afforded her practice with time management in scheduling kids’ days. When the pandemic hit, Sink had to overcome a new challenge: structuring her own time, her own kids’ days and new methods to tutor her students.
“Many of the themes are ones that I use when tutoring,” Sink said. “I provide times, similar to ‘off’ times, when students have to complete a task independently and then we come back together to review the work, and I can teach any skills that need extra work.”
What Mims brought to the table is the knowledge of what good sleep can do for our bodies.
“As a sleep doctor, one of the things I do daily is help manage people’s schedules to improve their sleep and wakefulness. I like to think of myself as a sleep time management expert,” she said. One of the most common things Mims has seen amid the COVID-19 pandemic is disrupted sleep related to inconsistent schedules and increased stress.
“Almost overnight, kids were out of school, parents were working from home and schedules got turned on their heels,” Mims said. “When sleep time is inconsistent, the brain and body get confused about when sleep is supposed to occur.”
Since school has restarted, Mims has seen parents sacrificing their sleep to help children with virtual schooling.
“A lot of parents are either delaying their work tasks until after their kids are done with virtual schooling and then finishing it after bedtime, or delaying bedtime so they have time to down time sans-kid and work,” Mims said. “One of the advantages of the Power Switch Parenting method is that it can help preserve sleep by incorporating work time into daytime.”
Power Switch Parenting
Available on Amazon.
This story was originally published November 4, 2020 at 10:47 AM.
