EP 88: Self-Care Strategies For Parents with Dr Olivia Kessel

Please excuse any errors from this autogenerated transcript

Dr Olivia KesselHost

00:06

Welcome to the Send Parenting Podcast. I'm your neurodiverse host, dr Olivia Kessel, and, more importantly, I'm mother to my wonderfully neurodivergent daughter, alexandra, who really inspired this podcast. As a veteran in navigating the world of neurodiversity in a UK education system, I've uncovered a wealth of misinformation, alongside many answers and solutions that were never taught to me in medical school or in any of the parenting handbooks. Each week on this podcast, I will be bringing the experts to your ears to empower you on your parenting crusade. Welcome back to our Summer Pocket Rocket series on our Bite Size podcasts, where we address the real challenges and the opportunities of raising neurodiverse children during the holiday period.

00:57

I'm Dr Olivia and this is our final episode in the Summer series. Last, but definitely not least, this episode is going to focus on our own self-care. What do we need to make sure that our energy, our patience and mental well-being are at optimal levels so that we can be the best parent to our children, no matter how hard it can get sometimes? I've had a few guests on the podcast over the years who have expressed the sentiments that, yes, self-care is really important and a good thing, but that it just feels like another thing on a long list of things to do and that it can add extra pressure into an already pressure-filled life, and I've also felt this at times, you know there just doesn't seem to be a moment to breathe, let alone find time for your own self-care. And the push kind of just to keep going, keep pushing ahead, has been detrimental not only to myself but also to my daughter, as I haven't been able to properly meet her needs and the challenges that she throws up because I haven't taken care of myself. And I think most of the listeners would agree with me that raising a neurodiverse child is much more challenging than raising a neurotypical child. It's kind of I view it like parenting on steroids and it requires a lot of energy, a lot of time and bucket loads of patience. It's a nonstop job In my life. It usually starts around 5 am when she wakes up after numerous broken night sleeps, years of broken night sleeps, and then could end at nine o'clock at night after a harrowing two or three hour bedtime routines. And that was my normal for quite a long time. It's gotten a lot better now, but learning to survive in that is super difficult. Our children also stay younger due to their delay in executive functioning skills. So this high intensity parenting can go on for years, much longer than our friends who have neurotypical children.

02:55

For me, also being a single parent which is a common thing actually as well, because it puts a lot of strain on marriages I was seldom able to actually leave Alexandra, you know, to get some time off without her. It was very hard to find anyone. She was comfortable looking after her. I also worked full-time and had two dogs, so you know, time was at a premium, it was always limited and the time for myself was always pushed aside or ignored. But what I'd like to share with you in this podcast today is what I have learned and I wish I had learned it earlier. Which is basically not taking care of myself has a knock-on effect of not being able to look after Alexandra in the way that I want and meet her needs and be the parent I would like to be. We all have our good and bad parenting moments, but I find that now that I've implemented self-care and really have, I can be a better parent to Alexandra than I could in the past.

04:04

Of us are already living in a really high stress environment at home. Sometimes You're not sure what will trigger your child when the flash anger will happen. You can both be sleep-derived, so you're already at a kind of deficit emotionally and restoratively. So the need to take care of yourself and make sure that you can kind of replenish yourself is essential. It's not a nice-to-have or another thing to add to the list, but it actually is a really key ingredient to success with your neurodiverse child that you can find ways, however small, to take care of yourself and to release some of the pressure so that you can be that calm, regulated presence in your child's or children's lives.

04:43

This analogy has been used before on the show and I've heard others use it as well, but it really is like the airplane where they tell you you know, if you put your mask on your child first and you then don't have any oxygen, that's not the right way around. You need to put your oxygen mask on, and that enables you to then put the oxygen mask on your child. Put the oxygen mask on your child. Um, so, and it's not something that that we do as mothers we put ourselves, you know, the last on the list. We are, you know, we, we don't think about the fact that we need to actually make sure that we are in a good place. Um, and it. It takes getting used to. It takes, you know, it takes time and it takes practice, and it's not always possible.

05:28

But there's a couple of real key things that I have found have made a really big difference, and you know it's similar to our children. Actually it's not that different. First of all, it's getting enough sleep, and this is a tricky one, you know, I didn't get enough sleep for decades because you know your children might need you during the night and it's also really tempting to exchange sleep for time for yourself, whether that's staying up later and oftentimes we stay up later not to do something for ourselves but to do chores that we haven't been able to do during the day or whether it's waking up earlier. But really you have to find a way to balance. I mean it's really key that you get the right numbers hours of sleep, and for an adult that's between seven and nine hours. Personally, like for me, getting eight hours is great, and it varies from person to person. But in last week's episode we talked about sleep as important for our children. It's just as important for us in storms of restoration, emotional stability. All the things that we talked about last week also apply to us. So one of the things that I've done is, you know the old adage when they were babies is people always said oh, when your child sleeps, you should sleep. And I think that's kind of important for us to do with our children, even as they get older.

06:40

You know I go to bed. My daughter goes to bed early now and wakes up early, and so I go to bed early and I wake up early. All of us are different. You have morning people, you have evening people. For me, I try and carve 30 minutes for myself in the morning. She's usually occupied in the morning. She wakes up, she'll watch some TV or play Minecraft, so I can have 30 minutes for myself, or an hour and a half, in fact.

07:09

My schedule. Sometimes I go to bed as early as 8.45, which I know it seems ridiculously early, but I wake up at five o'clock in the morning and that allows me to get my sleep and then also to have sometimes an hour, hour and a half in the morning where I can do something for myself, whether that's exercising, whether that's writing my book, something that's for me. And that takes discipline and it takes getting into routine, but once I'm into it. It actually really works. It becomes harder, I would say again, in the holiday period because routines go out the window, but trying to stick to that routine for myself has been important too, and making sure that I have that sleep, because it really does make a difference if you've had a good night's sleep.

07:53

The second thing which we also mentioned is really important for our children last week is exercise. It's super important for us too. This has been a game changer for me, for my wellbeing. As a child, I was never sporty. I hated PE. Um. I always viewed exercise as something that you had to do, um, something that you would do if you were trying to lose weight. But I didn't really understand the power and the benefit of exercise until I had a neurodiverse child. And now exercise has become a lifeline for my sanity. It's. It gives me an outlet for my stress and it gives me an ability to remain calmer and to be on an even keel with my daughter during the day.

08:35

In times where I haven't been able to exercise let's say, I hurt my knee action, I couldn't run for a while my daughter has even said to me mommy, please can you go running? I think you need to exercise. I think you need to release some of your stress and out of the mouths of babes. But it's true, and for me it was really difficult in the beginning because I am a single parent, I don't have someone else that can look after her. I can't go to the gym, I can't even really go outside and go running. So I had to make a little home gym for myself. So I got a basic runner I think it's even a walker thing, but you can run on it and it was only a hundred pounds, which is a lot of money, but you know what it was worth it for my sanity, you know. Otherwise I was trapped sometimes in the house and now I could run when I injured my knee. Then I got a stationary bike as well and now I, you know, alternate between the two and really getting that 20, 30 minutes of exercise, and I do it six days a week. It really allows me to release my stress, builds up my happy hormones and it replenishes my soul. It puts me in a different mindset and you know I also tend to use that time to multitask, as we do as moms. So I'll either listen to one of my podcasts that I've recorded to see if it's, I've made any errors in editing or stuff like that, or I'll learn from listening to other podcasts or people that I like to listen to. So it's a kind of killing two birds with one stone.

09:57

The other thing that's really important and it's something that sometimes falls by the wayside for moms is nutrition and also alcohol intake. So, you know, what we eat affects how we feel and it is also, you know we're huge role models for our children, but it actually it has a huge impact on how you feel emotionally, how your gut is doing. So what we eat is really important. You know, oftentimes I you know I talked to other moms too they just eat the food off their kids' plates or, you know, they rush and eat something. You know we need to actually take care of ourselves and make sure we're putting the right fuel in our bodies, because it's going to affect our moods and it's a really good. You know our kids mimic us, so it's really good way for them to model, to look at us and, you know, lead by example, to model, to look at us and lead by example. So not to forget that your nutrition is as important as the nutritious things you're making for your child.

10:53

And alcohol it's an interesting one because at the end of a long day, your self-care might be having a glass of wine to unwind. But you know what? Ultimately, alcohol is a depressant, and when you have a depressant in your body, your body wants to come into balance. So what it will do is it will produce adrenaline to counteract the depressant action of the alcohol, to get back in that homeostasis. And when the alcohol wears off, that adrenaline keeps being produced. So that leaves you feeling anxious, on edge, and it can actually really exasperate your sleep cycles as well, because it can wake you up. So you can wake up at three o'clock in the morning. So, although it seems to numb things, when you have that glass of wine in the evening, the knock-on effects of it can actually impact your sleep, impact your anxiety levels and can really handicap you the next day in terms of your interactions with your child. So it's a tricky one and yeah, I usually find that not drinking is the easiest way for me, but every now and then, everything within moderation, I suppose.

12:06

And then there's things that you can do when you are stressed to help you kind of calm down in the moment. Some people I have been on the show and talked about how they do tapping. We have an episode on tapping that you can look up in the podcast which we talked about tapping on your children, but you can do it to yourself and it's something you can easily go into a bathroom and tap on yourselves. Some people use breathing. Personally, I go out in the garden and I smell some rosemary or some thyme and it kind of re-centers me. Doing meditation Meditation is not something I find very easy to do but it's, you know, combined with breathing, can really calm you down, and I use it actually to go to sleep at night meditations because it helps quiet my busy brain and allows me to go to sleep.

12:57

And then the final piece of advice in terms of self-care that I think is important is finding time to do something that you really enjoy and making the time to do that once a week, and it might be only 10 minutes, it might be 15 minutes, it might be 20 minutes, and whether that is for me on Sunday morning I don't exercise, I wake up, I make myself a tray of tea, I go up into my bedroom and I read my book or listen to a podcast in bed and that's my little bit of heaven, and for you it could be. You know there's so many different things. It could be a bubble bath with a scented candle, it could be watching a film on TV with some popcorn anything that makes you feel a little spoiled and that gives you a little time. It really helps to then give you the strength and the capacity then to give your 100% to your child. And I know that this is not easy. I know there'll be times when you haven't slept well, you couldn't exercise, you ate junk food and you had a glass of wine, you know, and you haven't found any time to unwind in your little slice of heaven. But you know, try and make that the exception, not the rule. You know, try to put yourself first sometimes. And you know the thing that really sold me that when I do manage to exercise and sleep well and eat right and find some time for myself, I'm ultimately a better mother to Alexandra and, as we all know, we will do anything for our children. So knowing that I'm kind of doing it for her in a weird way makes it easier to do something for me. So take a deep breath and realize that taking some time for yourself is taking time to be a better mother.

14:42

I hope you've enjoyed our Pocket Rocket Summer Series. I can't believe that the summer is over and that they're going to be going back to school next week for most of our kids. Take a deep breath, know that. You know it is going to be challenging.

14:56

Change is hard for our children and you know the transition back to school is going to be bumpy, and knowing that kind of makes it easier to bear and also implementing some of these self-care tips will make it easier for you to keep on an even keel. And next week we are going to look into artificial intelligence tools. There's a company called OpenGenius which does mind maps using artificial intelligence and technology, and it's a really cool thing actually for our children to bridge that gap with all these thoughts in their head to actually being able to use technology to organize and structure them. And this technology is mainly being used in universities and actually in workplaces, but I would argue there's a place for it in secondary school and can really help our neurodiverse children bridge that gap and get over some of those hurdles or challenges that they have so that they can academically achieve. So tune in next week for my discussion with Open Genius, wishing you a calm and peaceful start, but understanding that it probably won't be, to the next school year.

06:48