In SAVVY, an online survey of 1,285 working parents was conducted between January 2021 and April 2021. Earlier in May, the researchers from Ohio State University published their report, Pandemic Parenting: Examining the Epidemic of Working Parental Burnout and Strategies to Help.
In SKILLS, after describing what Parental Burnout is, the report went on to provide some strategies to help parents deal with burnout. So whether you are a parent yourself, or helping parents cope, the report has strategies for you.
In SOUL, In 2008, Shawn Seipler was staying at a hotel in Minneapolis and wondered what happens to all the unused hotel room soap? This got me thinking about what would be the ‘wasted hotel soap’ of the healthcare industry? What better systems could we build that could save as many lives as 13 million pounds of discarded soap?
In the USA, Mother’s Day was on May 8 and Father’s Day will be June 19 (Fun Fact: In Australia, Father’s Day is the first Sunday in September. Mother’s Day is the same as the USA). While we are all sick of the COVID pandemic, a report published by researchers at Ohio State University (OSU) earlier this month caught my eye in the context of Mother’s and Father’s Days.
The report is based on an online survey of 1,285 working parents that was conducted between January 2021 and April 2021. It is titled: Pandemic Parenting: Examining the Epidemic of Working Parental Burnout and Strategies to Help
Here are the SAVVY tips arising from that OSU report. All the content is from the report where you can see more detail. I have just reworked the information into Tips and Topics format.
Tip 1
Sixty-six percent of parents reported being burnt-out.
Parenting stress is normal and expected. However, when chronic stress and exhaustion occur that overwhelm a parent’s ability to cope and function, it is called parental burnout:
One parent: “I am expected to be a superhuman that can be a full-time employee, parent, elementary school teacher, pre-school teacher, cook, cleaner, playmate and emotional support system. But I can’t do it any longer.”
Tip 2
Factors that contributed to higher levels of burnout included: Being female and being parents who were very worried about their children’s mental health versus parents who were less worried.
All factors that were strongly associated with parental burnout:
Tip 3
Parental burnout is strongly associated with depression, anxiety and increased alcohol consumption in the parent.
Besides being strongly associated with depression, anxiety and increased alcohol consumption, Burnout is also associated with dramatic increases in the likelihood that parents may:
Tip 4
Working parental burnout is associated with parents’ reports of their children’s internalizing, externalizing, and attention behaviors.
Parents’ reports of their children’s internalizing, externalizing, and attention behaviors:
Examples of internalizing behaviors are:
Examples of externalizing behaviors include:
Examples of attention behaviors include:
After describing what Parental Burnout is, the report went on to provide some strategies to help parents deal with burnout.
Tip 1
Find a balance that decreases personal stressors and increases the access to and use of available resources.
Stress and burnout looks different for everyone:
Stopping to catch, check and change the negative automatic thoughts that often happen with parental burnout can result in feeling emotionally better and can open the door to strategies and solutions that work for you and your family.
Work on burnout by decreasing personal stressors and increasing the access to and use of available resources.
Decrease personal stressors:
Increase and tap resources by leveraging the ‘village’ around you:
Tip 2
Other evidence-based strategies that can help you every day.
Here are five other evidence-based strategies:
1. Take good self-care (it is not selfish!):
2. Be kind to yourself:
3. Talk to someone you trust about how you are feeling:
4. Build your mental resiliency and coping skills. This can include:
5. Ask for help:
In 2008, Shawn Seipler was staying at a hotel in Minneapolis and wondered about a question I have also pondered: what happens to all the unused hotel room soap? So he called the front desk and found out that they throw the soap away and it all goes to a landfill.
Learning that millions of bars of perfectly salvageable soap were going to waste, Shawn laid out a bunch of stats and came to a realization:
“Seipler launched Clean the World and set out on a mission of getting those millions of bars of wasted soap to children in need.”
Since 2009, the company has:
You can read all about Shawn’s ingenuity and journey in The surprising afterlife of used hotel soap in The Hustle.
All this got me thinking about what would be the ‘wasted hotel soap’ of the healthcare industry? Would it be:
Out of the resources we waste or misuse in healthcare, what better systems could we build that could save as many lives as 13 million pounds of discarded soap?