Griffin
felt her company was committed to supporting parents, and single
parents like her: They embraced flexibility. Griffin had been working
remotely for years from Colorado for the Washington, DC-based firm. They
provided parents additional funds to cover childcare during the
pandemic. They cover 100% of employee health costs. But even with
support, the pandemic, quarantine, and school and childcare closures
made what is challenging for single parents close to impossible.
For
months, like so many other parents of young children navigating
Covid-19, Griffin had been getting up at 5 AM and throwing on sweats to
start working on an East-coast schedule. She’d make her boys breakfast
while on conference calls, with her laptop on the kitchen counter and
her airpods in. She’d be going nonstop — monitoring her kids’ online
schooling when she could — until about 5 or 6 PM. Then she’d root around
in the fridge for something for dinner, more often than not resorting
to grilled cheese sandwiches because she hadn’t had time to buy
groceries. She’d return to the emails that threatened to overwhelm her
inbox once her kids were in bed and realize she hadn’t made it to the
post office, hadn’t picked up prescriptions, hadn’t bought milk for
cereal in the morning, and was too exhausted to do anything about it.
But unlike parents with partners, Griffin had to white-knuckle through it alone.
Women,
regardless of their marital status, have borne the brunt of childcare
and homeschooling in the pandemic. It’s part of why 2.3 million women
have been forced out of the workforce. As a single parent, Griffin had
no such option. She felt she was barely holding it together flying solo.
The pandemic had cut off her “strategic village” of friends, neighbors,
family, childcare, babysitters, carpools, school, after-school
programs, and even her ex-husband that she, like so many other single
parents, had carefully crafted to make it through each day. The stress
had been building for months, then one day, unexpected road closures
from wildfires turned a drive home from a board meeting into an
eight-hour nightmare. That was it. She called a friend and sobbed, “I
just need someone to hit pause for me right now.”
Griffin
isn’t alone. And while Covid might have made the situation worse, it
certainly wasn’t the cause. Long before the pandemic, parents (of any
marital status) in the United States already had one of the highest rates across the world of parental burnout
— intense exhaustion, cynicism, and feelings of ineffectiveness from
parenting. And U.S. workers were already struggling with what some
describe as an epidemic of workplace burnout: feeling depleted, cynical, and ineffective at work. One 2018 Gallup survey
found that as many as two-thirds of full-time workers felt burned out
on the job. The Covid-19 pandemic that has dragged on for more than a
year has just intensified that burnout, particularly for mothers. One recent survey
found that 9.8 million working mothers — nearly 30% more than working
fathers — say they are experiencing workplace burnout, with cases higher
among Black, Asian, and Latina mothers.
And single parents are under the greatest strain. “Nowhere is the stress greater,” according to a new study
of single mothers in the pandemic by Rosanna Hertz, a sociologist at
Wellesley College. Her report found that single mothers who lived alone
with their children were more likely than mothers in multi-adult
households to say that their work productivity had decreased as a result
of their care responsibilities (57% to 47%). One single mother, echoing
others, said, “I felt like my children were my priority, but there was
pressure not to drop productivity at work.”
“The pandemic has exposed how we felt so challenged before it even started, and just blew it up,” said Paula Davis, author of Beating Burnout at Work
and a single parent herself. “Burnout can happen when you have too many
job demands and too few resources. Single parents have extra demands
and potentially fewer resources. And time is certainly more scarce.”
And for single parents, who can least afford to burnout, the toll can be high.
Dr.
Stephanie Lee, a senior director at the Child Mind Institute, has been
observing widespread burnout in the communities she serves, particularly
among single parents. “Single parents are particularly at risk in terms
of isolation because of all the things they need to do on a daily
basis, and they have absolutely no help to do it,” she said. That
isolation was what Matthew Burke, a school psychologist based in
Philadelphia and single father of two boys, found particularly difficult
when he found himself out of work and isolated and alone for most of
the past year. “It’s a lot, it’s really challenging,” he said. “Nobody’s
ever loved their boys more than me. But I miss parts of myself other
than being a dad.”
Paula
Davis, who now runs the Stress & Resilience Institute and works
with organizations to reduce burnout, said burnout is rooted in work
systems and cultures — think high work pressure with inadequate staff,
lack of autonomy, recognition or support, and (particularly in the
pandemic) lack of childcare — that requires holistic strategies to
resolve. Yet while organizations and public policy must step up
to support single working parents, Davis said there are steps that
individuals themselves can take to build self-efficacy and alleviate at
least some of the pain and stress of burnout.
See the big picture.
If
people can understand that burnout is not an individual problem or
personal failure that requires an individual solution to fix, they’re
less likely to feel guilt or shame. Even Christina Maslach, the social
psychologist who developed the Maslach Burnout Inventory, wrote recently
that the whole point of developing the inventory was to prod employers
to “establish healthier workplaces.” But that’s been a challenge,
particularly in the United States with its overwork culture, long before
the pandemic. So Davis suggests beginning to manage burnout by taking a
stress inventory
to become clearer on which tasks or situations are energizing and which
are draining. In each instance, ask, “Am I energized by this? Am I
learning something? Am I continuing to grow and develop?” The idea,
Davis said, is to seek out and remember positive events and information,
which can protect against burnout and instead build resilience.
Lower demands and tap into resources.
Burnout
is about the mismatch between resources and demands. Work demands can
be harder for workers to control — although talking to managers and
communicating needs can help. Davis suggests single parents think
broadly about how they can increase their resources. And that’s not just
money and time (which can be scarce, particularly for single parents),
but strengths. “If you’re optimistic, have hope, perseverance, a strong
work ethic, a sense of humor, small moments of joy, how can you leverage
your strengths more intentionally?” Davis said. “Who are the important
people in your life you can connect to more regularly, even if
virtually?”
Lowering
demands can also mean single parents cutting themselves some slack.
“The biggest thing that helps me when I start feeling burned out is
letting go of my standards,” said Lauren Weizer, a single parent who
works in advertising and has been struggling with constant interruptions
from her seven-year-old daughter as they both try to work and
homeschool at home without help. “I don’t expect things to be clean. I
don’t expect to be able to cook a meal. I just try not to expect much
from myself these days. There’s just so much on my plate.”
Keep track of small wins.
Dr.
Lee of the Child Mind Institute advises single parents who are
struggling to manage their multiple responsibilities to note their
successes — even the small ones. “It’s just as important to focus on
things you did accomplish in a day and making sure we acknowledge the
absence of things: the absence of an argument, or an absence of an
aggression, or the absence of a tantrum,” she said. “Everybody stayed
safe today, and that’s honestly a win. If we’re missing an assignment or
two, that’s not the end of the world.” As behavioral scientist Adam Grant writes, “the strongest buffer against burnout seems to be a sense of daily progress.”
Ask for help.
Single
parents need support both at work and at home. For example, help from
her community has helped Deanna Tenorio, an indigenous single mother in
New Mexico, cope with the strain of the last year of juggling a layoff
from the restaurant where she worked, finding work, helping her
13-year-old son with virtual school, and going to school herself. At a
particularly difficult time, she reached out to a community group, Free
Access to Movement Childcare Collective. “They’ve dropped off food and
groceries, cards, well wishes,” she said. “We just love getting our care
packages” which has helped her not only survive but feel more connected
to her neighbors and supported by her community.
Take a break and rest (when you can).
Myleen
Leary, a management professor, said being a single parent has forced
her to become more aware of her own time and energy and plan for
downtime for herself. “At the best of times, I’ve trained my children
about what it means when mommy says she needs quiet time,” Leary said.
“I recognize that I need to make decisions that are good for the kids,
but also good for me. That’s been harder during the pandemic, but I
still try to do it.”
These
steps are what has made all the difference for Alison Griffin’s
recovery from burnout. After she hit the pandemic wall, she realized no
one was going to hit the pause button for her. She realized, too, that
she’d hidden her burnout so well under her veneer of productivity and
professionalism that no one at work even knew. So she asked for help —
and time off. With her boss’s blessing, she arranged for others to care
for her two boys, for her job to be covered, and took a three-week paid
mental health retreat.
Upon
her return, she began to work with a therapist to set healthier
boundaries between her work and home lives and multiple roles that had
become so blurred. She now makes time to work out in the morning. She’s
blocked her calendar for the times she needs to homeschool or attend to
her boys and keeps a more consistent schedule. She tries to stay offline
during the weekend. Every Monday, she prioritizes three work tasks and
three home tasks. And she doesn’t say yes to anything new until they’ve
all been accomplished.
But
she wouldn’t have been able to address her burnout unless her manager
was willing to be flexible and her company offered paid time off,
something she said she recognizes is a rare privilege for workers in the
United States. “The pandemic has revealed our collective humanity,
whether that’s something as silly as a kid running behind you on a Zoom
call, a cat on your lap, taking care of an elderly parent, waiting for a
Covid shot, or relying on the delivery person for groceries,” Griffin
said. “I hope we’re learning that when people have the flexibility to
take care of themselves, we’re all better off.”
Was this article helpful? Connect with me.
Follow The SUN (AYINRIN), Follow the light. Be bless. I am His Magnificence, The Crown, Kabiesi Ebo Afin!Ebo Afin Kabiesi! His Magnificence Oloja Elejio Oba Olofin Pele Joshua Obasa De Medici Osangangan broad-daylight natural blood line 100% Royalty The God, LLB Hons, BL, Warlord, Bonafide King of Ile Ife kingdom and Bonafide King of Ijero Kingdom, Number 1 Sun worshiper in the Whole World.I'm His Magnificence the Crown. Follow the light.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.