Every parenting cliché is true.
You’ll never sleep again. ✅
You’ll never see your friends again. ✅
You’ll become a morning person, not because you want to, but because your little gremlin is up at the crack of dawn and *needs you now*—sorry, but you don’t even have time to ✅
But the biggest cliché-because-it’s-true of the parenting experience is that you are always tired. From the moment you wake up, to the moment they (finally) go to bed, you’re on.
This is because your responsibility, to keep your little creature alive, is a program that’s always active in the back of your head no matter where you are or what you’re doing. It’s a running process, which requires memory—aka energy—to keep active.
Daniel Kahneman famously identified System 1 vs. System 2 thinking—System 1 being the mental process that covers in-the-moment tasks, the intuitive and instinctual considerations that keep us safe in the moment and covers our immediate needs, keeping us functioning (and alive) throughout the day.
System 2 is the slower, more effortful ‘deep thought’, which can spark changes in our mental models, or lead us to the ideas that we may devote our career, creative pursuits, or other ‘big picture’ activities. The thoughtful thought.
But here’s the thing—when you’ve got a kid running around, your System 1 is always on, leaving you exactly zero space to allow System 2 to kick in. It’s extremely hard to consider the nature of life, the universe, and everything, when you’re also watching out to make sure your three-year-old isn’t going to fall off the seesaw and break his jaw.
And this always-on System 1 program IS TIRING. It’s a drain to run that process at all times, always being aware, cautious, and on the razor’s edge of readiness to step in at a moment’s notice to grab your little one as they nearly stumble off the cliff into Mount Doom.
At the end of the day—aka whenever they go to bed—you are done. Depleted. Battery fully drained. Zero energy to consider the cosmos.
I’m sure that Netflix has fully mapped out the ‘tired parent’ customer persona.
I’ve been thinking about, but never fully articulated this for a while now, so it was refreshing to hear Ezra Klein discuss this in his latest podcast with Dr. Gloria Mark, attention researcher at the University of California at Irvine:
“I really noticed [this energy depletion] in parenting, that on the weekends particularly, when I’m spending a lot of time watching my kids, I’m not doing anything physically that active. I’m often sitting at a playground. I took them to the store. We went for a walk. I made breakfast.
“But I can’t ever look away. And the kind of sleep I end up needing to take sometimes in the middle of those days is like no nap I’ve ever taken as an adult before. It is completely drained, completely exhausted. And it feels to me like an attentional form of exhaustion.”
Ezra Klien
Bingo. This is a direct result of System 1’s low-level activity process simply running in the background all day. Even just sitting on the bench at the playground, doing nothing but watching your kid climbing around the jungle gym, keeps that tiny vampiric energy suck going.
So what’s the solution here?
Dr. Mark suggests taking conscious breaks, small replenishing moments where we can tune out and recharge; naps, meditation, exercise, a short walk through nature, etc., but that’s easier said than done. If you don’t have the resources for professional care, or a partner who’s time is more flexible than yours at a given moment, it’s hard to find those moments.
The only way I’ve found to alleviate this kind of deeply primal burnout is through a deeply primal remedy: optimizing sleep and focus.
Whenever you ARE playing with your little one, put the phone away—maybe in another room!!!—and dedicate yourself to the moment. Another cliché is that this youthful time fades quickly, so wouldn’t you want to be there for as much of it as you can? Think of this as System 2 parenting. Enjoy it. Bask in it.
Time flies when you’re playing with trucks, and you’ll be less drained if you’re fully there for it. Be the backhoe.
The other thing is to get sleep. As tempting as it is to stay up all night—because it’s the only you-time you ever get!—it’s often not quality you-time if you’re dead tired and just futzing around with your phone. We’ve barely touched on the technological side of parental burnout, but digital distraction / mental bifurcation is a huge factor here.
But I’ve found, if I’m fully rested, I actually can manage the background task of keeping the kid safe, even if I’m generally working or getting things done around the house, or hanging at the playground reading a book or even—I hate to admit it—messing around on Threads. This is System 1 parenting.
For me, the constant pull of the digital world, plus the necessities of my work-life, plus the desire to be a good parent and be actively available at all times—in addition to my own personal social obligations and creative projects, is almost too much to manage. I need System 1 and System 2 to work together, give each other space to run their processes without constantly fighting for RAM.
Because, like a battery-powered Hess Truck, if you leave the all of its dozens of lights on all day, even the freshest AAAs are dead by nightfall.
And so am I. I think I’ll head to bed now.
Because he’s going to be up at 6, and… I guess I’m a morning person now?
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