Parenting (and Working) in a Pandemic

The skills needed to parent in this quarantined, Zoom-dependent, coronavirus-driven "new normal".

Parenting has always been a challenge.

Under normal circumstances, the average parent is over-worked, under-slept, perpetually worried, and stressed to the point of visible aging. This was true long before we ever heard of the coronavirus.

We now refer to that life as “the good old days”.

Courtesy of the pandemic, parents now have to navigate a wide variety of different responsibilities, trading our “parent” hat for ones that say “teacher”, “bouncer”, “triage nurse”, and more. This talk helps you prepare to perform each of these roles without having a teacher’s license, years of self-defense training, or a medical degree. For each role, you’ll get the wisdom of experts who are actually in that field, a guide for how to apply this knowledge to parenting, and a quick list of tips and tricks of the trade that will help you and your kids survive the pandemic as smoothly as possible.

Chief Parental Officer (CPO)

Parenting Secrets from the World of Business Psychology: How the strategies used to run the world's most successful companies can make you a better and more sane parent.

A common inside joke in the field of psychology is that childhood or educational psychologists often have the most messed up kids.  Similarly, many parenting books may tell you what meconium is or the specific hormones that get released in puberty, yet leave you utterly unprepared to actually raise a child.

This talk introduces the concept of framework-based parenting, leveraging the strategies that top executives and business psychologists use to run Fortune 500 companies to help you raise your mischievous progeny. 

You will leave with a set of overarching principles that can be applied to almost any parenting situation, a few specific examples (that almost every parent has faced), and a renewed hope that you might survive until bedtime without shame-eating Oreos in the back of your closet.

I Used to Be a Real Human

How to balance being a parent with your work demands, household chaos, and actual adult life.

The hardest part about being a parent isn't the midnight feedings, the potty training accidents, or the teenage hormones.  It's the instantaneous transformation from being your own person to being "so-and-so's mom".

Even though parenting is the most important job we do, it's rarely the only thing on our plates.  We have jobs, marriages, houses to manage, finances to maintain, careers, and ambitions that don't involve finding your kid's shoes before the schoolbus gets there.

This talk helps parents find that balance where they know they're showing up 100% for their children, but they don't have to sacrifice everything that made them an individual before their name was "mom".

Be Your Own Mother

The need for parenting doesn't go away as you get older. Regardless of who your parents are, the need to parent yourself is more and more important with age.

Even though we moms are usually focused on mothering our own children, the need to be "parented" never actually goes away.  Just like tying your shoes, remembering a jacket, or remembering to put the car in park before you get out, mothering is one of those skills that people eventually need to learn to do for themselves to qualify as healthy, functional adults (regardless of our relationship with our actual mothers).

Whether they had the best mom in the world, came from a dysfunctional parent-child relationship, or practically raised themselves, everyone in the audience is a mom and knows the importance of mothering and being mothered.

This talk goes into the importance of turning one's mothering skills inwards.  Being your own mother helps you know how to set boundaries, how to provide yourself with unconditional love (both tough love and the overindulgent spoiling kind, as situation dictates), and how to express compassion and tolerance for our mistakes, even while holding ourselves to maternally-high standards.