Parenting is not only good for your soul...

Hi friends! Anyone else caught up in the relentless paradox of parenthood? Like, we want our kids near us at all times but we also simultaneously desperately need a break? Tale as old as time!

Raising Kids Is Good For Your Brain

Parenting keeps you on your toes. It’s a constant hamster wheel of scheduling and calendars and activities and answering questions and finding “lost” items and answering more questions and birthday parties and more activities. It’s an 18+ year balancing act and quite frankly…it’s exhausting! But there’s a silver lining! A recent study conducted by Rutgers Health and Yale University found that “parents show patterns of brain connectivity that counteract typical age related decline.” Looks like managing all those Apple calendars will pay off after all! 

It makes sense that parents as a whole have strong cognitive skills even as they age. When you’re a parent, you’re firing on all cylinders (even when you aren’t) simply because you have no other choice. Multitasking is second nature. Your brain is always stimulated, you get a mental workout every single day. Parenting also comes with more social interactions (sorry introverts!) which is a key factor in maintaining strong cognitive health. So while the mental load of parenting might feel daunting at times, it’s not only worth it for your kids’ future but your own, too! 

Preparing For The Grief of Parenthood

Not to be a downer. But sometimes parenting means getting your heart broken by the person you love the most in the world–your child. And most of the time, they don’t even know they’re doing it. It happens over and over, from letting go of your hand as they enter kindergarten to asking you to drop them off a block away on their first day of middle school. It’s those small moments that remind you that your baby isn’t a baby, that your time with them while they are kids is fleeting. Unrelated, can someone pass the tissues? 😩

These feelings can be complicated because of course, all parents want their children to evolve, make friends and build their own lives. Watching our kids gain their independence is incredibly rewarding and it can also feel like you’re losing something. Two things can be true! These moments will happen at every stage of their lives. But coupled with that grief is also an amazing new chapter. The older your teen gets, the more they’ll come to understand you (and vice versa). The little years are amazing. But the big years bring a whole different kind of joy. Let yourself feel the grief for the baby your child once was, but don’t let it consume you. The best is yet to come! 

Decentering Toxic Masculinity

Andrew Tate’s messaging is dangerous. We discussed this with our The Common Parent community last week but it’s worth repeating. Andrew Tate embodies toxic masculinity at its worst. His growing platform promotes misogyny and deeply troubling extremist views. Tate’s demographic is predominantly impressionable young men. As parents, we have to take the lead in ensuring that our boys aren’t influenced by such problematic content. We can do that by encouraging media literacy–that means teaching our boys to question the things they see online and analyze it with a critical eye. Another great way to counteract bad role models is to replace them with good ones. That can mean any man, whether they’re a public figure or a member of your community, who upholds good values and demonstrates a healthy version of masculinity. However you go about it, the important thing is to keep an open dialogue on how harmful this kind of rhetoric is and to remind our boys that real men don’t build their platform on tearing women (or anyone!) down. 

Our teens probably don’t think much about what we were like as kids. And who can blame them? We grew up in the 1900s, after all☠️But understanding each other’s generations can be a really fun bonding experience!

• This millennial teacher quizzes his Gen Z students on 90s slang and the results are hilariously shocking 

• On the other side of the coin, props to these Gen X moms for being brave enough to decode Gen Z slang!