I often wonder if my children are playing a game where the winner is the one who sends mom to the insane asylum first.
What makes me most insane is when they take turns being in crisis mode. And they are terrible turn-takers, so usually they are fighting over whose crisis is most important, which is a crisis in and of itself. While these crises are unfolding, I can't get a thought in edgewise. "What should we have for din... AHHHH! CRISIS CRISIS CRISIS! Huh? What was I think AHHHH! CRISIS CRISIS CRISIS! Please stop hitting your AHHHH! CRISIS CRISIS CRISIS!" All day long.
But my plight is really nothing new. For generations, children have been driving their parents insane. Jennifer Senior, author of the book
All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, cites a study from 1971 in which "a trio from Harvard observed ninety
mother-toddler pairs for five hours and found that on average, mothers
gave a command, told their child no, or fielded a request (often 'unreasonable' or 'in a whining tone') every three minutes. Their
children, in turn, obeyed on average only 60 percent of the time. That
is not exactly a formula for perfect mental health."
Tell me again what you do all day with the kids? Oh, that's right. Every. Three. Minutes.
Another study from 1991 by T. Dix found that parents with young children had conflicts with them 3.5 to 15 times per hour.
My kids probably hover right around the "15 times per hour" mark. Times two. When you're interrupted every three minutes, or arguing with your kids every four minutes, you're not just faced with a minor irritation. You are faced with a serious attack on your self-control.
"Self-control" is more than your ability to avoid eating potato chips. According to the book
Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, self-control is anything that requires "self-supervision." And, most importantly, self-control isn't a bottomless resource. You can actually run out of it.
For most routine tasks, our brains run on autopilot. These kind of tasks require no self-control. Make your coffee, brush your teeth, drive to work, all with hardly a conscious thought. But when you're doing something outside your routine, self-control helps you figure out how to act. "Think of the way your mind works when you're giving negative feedback to an employee, or assembling a new bookshelf, or learning a new dance. You are careful and deliberate with your words or movements. It feels like there's a supervisor on duty," Heath says in
Switch.
Now think of the way your mind works when you're dealing with your kids, especially when they are young. You are in new territory, and might be more careful and deliberate about what you say. Yes, refraining from dropping an F-bomb after your toddler scratches your calf with his tiny razor blade fingernails does require self-control.
Your brain tries to run on autopilot -- make coffee, brush teeth, drive to work -- but you start a task and then get interrupted, then need to restart. You use self-control to deal with the kid-sized crises that interrupt you, but researchers have also found that it takes self-control to stop what you're doing and focus on something else. If you're a parent, this happens to you a bajillion times a day. By the end of the day, you may feel like you're losing your mind. Really what you're losing is your self-control.
Most enlightening to me is that researchers Nicholas Freeman and Mark Muraven found that being interrupted when you're close to finishing a task, even if the task is boring, drains your self-control faster than being interrupted early on.
Imagine you are folding laundry, and only have a few shirts left when your toddler runs across the room and leaps into your neatly organized laundry basket of clothes. Cute photo op? Maybe, if it's your first interruption of the day. Not so much if you've also been interrupted when you were almost done doing dishes, cooking dinner, cleaning toilets, making a shopping list.
All of this isn't even considering the other factors that deplete self-control -- fatigue, an abundance of choices, low blood sugar. All things that come with the territory when you're a parent.
There are times when I am interrupted from the interruption that interrupted me in the first place. Cooking breakfast is interrupted by the toddler clinging to me and crying to be picked up, which is then interrupted by the preschooler whining for juice, which is then interrupted by the dog scratching at the door to go out. I'd love to find a researcher willing to take on
that study. I'm sure the results would be conclusive: It is possible for a mother's self-control to be completely drained before she even gets out of bed.
