Great Parents Still Have Chaos

0:00 Kids have tantrums. Kids make messes. Kids have snotty noses. Kids get their clothes dirty. Kids talk back to their parents. Kids break curfew. Kids get obsessed with things. Kids go through phases. And there are all sorts of things that I think increase our mental load because we don't have a realistic grasp of the territory, of what comes with the job, of what it demands, right? Of what kind of reality we we are embarking upon when we set on this adventure. Now, it's an incredible adventure. I recommend it. It's meaningful. It's It's joyful. It's beautiful. There's a lot of great things about having a kid, but it's also important to just understand kind of what we're getting into or what we've gotten ourselves into so that we can have realistic expectations about what it's going to be like. You might be asking me, "Mental load and how do we do it?" And yeah, you can use the calendars and the schedules and the printable visual, you know, routines, and you can have reminders, and you can simplify, and you can do less, and you can have predictable calm, and you can meal plan, and you can do every high-fan project in the book and then some, right? And become the ultimate Pinterest mommy, but there's still going to be messiness, complaining, whining, backtalk, uh sibling rivalry, all of that stuff. And I think that sometimes the parenting books or the parenting coaches, people in my field or in my position can sometimes uh we I have a hard time balancing on the one hand the aspirational, like this is joyful and amazing and beautiful and it's worth it and you can do it, and on the other hand the realistic. And it's going to include all of these challenges and they're normal.