Illustration by Illustration by Mariah Llanes/The Globe and Mail
On Nov. 20, time use reporter Zosia Bielski and contributing parenting columnists Amberly McAteer and Katherine Martinko answered reader questions on how families can manage busy schedules, especially as we near the often overloaded holiday season.
Zosia’s feature recently explored the topic:
Apps, calendars and to-do lists rule modern parenting – but do they ease stress or add to it?
Readers asked about how to handle their kids’ extracurriculars, which scheduling tools parents are using, and how to prepare for the busy holiday season. Here are some highlights from the Q&A.
How to prioritize things in a busy calendar
Parents are always struggling to find time for themselves, how are you and parents you’ve spoken to managing to fit their own activities between those of their kids?
Amberly McAteer: What do you mean ... parents have social lives? I kid – kind of. Honestly they’re the first ones to be bailed on in our family right now. I feel like it’s a short season where we put the kids truly first. Unless it’s an adult medical appointment, which is a non-negotiable. We prioritize our kids right now, but they’re 3 and 5, so hopefully as they get older we get more leeway. (But I just had my husband cancel his dad beer date tomorrow night – sorry, we have a 6-year-old’s birthday party to attend to, and I could really use your help!)
Zosia Bielski: I asked this of all the parents I interviewed: what’s on the calendar for you?
Each time, I got a pregnant pause, a chuckle or a “we have no life” quip. There was a sense that life for parents comes ... later.
I had mothers tell me they were quietly hoping to try badminton again, or eke out some hours on the weekend to return to their hobby of refinishing furniture. No success yet. These were mothers of 10-to-14 year olds.
Margaret Tsuji, one of the parents, recalled: “I always think back to my neighbour. Her kids are much older and she said, ‘Don’t worry. It all goes away when they hit Grade 9.’ But with this idea of busyness engulfing everybody, I wonder if with this generation of kids it’s not going to go away by Grade 9.”
Move over, helicopter parents. Try being a lifeguard parent instead
Katherine Martinko: I have a non-negotiable 4:30 p.m. date with myself at the gym four times a week, and I swear it maintains my sanity. Obviously, it requires some advance planning, like getting dinner in the Instant Pot or assigning food prep duty to my teenage son, but I defend that time fiercely, recognizing its benefits. I think it helps if it’s a regular thing, so the family knows what to expect, but just having regular check-ins with a partner about what you’re wanting to do throughout a particular week can help.
Katherine Martinko says when you let your kids be bored, they'll discover activities to do on their own.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Is it important for kids to experience boredom? How can we make space for it in family calendars?
Martinko: I love this question. Boredom is an uncomfortable state for children (adults too!), but it holds such rich, creative potential. Kids never stay bored for long because it’s intensely uncomfortable. Instead, they’ll move through it and discover all kinds of wonderful skills, interests, hobbies on the other side. For kids to achieve that, though, parents have to get out of the way and not strive to entertain/stimulate their children every minute of the day. They have to trust their child’s ability to find and delve into the wonder that exists all around them.
So, I think a key part of this is descheduling – protecting chunks of time in the family calendar that allow for free, independent play. Perhaps you keep your weekends as empty as possible, or you don’t do anything on weeknights after school. Another part is providing loose-part toys – play materials with open-ended purpose that kids can use to build, create, and explore in a broad number of ways, that will change based on their mood, the season, their playmates, etc. This could mean sporting gear, costumes, baking supplies, arts and crafts materials, board games, construction materials, etc. Don’t be afraid of boredom!
Time use reporter Zosia Bielski says some parents rely on technology to stay afloat, while others find it overwhelming.LDProd/Getty Images/iStockphoto
The role of technology
Has technology such as new calendar apps made overscheduling worse for families?
Bielski: Some of the parents I interviewed who are relying on newer calendar apps and touch screen systems told me they’re using the tools to stay afloat. They were worried they’d miss commitments, run into scheduling conflicts or run late if everything hadn’t been inputted across 1, 2, 3, even 4 different planning tools, and talked about feeling reassured when everything was noted in multiple places.
For others, the full calendar brought pangs of stress. Several parents talked about scanning a full month ahead and deciding to pull back on socializing through weekends. Others would see a blank square on the calendar and not know what to do with it. One dad said, half jokingly, that a blank square made him feel guilty: wasn’t there something they should be doing, or learning, or ticking off?
That points to more beyond the calendar: this tendency to use every moment to optimize our lives and acquire new skills. The parents I talked to weren’t convinced it was the calendar’s fault; they felt this external pressure to spend their time this way.
I just let ChatGPT run our family now.
McAteer: I feel this deeply! Though I use it for grocery shopping and meal planning, mostly. Especially after I wrote about artificial intelligence and parenting – when ChatGPT gave me some actually useful parenting advice.
Though, I still have two issues: for scheduling, I think the calendar apps and systems Zosia wrote about are much better for merging multiple people’s busy schedules. And more broadly, I’m concerned with how ChatGPT/OpenAI is ... replacing our ability to think for ourselves? I remember one comment on my ChatGPT piece – and it pops into my brain every time I open the app now – “our laziness is the harbinger of our demise.” Here’s The Decibel episode where we got into it.
Different approaches to scheduling
As parents, how do you personally manage your family schedules?
Martinko: I’m a big fan of delegating responsibility for activities and tasks to all members of the family, since it’s just too much for one parent to manage everyone else’s schedules on their own (and not really fair!).
My kids are now 10, 14, and 16, so I do expect them to keep track of practices, meetings, homework assignments, etc. mainly on their own, with occasional reminders from me and their dad. Each of them has a paper planner where they write down deadlines. We have an informal family discussion every morning to go over the day’s events (this is a critical step, since my younger two kids don’t have phones and my older one doesn’t take his to school). It’s a good way to refresh in their minds what has to happen that day, e.g., who has to be where at what time, who’s picking up who.
I rely heavily on my own paper planner, which I keep open on my desk, and I also use alarms and notifications on my phone to alert me at key moments. It helps that our family schedule has a regular rhythm – music lessons and sports practices at the same time each day of the week.
The holiday season can bring more scheduling conflicts for families.
How can I manage my family’s calendar with the holidays coming up? It feels like everything is ramping up too quickly.
McAteer: I’m currently working on a column about the mental load of Christmas, and all the ways women and moms are socialized into taking on an extreme amount to create all the magic. I feel this deeply – it was just October ... and now it’s Christmas? Suddenly we just feel so behind on everything. Social media champions these moms as “magic makers,” but what if we just didn’t manage our family through the holidays? This year I’m going to delegate way more, and do more shrugging. My in-laws ask what my kids want for Christmas? Who can say! Kids can make their own lists and husband can relay.
Bielski: The journalist Katherine Goldstein, who I’ve interviewed before about the importance of unfussy, “deep casual” hosting, is encouraging her readers to put together a holiday “Don’t List,” to reclaim more of your time this year. Worth considering.
When companies force workers back to the office, working moms are left behind
Have shared calendars actually taken the “invisible load” of family responsibilities off mothers, or has it become another task that mothers are taking on the bulk of the work?
McAteer: I could rant about the mental load for a long time. It’s something you don’t truly know and understand unless you’re a parent – and frankly, a mom.
The data shows that even when mom is the primary breadwinner of the family, she’s still the “default parent,” more often than not. We are still making the dentist appointments, booking the flu shot, knowing who needs new winter boots. This irks me more than I can say.
Funny enough, because of Zosia’s story, my husband and I just merged our Google calendars this morning, but then I saw all the double-booked things, and instantly felt the need to be the one to reschedule them. It’s going to take a huge, profound, societal shift to take this off moms; I wish I had a better answer.
Bielski: Part of the dream and promise with these newer scheduling tools was to off-load, away from women, the “mental load” of remembering everything for everyone. To make it more of a shared responsibility.
The other idea was to make visible this invisible load – to show what’s involved in planning a family’s week, month, year.
Some of the mothers I interviewed felt the tools had helped off-load that load. One Calgary mom, Millie Adam, said her family’s new shared e-mail address and Google Calendar had lifted a burden for her.
Though I’d argue the bigger difference was this attitude shift that came with these tools: “If something gets missed, it’s like, ‘You know what everybody? It was in the calendar. It’s not my problem,” Millie said.
I appreciated Millie’s sass. Mothers never asked to have their brains occupied by everyone else’s to do lists and commitments.