Parents, the Surprising Reason You Don’t Have Time for You

Why is it that no matter how early you wake up or how much you get done, you still can’t seem to find time for yourself?

So many parents feel like they’re constantly running on empty — we assume it’s because of our jobs, or our never-ending to-do list. The real reason? It’s often something much simpler, and sneakier.

 In today’s episode, we’re unpacking the surprising root cause behind your lack of personal time — and trust us, it’s not what you think. Stick around to hear what it is and what you can do to finally carve out space for yourself and prevent parent burnout.

What you’ll hear in this episode: 

• Why more isn’t always better. Sometimes it's just more.
• How to work together with your kids to create more time for your family, and yourself.
• The idea that it's okay to say no, especially if it is best for your family as a whole.

If you’ve ever wondered why you never seem to have time for yourself, hit play to uncover the surprising reason and learn how to reclaim guilt-free personal time as a parent.

00:00 Introduction: The Real Reason Parents Have No Time
00:27 The Overloaded Schedule Dilemma
00:53 The Cost of Too Many Activities
04:12 Finding Balance: Tailoring Activities to Your Family
05:52 The Importance of Saying No
06:19 Personal Stories and Practical Tips
09:16 Conclusion: Making Time for What Matters

When you finish listening, we’d love for you to connect with us on social media!

Follow us on Instagram and like our page on Facebook to keep the conversation going. It’s the best way to get quick tips, encouragement, and resources to help you make time for what matters most—your family.

Get our FREE resource, "30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids", by going to: parentsmakingtime.com/freeresource

Parenting is hard. Intentional parenting can seem even harder. Motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, and all that goes with those important aspects of life can make it difficult to prioritize tasks, embrace intentional living, focus on present parenting, and build family bonds. We're here to help ease your parenting anxiety so that you can stop feeling overwhelmed, find joy in your parenting journey, and build family bonds that last for generations. Here at Parents Making Time, we are all about that parent-child connection, self-care for parents, and helping you overcome mom guilt and dad guilt. If you have a question or would like to share an experience about your own parenting, please feel free to reach out to one of us! Please note, we may use your question and/or comments as a part of a Q&A Parenting Advice segment on one of our episodes.

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Transcript

Jennifer: [00:00:00] Parents, if you never seem to have time for yourself, the reason might surprise you. It's not your job. It's not your to-do list. It's your 

Anthony: don't spoil it. They'll find out if they keep listening.

This is parents making time. The show that helps busy parents put family first without burning out. We are Anthony and Jennifer Craiker. We don't just give parenting tips. We help you become the parent you want to be.

Jennifer: So I've talked to a lot of moms who have complained that they feel like they're in the car all day long.

Their day starts early, and if they have kids in school, they have those precious few hours to do whatever it is they need to do, whether it be housework or work. Work. And then the second that school bell rings, they're off running again because they have multiple children, multiple extracurricular activities.

Every day, and they don't stop until they fall in bed at night completely exhausted. It's just no way to live. 

Anthony: Yeah. Filling your kids' schedules with too many extracurricular activities comes at a pretty big cost. And there [00:01:00] are all sorts of things that kids can be involved in these days, right? Sports, dance, music lessons, you name it, and all of those things demand an enormous amount of time, not to mention money.

Jennifer: So we've seen so many parents do this at the cost of their own wellbeing. There's lots of reasons for this, right? Parents don't wanna deny their kids opportunities. They don't want their kids, heaven forbid, to be bored. They're worried their kids will be left behind and not have enough involvement for college applications.

We worry about college applications so early these days. Yeah. 

Anthony: It's kind of ridiculous. It really is. Yeah. And you know, we want them to be able to do the things that were important to us when we were growing up. And we also want to keep up with, uh, what the other families are doing. There's sometimes, I hate to say it, but there's kind of a social pressure to have your kids involved and sometimes.

Frankly, we think our kid is special. 

Jennifer: Hey, all my kids are special. 

Anthony: Well, every kid is special, but maybe a better word is unique. We think our kid is somehow unique and so [00:02:00] we need to invest all this time and money into whatever it is because they're going to go on and be the best in the world at that activity.

Jennifer: Yeah, but all of that comes at a cost. Now, before I say that, let me just say this. We know and we truly believe that parenting is sacrifice, and you're going to sacrifice for your kids. That's just what parenting is. But the cost here is that you have no personal time. If you are running your kids', child, children, whatever you have everywhere, at all hours of the day, you have lost your time to reconnect with yourself and rejuvenate and to be the best parent you can be. 

Anthony: Yeah. I mean, so many hours of our week are dedicated to taking care of other people, right? Whether it's in our employment, so that we can have enough money to pay for bills and all of those things, all the extracurriculars, all of the extracurricular activities that we're doing, or it's taking care of the home and getting our kids to and from school at, to, and from activities, right?

There are only so many hours in a week, [00:03:00] and if you don't have time each week for yourself to do something that you enjoy, to develop your own skills or interests or just to have a hobby, something that brings you meaning and fulfillment that is just for you. That's a big problem because that lack of personal time is going to affect the way that you parent the rest of the time.

Jennifer: And it's not just parents not having time for themselves, it's kids not having time for themselves. Our children need time in their week where they're just being, where they're at home, where they're relaxed, where they're, you know, maybe it's reading a book, maybe it's talking to a friend. Maybe it's just relaxing.

But the kids need that too. 

Anthony: And we need time as a family altogether. Right. And sometimes if, if you have a kid or or multiple kids involved in too many extracurricular activities, there's going to be a limited amount of time to, for you to spend together as a family. I'm talking quality time as a [00:04:00] family.

Jennifer: Right. And when we do too many things, put our kids in too many things, they now don't have time to keep up academically. We've seen that. 

Anthony: Yeah. 

Jennifer: Kids struggle sometimes when they're in too many things to keep up with their schoolwork, and that's a real problem. 

Anthony: So how should parents handle this issue of extracurricular activities?

Jennifer: So I think, well, we think that you should carefully consider what actually works for your family. So this means asking yourself questions like, well, how many kids do we have? What kinds of activities are they interested in? Do your kids even want to do the activities that they're interested in? And then you can look at that and you can start cutting down.

Things to a reasonable level, 

Anthony: right? And you're likely going to have some pushback from your kids if, if you're one of those families that has your kids involved in all sorts of activities, and you decide to draw a line in the sand and say, okay, we've got to cut down on what we're doing, your kids are very likely going to object to that.

So you've gotta be prepared to deal with those objections [00:05:00] from your kids. And I think you do that by just having an open, honest conversation about the amount of time that they're spending on all of these different activities 

Jennifer: and not just time. It's okay to talk to your kids about the money, the cost of all these activities.

Absolutely. Most of us do not have a never ending source of funds. And it's okay to say, look, if you wanna take those piano lessons, that's $200 a month. Now, if you also want to do soccer, that's another 75, and now we're at 2 75. And that just gets too much, especially when your brother wants to do something.

Those are great learning opportunities for your kids. 

Anthony: Yeah. So how does cutting down on extracurricular activities give you more time for yourself as a parent? 

Jennifer: Well. It's simple math, right? Simple math. Yeah. You cut out some activities, you have more time. You cut out that time running in the car, you have more time at home 

Anthony: and also more money in your bank account, 

Jennifer: and it's totally okay to say no.

You can't possibly say yes to everything. So get comfortable saying no and don't let that pressure of, [00:06:00] but my friend doing it, but my friend's friends doing it. Don't let that pressure get to you know, what's best for your family and be confident in that. 

Anthony: Yeah, just because something is good for your kid doesn't mean that it makes sense to have your kid involved in it.

You don't have time to do all of the good things, 

Jennifer: right? So when our kids were all in elementary school, we limited each of them to one activity at a time. So if they chose a sport, they had to wait for the next season to try something else. So for example, our middle daughter took piano and she never did a sport, but that's because she was in piano, and piano was every single month of the year. Now, had she really wanted to try something else, we could have taken off piano and tried something else, but she was in piano, so that's what she did. Once they were in middle school and high school, some of that changed because there's a lot of things when you get to those older years that are happening during school hours, they have occasional things after school, so choir, drama, band, those kind of things.

So we would just have discussions about their commitments. What is [00:07:00] that? Gonna ask of you, what is that gonna cost us as a family? Our son currently is really into theater, and he took multiple theater classes this year, and there's a cost for that. I mean, it's in school, but there's a fee for every class.

So we had a discussion with him about fundraising and doing the things the school offers to kind of offset those costs for our family. 

Anthony: Yeah. And to his credit, he, he did it. He did it. Yeah. He went out and raised the money. So can make it a positive learning experience even when your kids are involved in a lot of different activities.

But you do have to be willing to say no to certain activities 'cause if you don't, like we said before, the cost can be pretty significant and what we've found in our family over the years as we've limited their activities to a certain number but when they were younger, one at one at a time, like Right, like you were just saying.

I think that really did give us more time as a family and allowed you and I to have personal time that we would not have otherwise had. 

Jennifer: But even with those limits [00:08:00] we have days, I think it's important to recognize you're going to have days where you're still gonna be juggling everything. So, for example, when our oldest was.

Finishing eighth grade. There was this night of excellence. I don't remember what exactly they called it a, it was an award night, and on the same night, her two younger siblings had two pretty heavy commitments of their own. And the problem was we didn't have anybody we could send those two with. They were younger.

They didn't have necessarily a friend or a family that we trusted going to those things. And so we had to make the. Hard decision really to send our oldest to her award ceremony without us with a friend, because that was an option. And then Anthony and I went with the other two to their commitments.

Anthony: Right. We divided and conquered. I went with Natalie And you went with Ethan? I believe. I 

Jennifer: probably, yeah. It was a hard decision, but what is important is that was not our normal day-to-day 

Anthony: right. 

Jennifer: Situation. 

Anthony: Yeah. That was a pretty rare occurrence. And it was rare because we made the decision early on to be careful about how [00:09:00] many extracurricular activities we allowed our kids to get involved with. 

Jennifer: I'm gonna say it was rare on purpose, so we had more family time. Just because of that one simple decision to say no to all of the things. 

Anthony: Yeah, more family time and more individual time.

Jennifer: So this reminds me of why we started our podcast in the first place. It's because life as a parent is busy and if we let it, time will just pass on and we'll miss out on opportunities to really connect with our kids. So to help with that, we put together a free resource we are calling our 30-second micro moments of intention with your kids.

It's a simple list of things that you can do in less than a minute to really connect with your kids. Now, some of the suggestions on there are gonna seem very obvious. Because they are. But if you do them with intention, they really will help you to connect with your children. So how do you get it? You go to parentsmakingtime.com/freeresource.

Put in your email and we'll send it right to you. Print it or store it on your phone, wherever it is helpful to you, because those small, consistent moments, [00:10:00] they really do add up and they're often what our kids remember most.

Anthony: So if you like this episode, we would be so grateful if you would leave a rating or review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and bonus points if you share the episode with a friend.

Jennifer: So that's all for this week. Next time we'll talk about how to cope when you feel like you're not connecting with your teen. 

Anthony: Until then, make time to become the parent you want to be.