Parents Making Time with Anthony & Jennifer Craiker | Intentional parenting ideas & time management tips to reduce parenting anxiety and help you stop feeling overwhelmed.
Parents! Feel like you’re missing out on your kids’ lives while also never having enough time for yourself? Want to embrace intentional parenting but don't quite know how? Career pressures, shuttling kids around, volunteer commitments, and the endless tasks of caring for your home all place enormous demands on your time and energy, leading to mom guilt, dad guilt, stress, and ultimately regret. And while you’re trying to tend to your own self-care while also being a present parent who prioritizes family connection, your kids are growing up way too fast.
Sound familiar? If so—help is here! Unlike other parenting podcasts that just give you techniques for raising children or tips on childhood development, Parents Making Time focuses on helping YOU, the parent, prioritize YOUR life so that your parenting aligns with your values. Motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, and family are what we are all about. In 15-minutes or less, this weekly podcast helps busy parents like you learn to prioritize their relationships, be more present and intentional with family time, and build a lasting legacy of love—without neglecting their own well-being or feeling regret later in life. It's not just about learning to prioritize tasks or mastering time management, it's about becoming the parent you want to be so that you can stop feeling overwhelmed, learn how to have more time, and create lasting family memories.
Leveraging their 20+ years of parenting experience raising three thriving kids and leading and mentoring hundreds of children, youth, and families in volunteer church positions, hosts Anthony and Jennifer Craiker teach parents on a tight schedule how to balance work and family, create unbreakable family bonds, prevent parent burnout, and find JOY in parenting. In other words, we help you stop being busy and start actually applying the concept of intentional living.
If you’re ready to prioritize family time each day without feeling overwhelmed, you can count on this show to teach you how to be fully present with your kids, build lasting memories, prioritize your spouse, make dinner time count, connect with your kids after work, stop missing precious moments, savor family time, discover intentional parenting ideas, and so much more—all while learning how to implement quick self-care tips, create an intentional family legacy, and parent with no regret. So, hit PLAY, and let’s get started!
Parents Making Time with Anthony & Jennifer Craiker | Intentional parenting ideas & time management tips to reduce parenting anxiety and help you stop feeling overwhelmed.
Parent Burnout: The Secret Weapon to Beat it
Are you running on fumes, constantly giving to everyone else while putting yourself dead last?
So many parents assume burnout is just part of the job — that exhaustion, overwhelm, and self-neglect are just what it means to be a “good parent.” But that belief is not only false…it's harmful to both the parent and the child.
In today’s episode, we’re unpacking the secret weapon every parent can use to push back against burnout — and no, it’s not a nap or a week-long vacation. It’s something simple, sustainable, totally doable in your real life, and will help you prioritize your spouse and kids.
Thoughts from this episode:
- Remembering that you make the decisions about how you spend your time.
- How FOMO causes burnout.
- The positive effect for you and your family of addressing the cause of your burnout.
So if you’re tired of running on fumes and ready to discover a simple, sustainable way to beat parent burnout, this episode is for you—tune in now.
00:00 Introduction: The Reality of Parent Burnout
00:30 Meet the Hosts: Anthony and Jennifer Craiker
00:40 Setting Boundaries: A Personal Story
02:28 The Importance of Prioritizing Your Time
04:38 Practical Tips for Setting Boundaries
06:57 Free Resource: 30-Second Micro Moments
07:53 Conclusion: Become the Parent You Want to Be
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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parentsmakingtime@gmail.com | https://www.parentsmakingtime.com/
Anthony: [00:00:00] As a parent, do you ever feel totally burned out? Like you feel like you're always running from one thing to the next? Do you feel like you're always doing something for someone other than yourself? That's just the life of a parent, right? Wrong. It does not have to be that way. Today we're gonna talk about the secret weapon that we can all use to combat parent burnout.
It might surprise you.
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: Well, thankfully for us, what we're talking about today is something that we learned very early on in our marriage.
Anthony: Yeah. When we first got married, we lived near both of our families, both of our parents, and they would invite us over both of them every weekend.
Jennifer: It was super nice. We [00:01:00] were newly married, not having to pay for two meals was kind of
enticing and we wanted to see our family, but it started just to become a lot, because if you have two families, how many days are on a weekend? When did we get time to ourselves?
Anthony: Right. I mean, it was typically one of them would want us to come over Friday night or sometimes Saturday and the other either Saturday or Sunday.
Jennifer: Right. Yeah. I think there was usually a Sunday evening. Invite. Eventually we had to kind of put up a boundary. We had to say, you know what? We love you. We want to spend time with you, but we really can't do both families every weekend. We need to have some time to ourselves.
Anthony: Yeah. And I hope their feelings weren't hurt when we had that conversation.
It was a long time ago, so I don't remember there being, do you remember
Jennifer: how long ago it was?
Anthony: Um,
Jennifer: how long have we been married? Uh,
Anthony: 20, almost 24 years.
Jennifer: Okay. Good job.
Anthony: Yes. Uh, anyway, um, I, I don't think it was a, a bad conversation. I [00:02:00] think our parents understood when we kind of had to set a boundary there.
Uh, and we did it in a respectful and nice way. At least I hope we did. I think we did. Yeah. I hope. But it, it was a conversation that needed to be had and, and I don't think they were thinking about it in terms of, oh, we're gonna you know, take up their whole weekend. They were just trying to be nice and they wanted to spend time with us, but we realized pretty early on in our marriage, like we also needed to make sure that we had time just for us on the weekend.
Jennifer: So if you're feeling like that, if you feel like you don't have enough time for yourself, you might be feeling like you're letting the pressure of other people determine what you do with your time. And there's so many other people that will kind of fight for your time. It's gonna be your work, it's your friends, your family, school, church, and there's nothing wrong with any of these things.
But you only have so many days, so many hours in a week, and you've gotta choose wisely what you do with it.
Anthony: Yeah. I mean, we do this because we believe that we need to be everything to everyone, right? [00:03:00] That's kind of the feeling that we have and especially when it comes to family, right? We don't want to hurt feelings and we wanna make sure that we're there to support our family, right?
But there is this feeling that a lot of time creeps in where we feel like we've got to be everything to everybody.
Jennifer: There's also the fear of missing out. Fomo. I totally experienced this. I totally experienced fomo. I don't wanna miss out. I wanna be there for everything. I wanna know what happened. I wanna say congratulations.
Whatever it is, I don't wanna miss out.
Anthony: Yeah. But the reality is you have to miss out on some things in life because again, you don't have enough time to make it to everything, to be there for every happy moment, to, you know, be there anytime that you get invited over for dinner by a friend or family, right?
You just don't have enough time.
Jennifer: And when you do try to do all those things, you're gonna feel burnout. You'll end up making yourself miserable. And when you do that, the relationships that you're trying to boost [00:04:00] to be a part of, actually they become a chore. You might resent those people. That's not how you wanna live.
You want to love, enjoy, and flourish those relationships. And sometimes when you're just letting all your time get pulled into every direction, that's not what happens,
Anthony: right, and you lose focus on what's most important. Right. This is a parenting podcast. We're talking about parenting, how we can be the best parents we can be, how we can prioritize our own families.
And if you're letting yourself get pulled in a hundred different directions, you are not going to be the best parent you can be. You're not gonna be there physically, emotionally, and mentally for your kids like you want to be.
Jennifer: The way you work through that is you set some boundaries, which like we said earlier for us meant to have a real conversation. They may be a difficult conversation, but remember, you are not responsible for other people's emotions or reactions. You're responsible for your time. You're responsible for your family and doing what's best for them.
Anthony: It's important to be on guard about the intrusions on our time.
[00:05:00] Right, especially when it comes to other people demanding our time or wanting our time. And the way that you do that is you take a good look at your priorities and you allocate your time accordingly based on your priorities. So if you're a parent and you wanna put your family first, which I think most parents do, that's going to mean setting some boundaries and saying no to other people at times,
Jennifer: right? It's in the name of our podcast, Parents Making Time, and sometimes making time means to stop doing some things so that you have the time to do the things you really want to do or really should be doing. So back to our story in the beginning, making that boundary, having that conversation with our families really gave us more time for each other.
At the time, we weren't parents yet. We didn't have children, but we needed that time for each other. It allowed us to enjoy and be more present when we were with our family because we felt like we had chosen to be there, not like we had to be there.
Anthony: And when we eventually had kids that helped set the stage because we [00:06:00] realized early on in our marriage that we needed to have some boundaries that made it a lot easier for us to set those boundaries when our kids came along so that we could prioritize them over other things.
Jennifer: So I think the takeaway from today is if you are feeling like you're pulled in all different directions all the time, it might just be because you haven't set some clear boundaries, and you might need to take some time to think about that and what those boundaries might be and how to set them.
Anthony: And having those conversations can be uncomfortable at times. It's not the easiest thing in the world, but if you're clear about what your priorities are. And you approach those conversations with love and with respect for the other person. That's all you can do. You're not responsible for other people's feelings as long as you approach the boundary setting in a respectful and loving way.
Jennifer: And frankly, I think most people understand that need for that boundary. Yeah. And so I think you're going to have easy, maybe not easy, but good conversations.
Anthony: You know, as we've been talking about this today, it reminds [00:07:00] me that one of the reasons we started this podcast is because we know how busy life gets as a parent. Sometimes it just feels impossible to slow down and create those big, memorable moments. That's why we created a free guide called 30-second Micro Moments of Intention with your Kids.
It's filled with quick, simple ideas that you can do anytime in 30 seconds or less to strengthen your connection with your kids without adding more to your plate. Now, some of these ideas may seem basic or like no-brainers, but when you do them intentionally, they can make a real difference in your relationship with your child.
So just go to parentsmakingtime.com/freeresource, enter your email and we'll send it right to you. You can print it out to keep it where you'll see it. Or save it on your phone to reference whenever you need a little inspiration so that you can start building lasting memories one micro moment at a time.
Jennifer: All right. So if you liked what you heard today, if you got something out of it. Go ahead and go where wherever it is you listen to our [00:08:00] podcast, leave a rating.
Leave a review, and there's bonus points if you share this episode with a friend.
Anthony: So thanks for listening, everyone, and tuning in. Next time we're gonna be talking about the number one parenting tool you simply cannot live without.
Jennifer: Until next time. Make time to become the parent you want to be.