Be a Slacker Mom

Perfectionism and parenting can be a recipe for exhaustion and a life filled with stress. Being a "slacker mom" is not negative; it's a way of thinking smart and of being clued into what really matters over what can wait till another day. Slacker mom was a term coined by Muffi Mead-Ferro, and it's also known as being a Beta mom, or slow parenting. Slacker moms are moms who reject any over-parenting models that involve children being sent to every possible after-school improvement option, with mom staying up till dawn baking homemade cookies before rushing off to work or starting the day's tasks.

If you're ready to be a slacker mom, then it's no more sitting for hours on end in traffic and in your car at the soccer practice field; and it's no more helicopter parenting where overbearing goodwill takes away your child's self-sufficiency and capacity to learn by trial and error. Take the over-the-top expectations out of being a mom, and start really enjoying your slow parenting experience.

Steps

1. Form your own ideas about where the tendency to overdo parenting comes from. While your personal reasoning for overdoing your mom role will be very unique to you, it can be helpful to understand some of the theorizing behind why it is thought that hyper-parenting has arisen in recent years:
   • Some commentators say that many moms transfer the zeal they applied to a career to their parenting, treating motherhood as another form of profession and social competition.
   • Sometimes it's a case of needing to define one's own worth by feeling better than the mom next door whose choices are different from yours, rather than accepting that each mom is an individual who is making good choices.
   • For other moms, it's just about trying to keep up with the Alpha mom model developed by the marketing industry, where educated woman meets super mom in applying corporate-style Improve Organizational Skills skills and technological agility to parenting.
   • And for some moms, it boils down to being afraid of what might happen to their children and to their mothering role, in a society where fear is a constant via media messages.
   • Whatever the reasons behind super intense parenting, if it's not working for you and you spend a lot of your time feeling stressed, guilty, and unhappy about maintaining this level of socialized competition, then it might be time to call time out for mom and start looking at alternative, less stressful ways to parent.
2. Change your perspective. There are a number of ways that you can perceive motherhood and all the tasks accompanying it and that's really the key message - you make the choices on how to parent. If you're a mom who wants to step out of the fast lane and start parenting with the same amount of love but a lot less competitiveness, you can get off to a great start by:
   • No longer viewing motherhood and parenting as a form of competition. Your mothering is not subject to a performance review, and your children are not the end product of a project.
   • Allowing yourself to make mistakes.
   • Lowering your expectations. Today's generation of moms have been raised to believe that they can do and have it all. Unfortunately, such a sweeping expectation places a lot of pressure on moms who translate this into meaning that they must literally "do and be everything".
   • Cutting down on digesting other people's mothering advice, especially the advice from people who have very little to do with your own lifestyle. From talk show gurus to self-appointed parenting experts in mommy blogs, you don't need it if it doesn't resonate with you. Getting a guilt trip just because someone else has a foolproof mommy plan is a waste of your life and an unfair burden to place on yourself. Remember the adage that parenting doesn't come with a manual – there's a good reason for that saying as it's based on the reality that we're all unique and we all have to discover our own parenting journey.
   • Allowing yourself to be more laid back and less "in control".
   • Avoiding judging other moms. If you're tempted to judge another mom according to your own standards, switch it to supporting her choices instead.
3. Stay away from Alpha moms. If your normal personality style is to take it easy, or you've simply worked out that all this crazed effort isn't producing the results it is supposed to, hanging around Alpha moms who spend a lot of time convincing one another of the need to hyper-parent and serving as a source of stoking the competitive fire is going to make you feel worse. The answer is very simple – keep away from them if they can't keep their competitiveness toned down around you. There is absolutely no reason on Earth why you should accede to their standards and even less for you to judge yourself according to them. Realize that much of what Alpha moms support is gleaned from popular media and is probably accepted by them without question.
   • If you do have to spend time around Alpha moms, try to view their expectations with compassion and be grateful that you're not stuck in the same mindset. This is a far healthier reaction than taking on board all the unrealistic expectations and beating yourself up for your own imperfections as a mom.
   • Find like-minded slacker moms and form your own haphazard meet-ups and chill-out sessions, with lots of unstructured play going on as you chat and relax together.
4. Stop being a helicopter mom. A term coined to described moms into hyper-mothering, helicopter moms hover around their kids all day long and well into the evening too. It's a phenomenon that is particularly noticeable among the professionally educated middle class. Helicopter moms are so afraid that their child might harm themselves or come to harm from some other person, TV program, website, or activity, that they can't abide for the child to be out of their sight and spend a lot of time present with their child, directing and commenting on every moment of the day. For some moms, this goes so far as to necessitate Overcome Opposition to Homeschooling for their kids (as opposed to homeschooling parents who value this for ideological reasons). Helicopter moms are in denial of their child's right to grow through testing. It's your role to create sensible boundaries but not to be that boundary 24 hours a day.
   • Several studies have shown that children of helicopter moms at college age are more dependent, more neurotic, and less open than other college students. Surely that's not something you're keen to impose on your children!
   • Helicopter mothering is time-consuming and emotionally draining on you as a mother. Interestingly, mothers have been investing more and more time in at home child-care activities since 1965 despite their increased labor force participation; this trend is especially prevalent among educated women, a sign of trying to "do it all".
   • If you're juggling work, helicopter parenting, and a marriage, the marriage tends to suffer first. Having an intense relationship with children can serve as a form of blocking out other people in your life, including other relatives and your local community. That isn't giving your children a healthy role model, including the essential one of involving them in volunteering.
   • Realize that sometimes being your child's best friend isn't a good idea - it's harder to set boundaries, it smothers the child, and you neglect your own friends and remaining family.
5. Let your kid get muddy, dirty, wet, and yes, pooey even. Kids need to touch, test, push and pull stuff around. If you're always there stopping them from touching what nature provides us, they'll grow to fear nature, dirt, and getting all gooey. They can also learn how to deal with hazards like dog poo and the immediate, common sense need to wash it off rather than feeling grossed out all the time. Don't scare them away from their backyard. Instead, do some reading about the good that being in nature can do for children, or better still, get out there and see the results on your children's faces.
   • Read Richard Louv's book Last Child in the Wood to learn about the benefits of nature and dirt for kids. There are more and more sites devoted to getting children "back into nature" if you don't have any ideas of how to go about this, and you can also check out wikiHow's article on Help Children Appreciate Nature.
6. Ditch Baby Mozart. No child ever suffered from a lack of Mozart being played to them in the belly. Nobody is yet sure if the same can be said about playing it though! The belly comes perfectly equipped with its own lovely woosh woosh sounds, along with the added bonus of mom's voice. What more does a baby need? Not Mozart. Hang on to your money and put it in a college fund instead.
7. Cull the toy collection. Kids don't need the latest gizmos of this, that, and the other. To overload their lives with toys is to teach them early on that materialism matters. The only materialism they need to know that matters is a good roof over their head, Get Children to Eat Healthy Foods in their stomachs regularly, and an ability to appreciate the hot and cold running water and internal temperature controls. Toys can be made from anything and indeed, most kids start off preferring the packaging anyway.
8. Restrain yourself from overloading the kids' after-school curriculum. Kids don't need all those extra activities to grow into fulfilled human beings. They need to know they can play freely and use their imagination. Kids need the freedom of doing nothing so that they teach themselves how to do something with nothing.
   • If their entire lives are filled with activities and the need to achieve, you might just be perpetuating office clones that a work-driven society too easily succumbs to facilitating.
   • Be kind to your kids and don't overdo the extra activities. Listen to their messages about what they're enjoying and not enjoying and keep the after-school activities balanced with time for play, rest, and genuine homework.
   • Stop doing your child's homework. They'll never learn self-responsibility while they have you to do it, and it's taking more time out of your day than you have to spare. They'll thank you later for the lesson in self-discipline.
9. Expect self-responsibility from your children and trust that they'll be OK. Doing everything for your children is not a healthy way to bring up children as you're setting them up to be adults with an expectation that there will be someone else to do it. Even when they realize that isn't the case, they can suffer a lifetime of resentment at being "made" to do anything, from housework to finding work.
   • Have children learn to be responsible for making their own lunch from an early age.
   • Allow unstructured play. Let the children get bored and learn how to get themselves out of that state, or at least cope with feeling that way.
   • Do a search online for "free-range" kids or parenting. You will find a lot of resources and forums for moms who want to raise their kids on a looser leash, and who are letting go of the fear messages and trusting their instincts instead. Free-range parents trust their children to develop a sense of responsibility early in life, making everyone's life a little less fettered and raising more self-reliant kids. Read the stories of other mothers tired of the fear and worry messages about parenting and find some relief!
10. Expect your husband or partner to pick up some of the slack. If you're trying to do it all yourself, hand some of the responsibilities over. Dad has a role in raising your kids too and in keeping the house in some form of tidiness. Dads can feel sidelined if you insist on doing it all – don't allow yourself to get into that bind in the first place. It's also good for your kids to see both parents handling household responsibilities equally.
11. Chill and stop feeling guilty. Your kids don't need the latest designer gear, they don't need the best 101 kid's TV channels, they don't need all those amazing electronic gadgets. They need your love, they need your company in small doses and they need the company of a lot of other people too, like their dad, their brothers and sisters, their cousins, their neighbors' kids, their granny and pops. You don't need to feel that you're not giving enough if you at least accept that what you're doing is raising a child, not a robot, and that you give love, praise, and set boundaries all with a good heart.

Tips

• As with all advice, take this with a pinch of salt too. Always cherry-pick to fit your own personal situation. Do what feels right, and what is right by your children.

Things You'll Need

• Relaxing activities
• A place of your own to go for unwinding

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Sources and Citations

See also

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