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Every parent has wondered: Am I doing this right?
In a world full of parenting advice, strong opinions, and endless information online, it can be hard to know who to trust. Hosted by clinical psychologists, researchers, and moms, Dr. Leslie Roos and Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen, You're Doing It Right is a podcast for parents who want trustworthy information without the judgment. As parents of young children themselves, Leslie and Lianne understand the joys, challenges, and total chaos that come with parenting, bringing both professional expertise and humor to every conversation.
Each episode features conversations with experts about the questions families are actually asking, from sleep and screen time to behaviour, emotions, relationships, and family wellbeing. Together, they explore what the research really says, what it means for everyday family life, and how to cope when things don’t go exactly to plan.
This podcast is not about perfect parenting. It is about helping families feel more confident, more supported, and a little less alone. The are so many wonderful ways to parent and chances are, you're doing an amazing job.
~You're Doing It Right podcast was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)~
Most parents know the feeling, the schedule's too full, the to-do list won't shrink, and somewhere underneath it all is the quiet question: is this doing damage? Are my kids going to be okay?
Welcome to You're Doing It Right, a parenting podcast about the real, messy, beautiful work of raising a family. hosted by acclaimed psychologists Dr. Leslie Roos and Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen. Leslie and Lianne are researchers, clinicians, and parents themselves, bringing honest, evidence-informed conversations to the everyday questions families face - no judgment, no single "right" way, just practical support for real life. Each episode, they sit down with an expert to dig into a topic parents actually deal with.
Today: what's actually restoring balance in a chaotic household, and what's just noise, with Dr. Dillon Browne, Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo and Canada Research Chair in Child and Family Clinical Psychology, whose work sits at the intersection of family stress, adversity, and resilience.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Family chaos. I also want to tell you this is unrelated and we'll probably get cut, but I just got my new bike so I can start ready to work.
Dr. Leslie Roos
Nothing I want less than to bike ride to work. I think it's so cool that you do. But I'm so
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
I took him for a ride last night.
Dr. Leslie Roos
Glad that brings you joy. It is not what would bring me joy. I get anxious on bikes because I'm like not good enough and occasionally I fall over.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
It makes me really happy. Also helps me reduce my family chaos feelings to be on my bike in Pacific Spirit Park.
Dr. Leslie Roos
You know, that's great and that's a nice illustration of like the different things that reduce those feelings of like chaos or calm to each of us. I sometimes I I can think of some like influencer reels that I've seen where it's like when you're feeling like burnt out and like you need a minute and life is chaotic, like here's a five steps. It's like hold on a 27-minute TV show for kids, get changed, hop on that exercise bike.
Grab them some, like throw them some cheese strings, and then it's like, and then do like a nice family body activity together at the playground. I'm like, holy, when I burnt out, I wanna like cry, try not to yell at my kids, and like I'm like vibrating. Like I can't go like do a workout for 24 minutes when my kids start screaming at that their episode's over. So I don't relate to that, which I feel like is sort of like, I don't know, commodified self-care. I don't even know what the word is.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Getting your kid on your bike and strapping them in means they are restrained and you get to exercise.
Dr. Leslie Roos
You have a toddler. I used to do that actually. It's okay, that's a good good analogy. With both of my boys who were very physically chaotic on the weekends, I would frequently like strap them in the stroller when it was really cold out, and I would like put on all my layers and just like angry walk somewhere. So this is I think that that's a nice illustration of like different ways that we cope. but I one thing that I just want to add is that like it doesn't need to look pretty recognizing when you're overwhelmed and things feel chaotic with like my laundry piles that are at issue all the time.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
So many laundry piles. Kick us off.
Dr. Leslie Roos
Sounds good. Welcome back to your Doing It Right. I'm Dr. Leslie Roos, here with Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen, and today we're talking about something almost every parent we know is quietly wrestling with. How do you restore any kind of balance when life just feels chaotic? Not in a someday when things calm down way. More as in a right now, while we're in it, how are we coping?
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
If you're feeling overwhelmed, it's not just you. Statistics Canada most recent data puts nearly a quarter of Canadian adults in the quite a lot of stress category. And when a US Surgeon General advisory came out flagging parental stress as a public health issue, researchers here confirm that it lines up with what we're seeing in Canada too. Close to half of all parents describe themselves as completely overwhelmed on a regular basis.
Dr. Leslie Roos
It is and you know it means that if you're in it right now, you're very much not alone and you're not doing anything wrong. And I would also argue that like if you're having a day or a week where you're like, I've sort of got some of these balls that I'm juggling right now, then like give yourself a pat on the back. That's great. You are holding on to it and I'm sure you're managing a lot too.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Today, we brought in an expert whose entire career is families managing real significant adversity.
Dr. Leslie Roos
And partway through, we're going to step out of the conversation for a few minutes on a piece of this that our guest flags is genuinely under-discussed and something that might be one of the biggest levers for restoring balance in a stressed-out household. This is not something that a lot of parenting advice points you towards.
Dr. Dillon Browne
A child who, for all intents and purposes, is having some type of mental health difficulty and that is somehow also meaningfully related to a deterioration in the marital system as well. And it's not about the chicken or the egg and what led to the other. It's more about how those things are connected in a feedback loop.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Dr. Dillon Browne is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo and lead researcher of the whole family lab. His work looks at how stress, trauma, and adversity ripple through entire families, not just individuals, and what helps parents and children regain stability while life is still chaotic. Dr. Browne studies real-time family interactions, the impact of early hardship, and the interventions that actually move the needle for families under pressure.
He's here to help us understand what balance can look like when the whole system is overwhelmed and how families can find steadiness even in the middle of the storm.
Dr. Leslie Roos
So let's dive in. The nation's top doctor is warning about an epidemic of stress among parents. A new surgeon general's advisory says parents are significantly stressed
Social Media Clip
Parents are significantly more stressed than the rest of adults. The Surgeon General, says parental mental health has to be a priority and a culture shift needs to take place to make that happen.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
That was an excerpt from CBS News when a study came out on the impact stress is having on parents. Part of the conversation today is about stress on parents and how families need to restore balance. So, Dillon, how did you get into working with families who are coping with significant adversity and stress and life challenges?
Dr. Dillon Browne
Well, there's a personal connection and then one that came directly from research.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Please tell us the personal. I want the personal.
Dr. Dillon Browne
The personal one. The personal one is that my mother came from a family of twelve. She was part of the baby boom after the war and grew up in Kentucky. Both of my parents were from Kentucky, hence the horse over my shoulder. And so, you know, given that we live so far away, I didn't get to see them very often, but we would go down there at least once a year, twice a year growing up. And I was just so fascinated by this huge family. So like twelve siblings.
And now we're on to the grandkids of that generation. So it's an absolutely enormous family. And then there were a lot of stories as well. It was a, I guess, a a bit of a a stressful time, in addition to so many wonderful things happening with music and and culture and and that sort of thing. And yeah, so there was just always this interest in families and finding them fascinated. And it's possibly because they were so far away, it almost helped me or led me to intellectualize around families a little bit. It was something that I thought about. More of course I had my immediate family, but the greater extended family kinship network was was far away. So something I thought about a lot. And then on the research side, it kind of came from data, to be honest with you. I had an interest in in children's mental health.
Well, first I had an interest in mental health and then I realized that mental health in adulthood starts somewhere. And so that led me upstream to wanting to work with kids. And then as I started to do research around how children come to develop mental health difficulties, it led me to understanding the family dynamic and just kind of going from there.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
I'm curious like how the adversity piece fits in, like personally or professionally. Like what led you to this working with kids who are facing significant stress?
Dr. Dillon Browne
Going back to my mom's family in Kentucky, Catholic family of twelve, one income. They had twelve siblings and two adults living in a one-bedroom home, needing to share clothes, the toothbrush, and that sort of thing. So times were tough and there was economic pressure. So that kind of speaks to some experiences of adversity. There was also a legacy of war trauma as well. So on my grandfather's side,
He was in some of the major conflicts in the Second World War in Europe and came home very decorated in a military sense, but there was a legacy of of what he experienced and that was felt through the family system in terms of the sorts of things that would transpire, whether it's folks getting angry or hostile with one another when times were stressful or or maybe un unhelpful ways of coping as well, like drinking alcohol. Yet
At the same time, there was so much wonderful stuff happening in the family as well. So I mentioned music. So I come from a musical family and there were these choir practices that would happen. Many of my family members would play music in the church, organ, piano. My grandfather and a number of great uncles were opera singers as well. So that led to a love of classical music. And so I became really interested in how there can be
All of this really challenging stuff happening, yet so much beauty and artistic things happening that kind of counteract some of that stress that people are experiencing. In terms of adversity on the research side, as I was looking at children's mental health, family relationships, and then getting into the data in terms of doing epidemiological research, the adversity related variables and constructs in these data sets that I was working in always conveyed the biggest signal. Doing anything in my life that would have some type of or at least be part of some net benefit in children's mental health.
Dr. Leslie Roos
I love what you highlighted in terms of the contrast between, you know, sometimes all the things that a family is managing, alongside all of the really wonderful, passionate, beautiful things that they pull through and bring to their family life in spite of all the chaos. I think that really rings true for a lot of, you know, adversity and stress that, you know, I see professionally, and I think is also true in my own family. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about like what do we mean when we say adversity? What do we mean when we say family stress?
Dr. Dillon Browne
Yeah, it's a big question and I feel like there are a few intersecting areas that are talking about the same thing from slightly different angles. There's poverty research, trauma research or traumatology, and then research that focuses on adverse childhood experiences and the history that comes from a number of very specific studies there. That's really speaking to
The effects of economic deprivation and not having the amount of money that is required for providing the necessities of life. When it comes to trauma, that has a bit more of a specific definition. And sometimes we talk about capital T versus small T trauma. So capital T trauma generally referring to things that have had some threat to the safety of an individual, or speaking of children, threat to the safety.
Of the adults that that child depends upon. And then going to adverse childhood experiences, that comes from a seminal study out of Kaiser in California in the late 1990s that looked at a set of variables that kind of speak to the cumulative number of stressors. So it's really a measure of the number of types of stressor that an individual experiences.
Dr. Leslie Roos
If we're thinking about our audience where parents might, you know, have dealt with their own stressful experiences as a kiddo, or maybe they're a parent who's managing a lot of stress right now, you know, it's tough to meet ends meet, there's lots of inflation going on. Maybe you're a parent who wasn't able to prevent something like a really traumatic experience happening to your own kid. How would you sort of explain these ideas of stress and adversity to parents managing those realities?
Dr. Dillon Browne
Maybe I'll put it in a metaphor, like the idea that parents are sculptors of their children versus are they gardeners? And so this I think that there's a a misconception in popular discourse around parenting that parents are sculptors of their children, that they shape exactly who their kids are. And then if there's a traumatic event, it can feel like, well, well, we really dropped the ball here and now the sculpture is ruined.
And that is not a good way to be thinking about it, and it's in inaccurate based on tons and tons and tons of research now. I think a more helpful metaphor is thinking about parents as as gardeners and their children and would be the plants in the garden, or maybe a a beautiful flower. And so, really, what their job is is to manage the conditions of the garden. And maybe there is something that happens in the garden.
There's a drought, we run out of water for a little while, we can always add water. We can do something to address the challenges that come up. And I think the other important thing there that's important to consider is the idea of neuroplasticity. And so with all of these sorts of things that can happen, whether they're capital T traumatic experiences or smaller stresses that come up, like you've mentioned the economic pressures that many families are experiencing right now. Maybe there's a really tough time and things are going poorly.
That can be turned around and all of the evidence suggests that children have neuroplasticity or relatively malleable. And so that while there are stressors that happen, there are also protective factors that can offset that stressor and then right the ship going forward in the future.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
There are so many pressures on parents these days, getting from work to the activity to making sure your kid gets the math tutoring, making sure that there's enough food in the house. Like parents are carrying a lot right now. What kind of advice do you give them for managing all these expectations on themselves?
Dr. Dillon Browne
I think one of the first steps is to acknowledge that over the past hundred years or so, that society has gone in a way that has made the job of raising children extremely difficult. And there are a number of factors related to that that have happened from like the Industrial Revolution all the way leading up to today. With globalization, there has been an erosion of extended kinship networks and community.
You have the simultaneous economic pressure and families becoming more of a closed system as opposed to an open system, which is a framework that we use in family therapy. And so then that is meaning that the tasks of child rearing are increasingly falling on one or two people, i.e. parents, and less and less on the collective. And so there's that old African proverb, it takes a village to raise a child, and we're not as able to access the benefits of being in a village anymore for a variety of reasons.
Dr. Leslie Roos
I wonder if we can talk a little bit about the importance of the parent-child relationship. This is something that I think a lot about. During my second pregnancy, it was one of the most stressful times of my life. And then I went on to have a baby who was very colicky and had the classic disposition of a baby fae who faced prenatal stress. But one of the things that I really hung on to was the research that even when kids are exposed to a lot of prenatal stress, one of the most important things afterwards is that connection with a caregiver and that sometimes stress can actually prime kids to just be more sensitive to their environment. It doesn't mean that things are gonna happen one way or another. It's not deterministic. So I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about that like parent-child relationship and why that might matter for families who are managing a lot of stress.
Dr. Dillon Browne
As a psychologist and in psychology, we talk a lot about self-regulation and the emergence of self-regulation over time. And in reality, for young people, self-regulation is really other regulation. So the regulation of the nervous system of an infant, then a toddler, and then a young child is happening. So there's this influential idea called experiential canalization, which is a fancy way of saying that neurons that fire together wire together.
And when there is that synchrony between parents and young people and it's co-regulated so that there is that kind of fluid dance taking place, children tend to grow up to be more able to regulate themselves. And when there is more synchrony and harmony in that early parent-child relationship, things tend to go better in terms of what that child would be able to do in the future pertaining to self-regulation.
Dr. Leslie Roos
So with self-regulation there, you're saying that a parent's ability to co-regulate with their their kiddo and respond to those needs is really important for supporting you positive outcomes and all, even in the context of stress. And how how important is that? Is that like very important? Are there other things parents should be focused on? What what should a parent focus on if they're managing a lot of stress?
Dr. Dillon Browne
You know, that's a really, really tough question to answer. And that's something that comes up a lot for me in family therapy. And there is a calculus that takes place where families might come into the clinic and there is that question, like, what else can I be doing? At that point, I offer a bit of a reframe, and sometimes I might even say something like, There's absolutely nothing wrong with your family. There is a problem with the relationship between the social demands of the day and the number of things that are being asked of you, and any reasonable family's capacity to meet those demands. So you're not doing it wrong, and there's nothing wrong with you, going back to that idea of a balance scales. The number of weights on the stressor pile are just too high. And so I think an acceptance and an acknowledgement that this isn't a failure.
Or that if I were a better parent, I wouldn't be having these difficulties, or everyone else is able to make this work, but not me. I think that that that's a fallacy and it's also a tough one to talk against in this kind of social media age where people tend to present the more harmonious moments of life or have very curated portraits of themselves online. And then we might work on some activities on how to downregulate one's own nervous system.
When we're going into moments of being with our children. And that could be even something like do some deep breathing, maybe listen to music. Maybe it's going for a walk around the block before we start interacting with the kids. So we kind of just chill out a little bit. And so again, that's a different way of thinking about it. Rather than saying, like, I'm an emotionally reactive person and the kids are driving me nuts. We can start to think about ways that we can deal with this kind of unique context that we live in in twenty twenty six in order to meet the challenges that family life are presenting.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
I think for me as a parent, knowing that there is this whole range of tools you can draw on has been really helpful. Just knowing that there's these different things you can try and you don't have to get it right is really, really validating. Like pulling stuff out of the toolbox with a kid who's melting down and knowing like we're gonna try this, then we're gonna try and make a joke, then everybody's gonna go try and take a deep breath can be very, very humanizing.
Dr. Dillon Browne
I think that's a great point and and things that work at one point in time or one era of development might not work later and then obviously within family children within the same family are very different. and so what works for one might not work for the other.
Dr. Leslie Roos
We're gonna pause it right there, because Dillon’s about to name something that comes up constantly in family therapy, but almost never in mainstream parenting advice. We wanna dig into this research a bit more before we hear his answer.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
So, most advice for chaotic households points you towards the parent-child relationship. So, more patience, better routines, more one-on-one time. And all of that is real and all of it's very useful. But there's a piece of family research that gets a lot less airtime, and it's actually one of the most consistently replicated findings in the field, and that's the relationship between parents themselves.
Social Media Clip
Recent research that shows when there is high confidence that involves this high conflict right child. If the conflict happens. Impact in the children in the first years of life of the child. For the child, the structure will change.
Dr. Leslie Roos
That’s Maria Filomena Ribeiro de Fonseca Gaspar, PhD, an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Coimbra. She is one of the speakers at the International Conference of Shared Parenting in Athens and was speaking to the effects of long term high conflict and how the brain is affected and can lead to serious consequences for the child, both mentally and physically, affecting both socioemotional behaviors and learning abilities. I also have a very good colleague, Alice Graham.
Who studied kids' brains exposed to marital conflict in utero, still during pregnancy, and found that kids exposed to this sort of conflict in their parents outside the womb have different wiring. So kids' brains are more set up to take in information about emotions and be a little bit more reactive and responsive to what's going on in their environment.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
And that's not just a brain scan finding either. It goes all the way down to the gene level. There's research out of UBC and BC Children's Hospital that looked at attachment styles between parents and toddlers and found that kids who were securely attached had a measurably different molecular profile than kids who weren't, specifically in DNA methylation, which is basically a chemical tag that acts like a dimmer switch on how active certain genes are.
Dr. Leslie Roos
And this could be seen as early as three months old. So differences show up in genes tied to the immune system and cognitive development. So the relationship isn't just shaping behavior, there's an argument that this exposure to high levels of family conflict can also shape biology, starting almost immediately.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Which is exactly why research in that study were careful to frame it as a two-way street. They say it shows that potential biological cost of early adversity, but also the resilience that comes with positive parenting. So this isn't a life sentence in either direction. I think you and I talk about this all the time, Leslie, right? Because I'm such a person who advocates for early intervention in pregnancy. And I love working with you because you always remind me that like even if a kid has a lot of adversity in pregnancy and early life, there's so much that can be done to help them regulate and thrive in their later life.
Dr. Leslie Roos
Absolutely. We are making new brain cells, you know, until the day that we die. And kids especially have a huge amount of brain growth that happens through the early layers of life, and then a huge amount of pruning to define like what are the most important structures in our brain a little bit later on. There is such protective effects of positive relationships. And even when things have been a struggle and maybe your kiddo is having
Big behaviors, a big emotional outburst that you think might be related to stuff that they experience, which is totally possible. You'll never know. There's also so much that you can do to support them to learn new skills, to act a bit differently, to grow over time. And so I think that optimism that there's always time to shift things is really, really critical. And again, there's a really, really consistent finding is the value of that positive relationship with a parent as being something that's so protective for.
Frankly, every possible outcome. And this echoes something that we've heard before too, that even something as simple as holding an infant early on can leave a trace on how the genes express themselves. The relationship with parents and caregivers is doing more work biologically than we tend to give it credit for.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
This can go back to something too called the spillover hypothesis. So the idea that mood, conflict, and stress don't just stay contained. They spill from a couple's relationship into the parent-child relationship, and vice versa. And that's not a new idea. It's been studied since the late 1980s, and it's been replicated over and over, including in daily journaling studies where parents track their relationship quality and their parenting quality day by day. We see that the two things really move together.
Dr. Leslie Roos
And it's not just about conflict. There's a newer framework published just this year called Interparental Positivity Spillover Theory. It's the idea that it's not just fighting that spills over, it's the good stuff too. So when parents share good news with each other, laugh together, show appreciation, that positivity spills into how the kids experience their family. Which actually lines up with something Dillon brought up earlier around our previous guest, Dr. Key's sleep research, finding that marital satisfaction predicts how parents perceive their infant's sleep independent of how the baby was actually sleeping.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Right, the relationship colors the whole household's experience of stress, sometimes more than the actual stressor does.
Dr. Leslie Roos
So if a kid is melting down at school, struggling to regulate, the research says it's worth widening the lens. Not because the parents caused it, and not instead of working directly with a child, but because a couple or co-parenting relationship might be one of the more overlooked places to actually intervene and think about, you know, investing energy, taking the time to think and to have those conversations when things are tough. I know I've certainly had times in my relationships when things were not where I wanted them to be.
So sometimes it's like permission to spend time there when you're already taxed and managing a lot of stuff.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Maybe the most restoring balance idea in this whole episode is that the fix for a chaotic household or maybe problems with your kids isn't always just pointed towards the kid. And I think that's something to really notice is that sometimes when there's problems in the relationship, it can be really easy to think, this is just problems with my kiddo. But sometimes this is actually pointed sideways at each other.
Dr. Leslie Roos
Absolutely. And I think it's, you know, really valuable for parents to have the permission to focus on what the adults' needs in the household are and how you know adults need to be interacting with each other or what they need to work on before thinking about the kids. Cause kids are so demanding, right? They take so much from us and they demand so much, and that's good. That's how they're supposed to be their kids. They're little like very cute, dependent critters. But adults are setting the structure and the frame for all that.
I also think you know a lot about people who are single parents. How do you think this comes into play for them?
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
I think single parents deserve their whole own episode because they're dealing with a whole different set of issues, right? I think sometimes single parents come out of a relationship and they're like, this is great. I'm thinking of the photographer that we just had who did some photos for us and she was like, There are parts of this where I'm like thriving, and it can be easier to come out of a difficult relationship than it is to be in a difficult relationship or be sleeping next to somebody or having breakfast with somebody who you don't like very much.
And I think sometimes it's logistically so much harder. Financially, it can be lonelier. It can be harder to get kids to things. So I think single parenting just has like its own almost like separate set of challenges that come along with it.
Dr. Leslie Roos
I think, you know, some of the principles are similar though, in terms of having permission that, you know, when things are chaotic, to have permission to take the time, look at your schedule, your life, what's going well, what feels like a major struggle, and do a little bit of brainstorming and like bring in a friend, bring in a therapist, bring in your neighbor to say, Hey, this is really tough. Any ideas or I'm struggling with this, just to like put the energy there.
When things are tough, it's probably cause they should be and you're managing a lot of things that are really tough. So it's not gonna be a quick fix where you like do something super speedy, get in some exercise, where you could watch the TV and everything's better.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Totally. And if your relationship isn't going well, it's just in the theme of our podcast, like you're not alone. And there's nothing wrong with you. My parents are divorced and my husband's parents are divorced. So statistically, we are like we're in trouble. And it means that we have to talk a lot about like what healthy relationships look like. And I think it's okay to really normalize that. If you're living with somebody who you are not having an easy time living with, that's okay. It's okay to reach out for help. It's okay to say, I don't know how to do this with you. My attachment style maybe doesn't match up with your attachment style particularly well. And that can be a really powerful way to come out of family chaos and family adversity is like healing some of these things.
Dr. Leslie Roos
Thank you for sharing those pieces. Let's head back now into our conversation with Dillon.
Dr. Dillon Browne
And I think that that is something that is often overlooked, especially in like the popular parenting discourse. There's a lot of discussion around the parent-child relationship. And so then if we were to think about the family to use like a a map or family map or what we might call a genogram, it's all about like the vertical connections across generations. That's obviously important. All the different connections are are important, but then we start to lose the horizontal connections between people of the same generation. So co-parents or marital subsystem, and then also with with siblings as well. So those intragenerational diets. And so the most common presentation I'd say among families that I see coming in for family therapy would be there is a child who, for all intents and purposes, is having some type of mental health difficulty. And that is somehow also meaningfully related to a deterioration in the marital system as well. And
It's not about the chicken or the egg and what led to the other. It's more about how those things are connected in a feedback loop. And it is natural that when there is a stressor with any member, any individual of the family, that has a ripple effect across the rest of the family system.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Yeah, I am so glad you brought that up. I got trained in integrated behavioral couples therapy and emotionally focused therapy. Psychologists have like the worst terms for the most interesting types of therapies. And I think so much about how parents are coping together, particularly in romantic relationships and how it impacts the kids. Like whether you are going to bed with your partner and you still want to hold hands or whether you still want to talk to them about your problem. And I'm I know we're a little bit off topic, but I'm so curious, like, why do you think we don't talk about that more?
Dr. Dillon Browne
Yeah, it's it's an interesting question. I think that it has to do with our individualistic society. And given that children's mental health has so much airtime, we tend to zoom in on the individual, who in this case is the child. And in family therapy, we actually zoom out from that. And one of the goals of family therapy is to move the problem attribution or the the explanation of the problem from the identified patient to the collective. And so this isn't a you problem. This is the problem is over there and this is an us solution. It comes from a long history going all the way back to psychoanalysis or like Freud, where the individual was the recipient of of care. And then family therapy kind of has its own history that actually came out of ecology and cybernetic computing, which is interesting that I won't go off on a tangent right now, that views the family as a complex system that is self-organizing and governed by feedback. And I mean, there's a lot of conversation out there around marriage therapy and having a successful relationship. It just seems to me that we're not connecting those two things. We're not connecting that the marital quality piece is also related to the children's mental health.
I think all the family therapy people know that and and we w and we know that it's just perhaps not not something that we talk about enough in more popular forums.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
One of my friends has this like amazing ethos with the I've heard her say it at the playground with her kids. Like, I've gotta make sure that me and daddy go have fun so that we can have fun with you later. And I just I love the way she talks about it. She talks about it like it's so important for them to prioritize like their relationship. And they do it. Like they're a role model for how parents go out on dates together.
Dr. Leslie Roos
It's so under discussed. And when we talk about ways to lower family stress and communication, relationships are one of the the primary ways. And you know, if that is with the romantic partner and and co-parent, when that relationship's good, it can be such a buffer. And when it's not good, it can be such an added point of stress. When you have
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
Kids, so much of the focus becomes the kids. Because I study pregnancy primarily. Like I see this transition happen when somebody's pregnant, like so many resources go into them. They get to go to the doctor, they get massages, they get to take prenatal vitamins, and then this baby pops out, and like we just stop asking if they're okay.
We stop caring about whether they're all right. And so much focus goes into this little baby. And I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, like focus needs to go into the little baby, but we forget that the parents still need love and care and attention. And so we just stop focusing on ourselves, and everything else can start to feel
Bad if we're not pouring into our relationships with our friends, if we're not pouring into our relationships with our partner. And I think it's this idea that you're selfish if you do it.
Dr. Leslie Roos
It's a key point of social connection and then you get married and it's supposed to be this steel trap of like what happens in the home stays in the home. There's not one way to do it. Should it stay within the home? What if people are talking about stress externally? Is that good or bad?
Dr. Dillon Browne
Yeah, I I think it goes back to the the balance again. So I I mentioned this idea of open and closed systems. And I think an extreme in either direction is potentially problematic. So if you have a family that is completely closed, so I'd like your iron trap or steel trap metaphor, and so there's no permeability in in that membrane around the family where people can get social support or have conversations about the things that are going on.
In the family, in the relationship with other people, then folks can start to feel really isolated. On the other hand, if there is no boundary and we're just airing all our laundry and maybe turning to people outside of the family when we could be turning to our significant other, or only turning to people outside the family when we could be sometimes be turning to our significant other, that can become problematic as well. So it's about striking that balance. And I think that balance might look little bit different for every family based on their values, their culture, who's available, all that sort of thing. It is something that comes up in family therapy. And I think related to that, men often or might feel excluded from children's mental health, or that it's not their place. this is mom's department. We'll let her deal with that.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
I could talk about this for like 10 years, totally, because men get excluded, right? And then they're lonely and excluded from the parenting relationship and also excluded from the marital relationship.
Dr. Dillon Browne
Yeah, that's like this idea that emotions or relationships or some of this quote unquote softer stuff is not the department of men. Now in twenty nineteen the American Psychological Association had a task force around recommendations for psychological practice with boys and men. And while that set of recommendations was perhaps a little bit ahead of its time, now we're seven years later and we're seeing stuff like the Manosphere and Toxic Masculinity and all this kind of stuff.
Dr. Leslie Roos
Thanks so much, Dillon. Is there anything else that you think really wanna leave families with that are managing stressors? Anything else you wanna end with in terms of key messages or takeaways?
Dr. Dillon Browne
I think it's coming back to that idea of an acknowledgement of this kind of historically interesting, perhaps a bit peculiar situation that we're in right now, and normalizing the idea that the demands of the day are so high and that the world and society has gone in a way that has made the job more challenging. Not in a doom and gloom kind of way, like we're all doomed and hopeless.
Actually in a very hopeful kind of way, just kind of acknowledging that this is how it is and that we're better together. And we can not only lean on our family members, but on other families and each other in order to kind of deal with some of the tricky things that life is presenting us.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
If there's one thing to take from this episode, is that restoring balance isn't always about doing more for your kids. Sometimes it's about tending to the relationship that's right next to you.
Dr. Leslie Roos
And Dillon’s Gardner Not Sculptor comment, quoted from psychologist Alison Gopnick, always sticks with me too. As a parent, you're not responsible for controlling every outcome. You don't know what your kids, you know, are made up of exactly what they're gonna be bringing to the table. But what you can control is setting up the conditions, adjusting them. And this can happen in an ongoing way, even after a rough season, or noticing that like the combination of like plant food, water, sun the things when you remember it is not a recipe that is working particularly well for your kid over
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
And that research that we talked about earlier, that a couple's relationship quality spills over into how the whole family experiences stress, for better or worse, is worth thinking about. Especially when we know that almost half of parents right now describe themselves as completely overwhelmed.
Dr. Leslie Roos
And this is exactly why it matters where you put that fort. It's not adding one more task to your to-do list, but maybe it's the one thing you focus on for this week that makes the rest of the list easier to carry. I always want to invite people to take things off their list. If something is not a crisis, you don't have to address it right now today this week. You can bookmark it and say, hey, we're gonna focus on something else. We'll deal with that later, even though I'm not happy with where it's at.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
So if you take one thing from today, check in on that co-parenting relationship. It can be easy to let investment in those relationships falls to the wayside after kids are in play, but there can be more benefits for you and for your kids to focus on that as a key priority.
Dr. Leslie Roos
Thank you so much to Dr. Dillon Browne for this conversation.
Dr. Lianne Tomfohr-Madsen
And thank you for listening. If today's episode gave you something to think about, pass it along to another parent, or better yet, to your co-parent.
Dr. Leslie Roos
Next time we tackle food, navigating picky eating. See you next time. This is You're Doing It Right.
Narration
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