If you’re nervous about juggling everything over the summer: listen to this

0:07Welcome to Motherkind. We are proudly sponsored by Wild Nutrition. women's supplements. I am your host Zoe Blaskin. This is the show that is going to grab you by the hand and be your guide through the wild ride that is modern motherhood. Every week I bring you world leading experts and thinkers to give us new ideas, new tools, new support, new inspiration and validation for our lives as mothers. We spend everything here from work to wellbeing to relationships to mental health and healing and parenting and I am very happy you are here. Thank you for being here. I'm so happy you pressed that little play button.

0:41I appreciate each and every one of you in this community. You know, this podcast really is community made. It has grown only because you shared it, told friends about it, and I'm so grateful. This week's episode is a solo with me, and I'm going to share a few ways to make summer easier and a lot more fun this year because I want you to hear September feeling good, not crawling to the end of the holidays. And I know that I haven't always got this right. So today I'm going to teach you in just 20 minutes what it's taken me years to learn. I'm going to teach you three ways that I avoid burnout and make the summer as easy and as fun and as joyful for all of us, which is what we all want.

1:32I'd like to take this moment to thank our headline sponsor Wild Nutrition who are offering MotherKind listeners 50 % off for the first three months when I was pregnant with my first 10 years ago I asked a few nutritionist friends what's the best pregnancy supplement and they all said the same thing Wild Nutrition so I listened and these incredible supplements have kept me feeling great through two pregnancies, starting this podcast, writing a book, a relocation and everything in between for the last decade. So it's magical to me that I now get to tell you about this incredible woman founded brand every week.

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2:45Just go to wildnutrition.com forward slash motherkind to get started. That's wildnutrition.com forward slash motherkind so you can feel the difference yourselves. Start 2026 rooted in wellness. T's and C's apply. Let me tell you a bit about what my summer looks like this year. So my girls, they break up from school early. They've actually already broken up. They broke up on the 5th of July. And so for July, Guy, that's my husband and I, we sort of muddled through with the childcare days here, day there. so I'm working but it's definitely not my usual hours or output and then August I actually have the whole month off in fact the whole of Motherkind has the whole month off one of my ambitions with what I'm doing with Motherkind is that I want it to be completely run by mothers and I want us to have August and December off and I want to work four day weeks and we are getting there so it is my own business.

3:42So I'm never fully off. I'll still be creating content, but I won't be recording. I won't be moving any big projects forward. We're going on holiday. We've got a couple of camping trips. I live in Dorset in the UK, which is basically holiday land. So we'll be going to the beach a lot. We'll be doing lots of fun trips. And I will also be putting into practice everything I'm going to share in this episode to make it easier and more fun. But tell you what, it hasn't always been this way. I used to find summer so challenging. And in fact, I was just telling a friend earlier today about how I burnt out the first summer that we moved here from London.

4:17I didn't have any childcare. I didn't have any friends. I had way too many visitors come and stay with us because we were so excited to have moved house. And I completely burnt out. And I remember getting to the end of August and I felt like a shell of my former self. I couldn't stop crying. I would freeze at even a simple decision. Doing something simple like packing the kids' bags for school at the start of September felt like climbing a mountain. So I have been there and I really want this episode to help you not go there ever because if you've ever experienced that it is incredibly difficult to come back from burnout.

4:57So I think summer can be so challenging for many of us and you know it's obvious why that is isn't it it's mainly around child care so on average children have 13 weeks off if they're school age if they're nursery the nursery is often closed for prolonged periods as well and the system just isn't set up to support us through that so clubs might be available but they might be for not for the right ages they might be too expensive they might be booked up so I think child care is probably one of the biggest reasons that we find the summer so challenging. The other thing is that I don't know about you, but I have two girls and they're used to going to school in the day.

5:33They're used to going to different things separately. And suddenly for nearly nine weeks, they are together all day, every day. And so they argue pretty much nonstop some days. And that takes such a toll on my nervous system. Also the lack of routine. So they know where they're at with school. I know where amount of school and suddenly it's all thrown up in the air. And I think especially if you've got little ones, kind of toddlers, three, four years old, this can really impact them, you know, not missing that routine, that normal routine, especially I think if we go on holiday and the weather's different and the food's different, it can just be meltdown central, which again takes such a toll on our nervous system.

6:14I also think the summer can be difficult because you might feel guilty. I think it's really easy to compare ourselves to what other friends are doing, what other people on social media are doing. Just seeing other people out and about having lovely days out when you might be needing to use clubs and childcare and you're still working at your same rate. I think that comparison is huge in the summer and guilt linked to that, you know, particularly if you're using screens way more than you would, or maybe you're not going on holiday this year. Maybe you're just working the whole way through. I think that can really bring up a lot of guilt.

6:45Another thing that I see in our community as to why summer can be so difficult is resentment towards our partners who sometimes, not always, sometimes, you know, can carry on business as usual. And we are there as the mothers running around, patching together childcare, managing work, managing kids, managing playdates, booking holidays, all logistics, and, and, and, and. Mental load really can go up in the summer. So all this to say that if you find summer difficult, or if you are maybe slightly dreading it, if you're being honest with yourself, I want you to know there's nothing wrong with you.

7:19There really isn't. The system isn't really set up to support us and it can feel like such a perfect storm. So that's the first thing is have compassion for yourself. Okay. As always with Mother Kind, we focus on the big picture first and we think about, okay, we are where we are. We've got the system that we've got. What can we control within it? And that's what I want to talk to you about next. So I'm going to talk through three things that we can do that are simple and are going to make a massive impact to you having a better summer. The first one is asking for help. Ask for more help than you feel comfortable with.

7:59Ask for more help than you've ever asked for before. And you do not need to get to the point like I did in burnout where it's all too much to ask for help. Ask for help proactively. Ask for help before you really need it. Ask friends, ask family, ask anyone that you trust to look after your children or ask for help with other things to enable you to look after the children. I know that I've struggled with this, particularly in early motherhood. I really wanted to be seen that I could handle it all. I didn't need help. I didn't like the idea of the vulnerability of asking for help. I didn't like the idea that someone might not do it my way.

8:38You have to let go of a little bit of control if you're going to ask for help. So things really changed for me when I unpacked that. And there's actually a whole chapter in the Mother Kind book about this because it's been a challenge for me. You know, why did I feel so resistant? Why was I so wedded to this sort of super mum, you know, mask on, pushing through, you know, vision that I was putting out of myself? It simply wasn't true. And now I ask for a lot of help. I ask for help with pickups, drop-offs, childcare. I ask for work help. Often I'll phone a friend and say, I'm really struggling with this work project.

9:15What would you do? I never used to do anything like that. And it's really changed. So challenge number one, and this is to me included, is can you ask for more help than you feel comfortable with? Think of a pinch point in your summer. Who could you ask for help? What might it look like? You might have to get creative. Lots of mums I know do kind of childcare clubs where they share the childcare and one mum will have them one afternoon and the other mum will work or do whatever she needs to do and then they'll swap over. There's so many ways that we can support each other and start to create more of a sense of that community that we really need.

9:59The second one is to share the load. Don't do that default parent thing and I am so guilty of this where we just take it all on as if it's our responsibility. If you have your children with a partner or co-parent, it is not your responsibility. It is a shared responsibility. So conversation needs to be, how are we going to share the childcare logistics, socialising, planning? If we're going away, who is going to pack? Not I'll pack. Don't be that default parent. Who is going to organise this for the summer, that for the summer, whatever it might be? divide it up. And here is what's most important.

10:35I learned this from Eve Rodsky, author of Fair Play. You know, I'm a massive fan of that book. If someone takes a task, they fully own it. Conception, planning and execution. It is not helpful to be told, yes, just tell me how you need help or give me a list because then the executive functioning, the planning all still sits with us. We don't want that. We want to fully hand off a task. Okay. So that's the first one. ask for a lot of help. The second one is to make sure that you take five minutes every day to release stress, complete the stress cycle. You may remember this incredible episode that had such an impact on me with Emily and Amelia Nagoski, who wrote, I think, not completely sure, I think it's the only book on female burnout.

11:27And really, in many ways, that episode changed my life because I thought burnout was because I was doing too much and not enough for myself. What I learned from that episode, and I can so see this now in my summer burnout that happened in 2021, is that I was building up a lot of stress. I was holding onto a lot. I was holding all the kids' emotions about the big move we'd just done. I was holding a lot in my relationship. I was holding a lot across the board in the business with myself. We'd been through this huge transition and I wasn't giving that anywhere to go. So I was holding onto a lot of stress, but I wasn't releasing any of the stress.

12:11And it's almost like, imagine if you laid the table for dinner and you had dinner, and then the next day you just put more plates on top and more plates on top. You never cleared the table. That is effectively what we're doing. If we build up stresses throughout the day and we don't complete the stress cycle. Complete the stress cycles like wiping the table so that we can do it again the next day on a clean slate. So there's specific ways that you can complete the stress cycle. One is a short burst of physical activity like shaking, a quick sprint. One is hugging someone that you love until you feel relaxed, crying, anything that releases oxytocin, it counters cortisol, which is the stress hormone.

12:55So all of those are scientifically proven to release stress and completing the stress cycle. Honestly, I have taken on so much more in my business and my life since that point in 2020. And I have been miles from burnout because I've made sure that I have completed the stress cycle every single day. And actually this idea of five minutes a day has been so significant and important to me that I've created my first offer, my first course in five years. And I've called it Five Minute Motherkind. And I have given you 21 days. It's audio tracks from me, just five minutes audio a day that invite you and remind you and encourage you to take just five minutes for you to do many of the things that I've just spoken about.

13:41and everything I talk about in this course is research-backed. I've tested it. It's been tested loads of times and the results are just phenomenal. In 21 days, mothers feeling more regulated, more grounded, calmer, kinder to themselves, more fun, more joyful. So if you want to do that this summer, now's almost the perfect time to start that because you will be hitting those summer holidays in a completely different state after that 21 days course. So I've popped the link for that if you want to check out in the show notes. And the third one is guilt and how to manage it because I think guilt peaks in the summer, guilt and pressure peak in the summer.

14:24And it's so easy to feel like you're not doing enough, isn't it? Because everywhere you look, people are doing holidays and they're having fun and they're doing this and they're doing this and they're doing that. and it's so easy to feel like I'm just not doing enough. My kids aren't having enough fun. Why are my kids the only one that melt down on a big day out? Why am I the only one who can't get through the airport without being, you know, having a tantrum because I won't buy them a chocolate bar? Whatever it might be. That might be from personal experience, by the way. The number one thing I want you to remember about guilt is that just because you feel guilty, it does not mean that you are guilty.

14:59Remember this. If you've read the book or if you know my work, I talk a lot about this because I really want us to shift our relationship with guilt for good. Real guilt is when you've done something wrong. It's something that goes against who you are and who you want to be in the world. Okay. Most of the guilt, about 80%, I reckon, based on lots of thousands of conversations that I've had, about 80 % of that guilt is not guilt at all. Actually, it's unproductive. It's not real. It's probably a combination of these things that I'll chat you through now. The first one is tension. So we call it guilt, but actually guilt is often just tension, that feeling of wishing you could be in two places at once or doing two things at once or with two children at once.

15:43Particularly if you've got one child that has higher needs than the other, you can feel so much guilt about having to spend more time with one and not with the other. So that isn't guilt though, because you're not doing anything wrong. In fact, you're being a really great parent. It's about tension, which is wishing that you could be in two places at once. That's the first thing. It's probably tension. And the moment you remind yourself of that, guess what? It dissipates. The second one is standards. Most of the mothers in our community, me included, we measure ourselves by insanely high standards.

16:14And then we wonder why we feel guilty when we fall short of those standards, because the standards are the problem, not us. You know, you are in paid work or not, there is only so many hours in the day. There's only so many things that we can focus on and do. And I feel like so many of us just want to nail every single area of our lives. And that is impossible. So if you're feeling a lot of guilt about the summer or in general, one of the first places to look are what standards am I measuring myself against? Are these realistic given my circumstances? And whose standards are these anyway? Because when I talk this through with mothers, what I learned is that a lot of these standards are internalized, or a lot of them based on media, or what their mother-in-law thinks, or whatever it is, it's very rare that we're measuring ourselves against our own standards.

17:02And it's such a good way to take a bit of your power back. So have a think about that. And the last one is inner critic. So, so much of what we call guilt is really just that critical part of us that says we're not good enough. And actually, if you think about it, that part of you has probably been alive and well for a while is that part of you that says you're not doing well enough with whatever you do. The key is, and I talk about this a lot in the five minute mother kind course, because our thoughts determine so much. If we can learn to have a thought that says you're a terrible mom or you're failing them or you're not doing it right, or why can't you be different?

17:37If we can learn to hear one of those thoughts and not listen to it, then I mean, wow, we are sailing, we're flying if we can do that and it's actually relatively simple it's not always easy but it is simple to learn that skill so I also teach that in that 21 day course and the last point just to wrap up is to take the pressure off yourself it's so easy to think that the summer is about creating these kind of pinterest perfect moments and actually when I think back to my summers many of the memories that I have the most joyful memories that I have are in the imperfect messy moments when we were just mucking around with a hose in the back garden or when you know my mum slipped in the paddling pool and it still makes me laugh thinking about it now these are the moments that children remember they remember how it felt children do not remember the specifics of the expensive days out or even the holidays often honestly they remember how it felt so I take that as an invitation for me to think about how can I be the most grounded regulated fun present mother that I can be so that I create the feelings that I want my children to have around me which is feelings of safety of connection of love of fun and that starts with me that starts with me not burning out.

18:58That starts with me taking these five minutes a day for myself. That takes with me allowing myself to be present, putting my damn phone away and all those things, allowing it to be spontaneous, allowing my control to loosen a little. So those are the main points I want to talk to you about today is share the load, ask for help, release stress every single day through the summer, because my word, our nervous systems feel it more than ever, I think, through the long holidays and learn to manage the guilt and the pressure that you're putting on yourself. So there we go. We have our plan and I really hope that you are able to enjoy this summer.

19:40Please remember that it's your summer too. Please remember that you're allowed to have fun too and maybe book something in that is just for you. Maybe also grab my new offer my five minute mother kind I think it's going to be just the perfect companion through summer to remind us when it all gets too much to just give five minutes back to ourselves too that is it I will see you next time thanks for being here

20:23Thank you.