Make Parenting Less Boooooring
Zak Rosen: This episode contains explicit language. Welcome to Mom and Dad are Fighting. Slate’s parenting podcast for Monday, November 14th. The Make Parenting Less Boring Edition. I’m Zak Rosen. I make another show. It’s called The Best Advice Show. I live in Detroit with my family. My oldest, Noah, is five and my youngest, Amy is two.
Speaker 2: Hey, I’m A.J. Pizza and I’m an illustrator, podcaster, public speaker guy. I like stories and I’ve got three children. I’ve got a 14 year old girl, a ten year old boy and a seven year old daughter. And I live in Columbus, Ohio.
Zak Rosen: It’s good to have another Midwesterner on the show today. Andy, welcome.
Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Zak Rosen: It’s great to see you. Listeners should know that my show, The Best Advice Show, recently joined Andy’s podcast Network Co Loop. We have a pre-existing relationship, you and I, and I’ve been wanting to have you on this show for quite some time. I know you’re very engaged, Dad, a very creative dad, and I find more than most people, Andy, that you and I have extremely similar interests.
Speaker 2: I do agree. I think we have a lot of taste overlap pretty much. I guess I haven’t even I knew we kind of like similar music and stuff, but after jamming about Tim Robinson, I just realized like, Good Lord, we do the taste. Venn diagram is almost just a circle.
Zak Rosen: Yeah, we live at the corner of Waxahatchee and Tim Robinson, you and I, well, I’m so happy that you’re here to help me tackle today’s listener question, which is all about parenting with ADHD. Specifically how to get through those moments of parenting that are just freaking boring. But first, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your work. You’re a storyteller, you’re an illustrator. You have a truly wonderful podcast called Creative Pep Talk. We’ll put all that into our notes. But I want to start here. You’re interested in stand up comedy, but what you’re really interested in is sit down. Tragedy something did you coined that phrase?
Speaker 2: It’s actually a lay down tragedy. I don’t think I did. I think it was a friend of mine who I was telling him. I was like, hey, you know, I love stand up comedy, but I’m way more interested in like, the stuff that produces tears rather than laughter. I actually prefer the opposite of stand up comedy. It’s like, Oh, you want to be a lay down? Tragic. That’s the literal opposite. I was like, Yeah, that’s kind of this. Yeah, I love stuff that makes you cry. Not because I’m like evil or mean or want to hurt people, but I just feel like in the same way, that laughter is like the result of encountering something funny. Tears are the result often of encountering something that feels really meaningful. And and so, yeah, I’m a sucker for that kind of storytelling stuff.
Zak Rosen: But your stuff, I think, is also totally imbued with with whimsy too. It’s not like it’s not pure tears.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is true. And that’s a product of being ADHD and being so anti boredom. I would rather be cringing, annoying, whatever, anything other than boring because boredom as an ADHD person is a physically makes me nauseous. That’s not a joke. That’s not. It’s it’s true. It’s actually true.
Zak Rosen: What’s an example of a time where you are bored teenager?
Speaker 2: Sure. I mean, good Lord, there’s so many of them. Life is so monotonous and you know it. It took me a long time to find all the really interesting good bits of life. And now I feel like I have a lot of resources on how to get excited about what’s happening, even just within my own head. Problem solving I love. That’s why I love podcasting. There’s always another problem to solve, so that can always keep me busy. But you know, getting locked indoors anywhere for more than 2 hours under fluorescent lighting, that kind of stuff. I mean, parenting, there’s a whole mass of it. You go to the science museum, Kids Museum. I’m good for about 45 minutes. Seriously? That I’m I’m like, oh, this is cool. I see what’s going on here. 45 minutes. And I’m like, you know, my heart’s pounding. I’m like, I have to find an exit strategy.
Zak Rosen: We’re going to get a lot more into the ADHD stuff with our listener question today. But I’m curious, when did you start calling yourself an artist?
Speaker 2: Probably when I was really little. I love those those little hacks of like how you take four ovals and it’s actually the head of a Ninja Turtle. Like, I like that. I loved it, man. I would just eat that. Like, yeah, I can show you a really quick hack to do a picture perfect Ninja Turtle. I think it’s partially because I grew up in the Midwest, you know, not a cultured house. And so it took me until my mid twenties to realize you’re not supposed to call yourself an artist. Like there’s I didn’t even know. I never even heard of, like, high art versus low art. None of that stuff didn’t make any difference. And so I was deep in the identity of a self-proclaimed artist before I realized how shameful that was supposed to. So yeah, I probably thought I was an artist when I was like five drawing Ninja Turtles.
Zak Rosen: So you have three kids now? When did you start to notice their creative tendencies emerging?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think. I mean, they were creative from the onset, which I think most people are too, to a degree. And also, you know, one thing I’m really fascinated about, if I meet a young person, like in their early twenties who are just like leaps and bounds ahead on the creative journey, especially in the way that they kind of finish work with a Polish that feels beyond their age. I almost always assume like they had creative parents. They grew up in a creative home.
Speaker 2: The amount of times I’ve been writing have shocked me. One example, as I remember when I got in 1975, that band, which I have lots of different feelings about that band, but we don’t have time for that. It’s a complicated relationship. But when I first heard their first single and I heard he’s like, This guy is like 22, I just thought, there’s no way a 22 year old makes something like this unless he grew up in a in a creative zone. And turns out I didn’t know for a long time his both his parents are famous actors in Britain. There’s just something about when you’re a kid and your parents are both artists, it just feels so natural. So I think my kids have that going for them. I don’t think that they’re more creative than anybody else, but I do think they just think that’s what you do. You draw things, you write books, you, you know, all that kind of thing. So and they were doing it very early on.
Zak Rosen: And your wife’s an artist, too, right? She works with fabrics.
Speaker 2: And she’s a textile artist.
Zak Rosen: That’s something that I wonder with with kids who were both of their parents are creative weirdos. Do they rebel in some opposite direction? Like, is one of your kids interested in finance?
Speaker 2: I think that that probably will happen. Like I could see my oldest being a doctor or something really sensible. I think that, you know, that the creative disposition, as it were, does come with roller coaster of emotions. That’s probably the thing I like least about being a creative parent, is that we’re just really emotional people. And I feel like we’ve we’ve done our best to get as many tools as we can to manage those emotions. But my youngest, actually, who’s very creative, very funny, looks at the other four of us as like, you guys are dramatic. Like, can you just chill at our best? And so I can see her doing something really sensible and just like, I don’t know, owning a company, being in finance. Yeah, something like that.
Zak Rosen: You’ve described your family to me before as email, like you are an email family. So you mentioned some, some strategies that you use to work through it. What do you mean?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that we have tried to create a lot more space for feelings than probably your average family does. I think starting out these huge feelings our kids were having were uncomfortable, especially in the in the Midwest. I feel like it’s just not very common to give time and space and name to all of those things. I think her name is Susan. David does a lot of work around feeling and she has a big TED talk about the superpower that is naming your feelings. And I’ve got a whole project called Invisible Things, which is an illustrated project to give a face to invisible forces, gravity, dark matter, stuff like that, but also feelings. It was ironic because traditional employment feels like jail to me and I ended up in traditional employment in an actual jail at a juvenile detention center for about nine months.
Zak Rosen: Oh, my gosh. Literally. Okay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It was a nightmare for a bunch of reasons. But it was also really interesting because and really educational as a parent, because the kids on the shelter side, there were two sides, shelter side and the juvenile detention side. Same kids, the same kids. They come in and out of there when they’re on the shelter side. There are different kid than when they’re in the juvenile detention side.
Zak Rosen: And what are the differences in those two?
Speaker 2: It’s just the environment really molds your sense of self. And so the shelter kids and the detention kids, they all went in and out of both sides. And when they were on the detention side, they were always causing a bunch of trouble. And when they were on the shelter side, they were, you know, a lot more vulnerable and open. And it was really interesting. But one of the things that I picked up from that experience was when they’re doing their training, they’re like, you’re going to encounter a lot of anger. But one thing you should be aware of is like anger is typically a secondary emotion. It’s like when an emotion bubbles up and explodes because they’re trying to hold it in. But it’s now it’s like the teapot and the steam is coming out. That’s anger.
Speaker 2: And so if you have a kid that’s going to be dealing with anger, what you’re going to see a lot here and the first thing you got to try to do is get him to the bottom of like, what is behind this anger, What’s the real feeling and name that because once you name it, it’s actually you’re sad or actually you’re scared. All of a sudden there’s a de-escalation. And little did I know I’m going to need that as. Parent. I don’t have it all figured out, but I feel like that has definitely been helpful to be like, Oh, they’re throwing a tantrum. They’re getting angry, you know, especially when they’re toddlers. And then when they’re teenagers, it’s good to remember, like if they’re showing anger, it means there’s something else going on.
Zak Rosen: So I really like your Invisible Things project, this idea of making your feelings and emotions visible that weren’t previously, or helping helping others do that. So is there something like a creative practice that that us parents could do with our kids kind of based on invisible things that might help get some of these buried things out?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we’ve done some workshops with kids around this subject and you know, to start off, one of the ones we do is if your mood was a color, what would it be? And draw that in. And we usually introduce into that conversation. Like also you might have multicolored mood because the truth is feelings rarely come, you know, just one feeling at a time. And so that introduces kind of the the nuance of multiple feelings at the same time and trying to work out that there’s a lot of stuff going on there.
Speaker 2: You know, back to the kind of anger, scared, sad thing. That’s a big starting grounds. Like if your mood was a color, what would it be? There’s kind of a poetic thing there. There’s also just kind of a true thing there. I think you have to fill in the gaps of, well, why is it yellow? You know, why did it why is it why is it why do you have blue and red? Why don’t why did you choose those colors? And now you’re having a conversation about it? Because there’s a leap in logic, because a mood isn’t a color. And so that’s a cool, like, conversation starter.
Speaker 2: And then beyond that, sometimes what we’ll do is we’ll show them some of my ideas of like, here’s here’s what I think hope looks like, here’s what I think fear looks like, or pizazz or whatever, all these different ones. And what do you think sadness looks like? What does your sadness look like? The symbology of trying to get that out ends up again starting conversations of why did they all spiky? Why did you do that? You know, it’s also, I think, a more instinctual way for kids who are probably going to find it easier to to pick a color than choose a word.
Zak Rosen: So are you having this conversation with like a box of crayons and paper?
Speaker 2: Yeah. The times we’ve done the workshops so far. Yeah, that’s that’s usually what we’re doing. And we’ll we’ll do it with our kids too, with different circumstances. But there’s always pencils and crayons all over the place. So that’s not that’s our problem.
Zak Rosen: We’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’ll dive into today’s listener question. All right, All right. Are you ready to hear our listener question, Andy?
Speaker 2: I absolutely.
Zak Rosen: And it’s being read, as always, by Sascha Leonhard.
Speaker 3: Hi. I’m the father of two amazing kids, seven and four. I love being a dad. I find it more rewarding than anything I’ve ever done. That said, I have ADHD, and because of that I often overlook small details. Thankfully, my partner helps in this realm, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten to pack lunches for school. Yes, I can usually just run home and drop their lunch off a little late, but this makes me feel like an incompetent parent. The biggest issue I face as a dad with ADHD, though, is that I find big stretches of parenting so boring. My kids friends, birthday parties, boring, the board games they want to play with me. Boring. Going to the park in a neighborhood. Boring. I feel so guilty that I can’t be more attentive to my kids. Do you have any advice that would make me feel like less of a failure? I love being a parent, but the struggle is real. Yours? Board games.
Zak Rosen: So, Andy, you told us that you are you are ADHD, you have ADHD. What’s the proper parlance?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I have ADHD. I don’t actually know, but I am ADHD. I know that.
Zak Rosen: Yeah. So how does this question strike you?
Speaker 2: First of all, I’m very pro honesty around parenting. There’s always a pendulum swing from generation to generation on how people go about things, and there’s always pros and cons with those pendulum swings. Right. And I think the millennial take on parenting is pretty idealistic to me. Feels like, you know, it should be this incredible thing. It’s never a burden. You’re always playing with your kids. I’m a huge fan of the show. Bluey But I do think that it’s unrealistic.
Zak Rosen: To be that good of a parent.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s a great aspiration. It is. It’s great and it does, you know, inspire me. But I think it’s good also to be honest about like a lot of it’s boring. A lot of it’s really hard. And I think it’s good to just be honest about that. My heart goes out to people that have ADHD because a lot of people can just hear that paragraph and think, Well, you’re just a bad person. You’re just a bad. And honestly, before I had language for ADHD, that’s how I would have thought about myself and my mom, who I believe has ADHD and people like that in my life. But it’s not their fault that they find these things boring. Can hate yourself all you want. It’s not necessarily going to make it less boring for you, but you are going to have to find some ways to be present with your kids. And so, yeah, I love the question because I think it comes from an honest place.
Zak Rosen: Yeah, no, I agree. There are stretches of parenting that are boring. Let’s normalize saying that for sure. But like, we don’t want to be bummed out when we’re with our kids. So.
Zak Rosen: So how do you how do you navigate this stuff?
Speaker 2: You know, if we’re going to talk about ADHD, I’ll just mention like medicine. I have I’m I’m very slightly medicated. That helps. I was diagnosed a long time before I got medicated for it. But parenting was really the last kind of straw for me of like, I even if I have to sacrifice a little creativity, I’ll do that if I’m a better dad. And so, you know, I always like to think the medicine topic’s a complicated one, and I’m not a doctor. But for me personally, that’s been a big good part of my parenting journey. I watched my mom really struggle, try to do the right thing, you know, quote unquote, the right thing, and just fail over and over because it was too boring, too mundane, couldn’t get through it, whatever, and ended up not being able to stick with two sets of kids and marriages and no jobs and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: And and I think that changed my mindset really early on. I was like, I’m not going to be incredible at things that I hate doing. I’m just not I don’t something this is before I knew I was ADHD and I thought I just know something about me is not able to power through like that. And so I tried to make it a goal of how can I make as many things that I have to do what I want to do? And it doesn’t work for everything. You still got to do your taxes, unfortunately. Hate that. You still got to change your diapers. You got to do all you know, there’s a lot of things. You know, not everything falls in that category.
Speaker 2: But what I have found is really, really drill down into what are the hyper focuses that I share with my kids. That’s a big, big deal. And being active about pursuing finding those things because it’s not always going to be obvious. And sometimes you’re going to try to get your kid into something that like, I’m not having it and vice versa. But the things that I’ve found where we really overlap in that DNA and our taste buds are both like, Yeah, this is delicious activity. Those things I can be, I can be blue is Dad. I know. And that was occasions, you know.
Zak Rosen: Yeah. I’m thinking that it it wasn’t so intentional, but my wife and I have divided up some of our interests in a way where the kids kind of just, you know, gravitate to whichever activity they’re interested. You know, Shira, she’s she’s great at crafts, you know, working on this really cool mosaic thing last night. They love baking together and that’s kind of like their domain. And I mean, my son is really into just his two he really into balls, the rolling balls, you know, putting I love you know, I love playing sports. So we do that together. We like playing music together.
Zak Rosen: And so, yeah, I think because you mentioned board, you know, board game letter writer that you have a solid partner, it sounds like you do. So figuring out parts of the day where you can just opt out, just be like, you don’t have to, you don’t have to do it all with them. You can go and, you know, do something that you’re going to be excited about and hyper focused on while you know, your partner takes over and vice versa. So figuring that out and creating some kind of intention around it so you can actually plan like, okay, because I know man, going into a Saturday, sometimes I’m just like, Oh fuck, what happened to my weekend? This is not my weekend anymore. I do not have weekends. I am. Just, you know, going at the whim of my kids and the parties and whatever else. And this isn’t fun. So I think this is a reminder to myself to, like, know you can create some intention around, okay, I’m going to take you know, I’m going to take my kid putt putt golfing. I’m going to take them to the record store, you know, like try these things out that you like and, you know, bounce them off your kids if they’re into them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s different for every kid, too. So like my oldest weirdly love self-help, I didn’t discover I love self-help until I was in college, but she discovered it like early middle school. And so she loves, like just daily practices and reading that stuff and consuming that YouTube content. And so that’s my jam. I like all of that stuff. And so we trade notes and watch videos and, you know, take online classes that are similar and and share things about it.
Speaker 2: My son and I got back into video games when he got a little bit older, so he and I both just nerd out on video games, like the biggest nerd you ever heard. My youngest. She’s really my weirdo. She’s the she’s the comedy weirdo. I’ve shown her the, like three clean Tim Robinson skits and she quotes she’ll work them into sentences. She did that today, and I was like, Oh my God, this child is just from heaven. Like one thing. She begged me to do this last night where we watch one of her cartoons with the sound off, and then I do the voices for everybody. And so, yeah, she like, loves improv and that kind of weird silliness. So that’s how we hang out.
Speaker 2: And I’ve been really careful with this because I think I can go away. That isn’t very healthy. But I love my work because I am lucky enough to be a creator for work. And so I’ve also found ways to collaborate with my kids on that front. So like if I’m working on a journal product for my podcast, I will talk to my daughter about it, even riff on ideas, and it comes to like character creation and book writing. I’ll work with my son on that. I’ve done little videos where I like at least one character be voiced by my youngest, so there’s all kinds of like little ways you can find that Venn diagram of overlap of interest.
Zak Rosen: Yeah. And this also makes me think that, like, we don’t need to entertain our goddamn kids all the time. Like, we need to normalize this too. And it’s easier said than done, but they need to work on being bored. They need to work on, you know, just doing their own thing. And I think that’s as much up to it’s probably more up to us to kind of cultivate that that kind of non activity space as much as it is up to them to, to relish in it. But that’s, that’s another thing you know, I’m just thinking thinking to my own anxieties or on the weekend like we don’t have to have it all planned out like we can just I don’t know, daydream for a couple of minutes and just whatever. And you don’t have to program their entire lives because that’s not that’s not going to be helpful either. So don’t put too much pressure on yourself.
Speaker 2: I agree 100%. I am always going to prioritize getting better, figuring out how to enjoy my kids more, being present. I’m going to do all that stuff. But it’s good to remember that like, you know, you don’t have to be their best friend, their teacher, their everything. You’re a grown up. You’re not going to love every single thing that they like to do. And sometimes you can make yourself do it. Sometimes you can’t take it easy on yourself a little bit.
Zak Rosen: Well said. Board games. I hope this helped and please let us know how things are going. Everyone else. Do you have some advice for your own for board games? Send it in. Email us at mom and Dad at Slate.com. That’s also where you can send us questions of your own. No question is too big or too small. We’d seriously love to hear from you. We’re going to take one more break. And when we come back, we’re going to dole out some sweet, sweet recommendations.
Zak Rosen: All right. It’s finally time for recommendations, the part of the show where we tell you to check something out. Andy, what do you want to shout out this week?
Speaker 2: Okay, So this is a weird one, perhaps, and I thought a lot about it. I’m a big recommender of things and I try not to recommend too much because people don’t really like it. If you over load them with recommendations. So I’ll go with this one little one. If you’ve ever seen this movie about time, I recommend it for parents. It does what stories do well, which it helps you feel a truth. You might know some things true. But feeling it’s true is a different experience. I think we need that to really embody a truth. And so this whole movie is about living every moment like you chose it.
Zak Rosen: This is that. This is the Rachel McAdams movie. About time. Yeah. Great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s. Have you seen it?
Zak Rosen: No, no, no. I just googled it.
Speaker 2: I’m a huge fan of it. The main guy in it is in the new Star Wars, and he’s one of the baddies in most recent Star Wars trilogies. But it’s phenomenal movie. It’s very cheesy, but it’s done well. So it’s it’s not cringe, I would say cheesy, not cringe and very earnest. But if you don’t have time for that, even just go.
Speaker 2: What I do from time to time, if I’m feeling like I’ve lost my humanity and I can’t remember if there’s a beating heart in my chest, I’ll go to YouTube and search about time dad scene. And it’s about this whole thing is about these. The men in this family have this ability to time travel through these very particular circumstances. And the dad just wants to go back in time with his adult son and run on the beach for a few minutes.
Speaker 2: And there’s just this thing of it really helps me feel the truth of how fast time moves and how the dumb things like taking my son to school, like these little like things that you’re rushing, you’re annoyed, You’re like, you spilled the coffee on you like all this crap makes it so hard to remember the thing and feel the thing that you know is true, which has this is what you’re going to be desperate to relive. And so that’s my recommendation to dads in about time. Dad seen on YouTube. There’s there’s two version there’s a short version, long version depending on what you can fit in. And I highly recommend it.
Zak Rosen: Amazing. I’m excited to watch this and it looks like it’s available on Hulu. As always. If you don’t have Hulu, just email me and I’ll give you my dad’s sign in my recommendation because I wasn’t planning on doing this, but because we talked so much about Tim Robinson today, people might be like, Who the heck is Tim Robinson? I’m going to recommend two sketches from Tim Robinson’s brilliant, hilarious sketch show. I think you should leave. I’m going to recommend two because you might watch one and be like, What? So I think you should at least give yourself 10 minutes, watch two of them, and then decide if you want to get deeper in. So my two gateway sketches that I’m going to recommend are Ford Focus Group and Brian’s hat, both of which we will link to in the show notes, both of which I have seen 100 times. If you haven’t laughed like really heartily in a while, this is your moment.
Zak Rosen: You. I mean, you might also not like it, but I’m hoping that you will. There’s nothing like it. And man, I just had such a good I was. I have like a monthly call with with this group of guy friends that I’ve been talking about on the show. We’ve been friends since kindergarten. We talk every month on Zoom, and we were laughing so hard last night. Not not about Tim Robinson, but just the feeling. I was like, Oh my God, I forgot how good it feels just to laugh until it hurts. Yeah, Tim Robinson stuff just makes me laugh until it hurts. So we’re leaving you with some jams today? That’s it for our show. We’ll be back in your feeds on Thursday with more advice, so be sure to tune in while you’re at it. Please subscribe to the show and give us a rating and review on Apple or Spotify. This episode of Mom and Dad Our fighting is produced by Rosemary Belson and Christy Taiwo. Back in July for A.J. Pizza. I’m Zak Rosen. Thank you so much for listening.
