Have you ever been so desperate to solve a problem with your child that the harder you tried, the worse everything seemed to get?

As busy parents, we feel a deep responsibility to protect, guide, and help our children. Whether it’s anxiety, school, or preparing for adulthood, we instinctively jump into problem-solving mode when they are struggling. We research, we analyze, and we worry. But often, the more intensely we focus on the problem, the more frustrated, overwhelmed, and emotionally drained we become.

Here’s the truth: constantly forcing solutions doesn’t always help you find answers faster. In fact, it can cloud your thinking, increase your stress, and lead to missteps that make the situation harder for both you and your child. Intentional parenting isn’t just about taking action, it’s about knowing when to pause.

In this episode of Parents Making Time, Anthony and Jennifer share personal experiences, from helping their daughter through severe anxiety to preparing their son for adulthood, and reveal how stepping away from a problem can actually help you find clearer, faster, and more effective solutions.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:

• Why stepping away from parenting problems can help your brain find solutions more effectively
• The five-step problem-solving process that helps busy parents move from stress and frustration to clarity and confidence
• How intentional pauses can reduce anxiety, prevent burnout, and help you show up as the calm, present parent your child needs

Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do as a parent isn’t to push harder. Instead, it's to pause, trust the process, and allow clarity to emerge.

Easily improve your intentional parenting efforts at mealtime with our FREE resource, Dinner Conversation Starters.

Download our FREE resource, 30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids, created for busy parents like you who need easy, actionable ways to have daily meaningful connections with their kids in less than a minute!

Parenting Questions? Email us at [email protected] (Please note, your question may be featured on the show).

For parenting inspiration, time management ideas, and encouragement for families, follow the hosts' individual accounts:

Anthony Craiker: Instagram | LinkedIn

Jennifer Craiker: Instagram

Interested in joining our free online parenting community? Send us a DM to receive an invite!

Enjoy the show? Leave a rating & review: Apple | Spotify

 

 

Transcript

Parents Making Time Ep. 24

Jennifer: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. Before we get started today, we wanted to remind you of a free resource we have for you on our website. We have created a list of dinner conversation starters that we wanna share with you to help you have better conversations with your kids over dinner. You can get that by going to parents making time.com/dinner conversations.

Go there now so that you can start having those great conversations. 

Anthony: Have you ever been working with one of your kids on homework? And they get really frustrated. Tends to happen with math a lot. I think they aren't understanding, and the more that you try to explain, the worse it gets. Finally, you suggest that they take a break, do something else, and come back to it later, and then when they come back to it, their mind has settled.

They're a little more able to process. Things and think through the issues that they were struggling with, and they're able to complete their work. We've definitely had that experience with our children, but how often do we apply that same principle [00:01:00] ourselves? That principle of stepping away when we're faced with a difficult problem.

Today we're talking about problem solving as parents. It's actually one of the main responsibilities that we have as parents, and we're gonna share some insight that we've learned about this idea of stepping away from your problems temporarily in order to find a solution.

This is parents making time. The show that helps busy parents put family first without burning out. We are Anthony and Jennifer Craiker. We don't just give parenting tips. We help you become the parent you want to be.

Jennifer: So several years ago we had a daughter who was really struggling pretty heavily with anxiety.

We had seen her doctor and discussed it with them, and she had agreed to try medication to help her, which actually did for a few months, and then it seemed like she was getting worse again. It was a really difficult time because she was having a hard time communicating with us what she was experiencing.

And it was [00:02:00] hard for me as a mom because I personally don't experience that kind of anxiety, and so the things she was sharing with me were just really foreign to me, and I was struggling myself to understand it, but I could see that this was something that was really affecting her, and I knew it was so much more than something she could just.

Get over. So it became something that not only was stressing her out, it was distressing me as well, because we just didn't know how to help her. And the things we were trying, they just weren't helping. So I really began to fixate a bit on this issue. I was searching. I was stressing. I was worrying. And.

Then we decided to make another doctor's appointment. So at that point, I decided I needed to just wait until we could see the doctor. But sadly, it was a bit of a wait to get to the doctor. So while we waited, I had basically just let go of trying to solve it myself. I was just trying to get to that appointment, but one day I was just scrolling on my phone and an article popped up and I couldn't even tell you the name of the article, but it piqued my interest enough [00:03:00] that I opened it and I it began to describe exactly.

What my daughter had been telling me. It was a mental health condition that I realized I knew very little about, but the more I read about it, the more it explained. I saw parallels in what my daughter had been telling us, and it was starting to make sense. I ended up sharing that article with my daughter, and I could see her almost relaxed as well.

Finally, something explained what she'd been feeling and it gave us hope. Now we had the right information to share with the doctor to get. Their opinion. And it turned out that when we did, they very much agreed with what we had found. This led to real answers and eventually real help for her, and that whole story is actually probably something we could talk about more in depth in another episode with her permission.

But the point of sharing that today was to point out that while there was. Definitely a time where I was frantic and frustrated and obsessed with trying to find the answer. The answer came after I calmed down, and in some ways stepped away and was at a point where I could process and [00:04:00] reflect much more clearly.

Anthony: Yeah, it's a great example of the. Mistake that we often make when we're struggling with the problem. As parents, we're so concerned about our children that we tend to ruminate on it for too long and for too much on the problem, and we do that because we're concerned for our kids, and it becomes easy to obsess and to spend all of our time thinking about how we can help them.

We do that because we love them. We want to help them. 

Jennifer: While we do this, we get frustrated and when we get frustrated, our mind is no longer clear and we can't see things like how they really are. We put ourselves in this negative place and honestly at that point we're, we're not helping anyone. 

Anthony: Yeah. A couple of years ago, I.

Read a book called A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young. Now, this is a book for creatives, people who are writers or artists or you know, [00:05:00] people that are in content creation. But I, I think there's some parallels here with the book. He shares five steps that creatives can go through to try to produce ideas, and I think it works for problem solving as well.

The first step is to gather what he calls, gather raw materials. That's gathering the information, the data, the the things that you need to be able to produce an idea or in, in this case, produce a solution to the problem. And then the second step is you work over the material in your mind or address it.

That's that stage where you do need to think about it and analyze and try to solve the problem. With what you have in front of you. And then eventually you get to a point where you need to step away from the problem. And that's called the incubation period. So you step away and you really let your subconscious start doing the work, and you [00:06:00] think about something else and your brain somehow.

Is able to analyze the problem without you actually thinking about it in the front of your mind. And then eventually that leads to the fourth stage, which is the aha moment. And that's when the idea or the solution comes to you in, in your mind, and then the final step is to finalize and develop that idea or solution.

Jennifer: Yeah, so if you've talked through these, I kind of thought back through the story that I just shared. So gathering those raw materials would be when I was talking to our daughter, I was listening to her, I was hearing what she was saying and, and kind of trying to process and understand what she. What information she could give me.

And then also it was also researching and gathering. And that's, that's really where I got frustrated. 'cause there was so much there. But I think what I was trying to do was, you know, I tried to work over those materials and there was so much and so much I couldn't understand. I tried to skip that incubation period.

Anthony: Yeah. 

Jennifer: And it wasn't until I was kind of forced to incubate and, and in this [00:07:00] case I was forced to incubate because we had to wait. We had determined this is beyond me, we need to see a doctor. That forced an incubation period that actually let me calm down, relax, and eventually have that aha moment.

That was really, I think, important. 

Anthony: Yeah. And you said you were kind of forced into that incubation period. I think the trick is learning when to step away. Learning to recognize, okay, I'm starting to stress out about this. It's, it's gone beyond just trying to solve a problem or think through the issues and figure out a solution.

It's, it's causing me to, to. You know, stress out to have mood swings to to feel tense to what whatever it is, how, however, it's manifesting itself for you. And if you, if you learn to recognize those triggers and then say, okay, now's the time where I need to step away, go into this incubation period and let my subconscious work through these things while I think [00:08:00] about something, or focus on something completely different, then your mind will be able to do what it needs to do.

Jennifer: And it's kind of amazing, but it's really hard to do, especially as parents, because we wanna solve these problems. Like I didn't want, and I know you didn't either. I didn't, we didn't want our daughter to suffer any longer than she needed to. It was, it was distressing. We needed an answer now. 

Anthony: Yeah. 

Jennifer: And so it's hard to have patience in those moments, but I mean, we weren't helping anyone as we were frantically searching and throwing darts at the wall.

Right, right. You know, we were just. Missing the mark completely. And she was getting frustrated. 'cause poor thing, as much as she was trying to explain what she was feeling, it was, it was difficult. 

Anthony: Yeah. The, the reality is that even though. It seems like it's going to take longer to solve the problem. If you step away from it, you'll actually get to the solution more quickly.

Jennifer: True. And you won't take a bunch of missteps in in the process. Yeah. You'll take less missteps at least, 

Anthony: and it'll be a lot less stressful in the process. 

Jennifer: [00:09:00] Yeah, so true. Actually, it reminds me of something we shared a few episodes ago. Another problem that we had, and this is far less of a problem, but we were just concerned about sending our baby boy off into the world and, and was he prepared and what could we do to prepare him?

And I think you were the one who, who came up with that solution. 

Anthony: Yeah. We were talking about how do we get this kid ready to launch and go out into the world. And we felt like there were some things that he really needed to understand and learn and, and know before he was ready to leave home and go out into the.

Lone and dreary world, so to speak. And like you said, it wa the, the problem wasn't. Didn't feel as urgent, but it's, it was starting to feel more urgent because we're in a senior year, he's getting closer and closer every day to graduation. And so we were thinking about it a lot and trying to figure out, okay, how do we, how do we do this?

And then it was in that process of just kind of stepping away. I think I was in church I believe, if I remember right when [00:10:00] the, the, the solution kind of came and I wasn't really thinking about it. But I had this idea of, Hey, we've got Sunday nights. That we can spend as a family and we can use this as a time to educate our son on some of these things that we want him to know before he goes off to college and, and the idea came that we should do this without our electronic devices in front of us.

Everybody should put away their phones. And it became this. Now tradition that we have every Sunday night, we sit down as a family and we put away our phones unless we're using them specifically for the purpose of talking about whatever it is we're talking about that night. And we have a little lesson and we've talked about everything from finances.

To cooking, to how to do laundry, how to clean 

Jennifer: the toilet, 

Anthony: how to clean the toilet, to other more important things like dealing with stress and anxiety and all sorts of different things that we've talked about in these Sunday [00:11:00] evenings. And that idea came in a moment where I wasn't thinking about it and I was focused on something else.

After we had kind of gone through these first couple of steps of gathering the raw materials and working it over in our mind, and then going through that incubation period, and then the aha moment comes and, and then I talked to you about it, we finalized it and figured out, okay, this is how we're gonna move forward with this idea, with this solution.

Jennifer: Yeah, and I think part of why this, this way works is when you're gathering those raw materials, when you're gathering the facts, when you're gathering, different pieces of information, you're really focusing on the problem. And when we focus on the problem, our minds just go negative. And so then we just dig and dig and we dig deeper.

And it's just, it's hard to dig yourself back out of that. 

Anthony: Yeah. But it, but that is part of the process. Like you, oh, of course you do have to do some problem solving. It's just, you don't wanna let yourself get to the point where it's affecting. Other parts of your [00:12:00] life

Jennifer: yeah. So if you're feeling like you've got a problem to solve now, or you've seen this in your parenting life in the past, kind of think about that. How did you handle it? How could you have handled it better and think what? Would it have helped to take a minute and pause. Maybe for a week or however long it takes, and then with clarity move forward.

I think we can all see that in the past and use it in the future for our ourselves and our children. Just life in general. 

Anthony: Yeah. The brain is a remarkable thing. And it's amazing how when we do step away after spending some time trying to solve a problem our subconscious kicks in and continues that problem solving.

Process for us without us having to stress and, and get anxious over the process. 

Jennifer: Yeah, it really is amazing. So if you like what you heard today, if you got something out of it, please leave a rating or review for us and share it with a friend so they can get something out of it too. 

Anthony: And have you [00:13:00] ever reached the end of the day and realize that you have nothing left to give No patience, no energy.

No margin whatsoever. And maybe the hardest part isn't just the exhaustion, it's the voice that tells you you're falling short and that somehow you should be handling things better. But what if burnout isn't a sign that you're failing as a parent? What if it's actually a signal? An invitation to pause, reassess, and to make a few intentional adjustments that can change everything.

Well, next time on parents Making time, we're gonna be talking about burnout, but maybe not in the way that you've thought about it before. Not as something to push through, but as something to listen to until next time. Make time to become the parent you want to be.