18
Food and Mealtimes
Getting the Whole Family Nourished—and Eating Together More Often
It’s the glaring irony of working parenthood: you’re working so hard to put food on the table that it’s incredibly difficult to get real, edible food, much less anything appetizing and nutritious, onto your actual table. When you’re tired, and have a backlog of emails to catch up on, and haven’t seen the kids since 7:00 a.m., the last thing you want to do is semi-ignore them to cook food they then may refuse to eat—assuming you’ve even got the ingredients. Instead of facing that same glum scenario every day, you start relying on takeout and convenience foods, or fixing the kids whatever they’re clamoring for. Or with everything you have to do, you’ve begun multitasking during meals, or eating on the go, or eating separately from the kids. Or all of the above, because each of those moves helps you save time and keep the peace … today. You know, though, that as they solidify into habits, these moves don’t do your health, wallet, relationships, or sense of working-parent self any favors.
If the whole issue seems fraught and unfixable, hang in there, because you’re about to see new ways to make this fundamental part of parenting more feasible. You won’t have to grab a spatula or download a bunch of new recipes to get going; you’ll just need to be ready to make some up-front decisions, and to pull from a menu of effective actions in and outside the kitchen.
Setting Your House Rules
A significant proportion of your professional behavior is governed by tried-and-true rules that have become so deeply embedded that you don’t even really have to think about them. Get to work on time. Underpromise and overdeliver. Dress up for interviews. Return phone calls promptly. Try to look smart and alert when the top brass is around. And so forth. You don’t sit around wondering if calling your boss back is the right thing to do—you know it is, and you can redirect the time and mental energy you’d otherwise spend on the matter toward higher-order pursuits (like completing a tough project, or finding a mentor). In IT terms, you’ve developed a professional operating system. Why not create an operating system to help you tame the workparent Food Challenge as well? A simple set of running-in-the-background, don’t-have-to-think-about-them guidelines could help you keep everything up and running, nutritionally speaking, and save you a lot of frustration and hassle.
In table 18-1 you’ll find a simple format for just such a system—for what we’ll call your Workparent Food and Mealtime House Rules. The particular example provided imagines you’re part of a dual-career household with school-aged kids. Read through the table, noting your own reactions and mulling over what you might want your own House Rules to be.
TABLE 18-1
Workparent Food and Mealtime House Rules
Always and have-tos |
No |
|
|---|---|---|
• Dinner is at 7:00, at the kitchen table, together, unless one of us is working late or at a school event • Breakfast is at the diner every Saturday morning • Green vegetable, daily • Milk with every meal • Utensils and napkins • You can say that you “dislike” something on your plate only after you’ve taken two bites of it • It’s fine to eat whatever’s served at the school cafeteria, but you need to tell us, daily, what that was |
• Dinners at the office if that work could be finished later at home • Substitute meals—e.g., if you don’t like your dinner, there’s no cold cereal alternative • Phones at the table • Drinks with added sugar |
|
Exceptions |
Shortcuts |
|
• If either parent has to work past 7:30 p.m., we order in • Birthday parties. Have all the cake and junk you want. |
• Tuesday night = pizza • Sundays are “fridge buffet,” and you can eat whatever you find in there • Weeknights, Dad is primary cook, but whoever gets home first makes a salad and turns the oven on • If you’re running late in the morning, take one of the granola bars in the cabinet |
‘‘I’ve always worked six days a week, but healthy eating is one area that doesn’t give. Once a month, we’ll do a takeaway, and everything else, we cook. Easy, quick things—veggies, salad. I’ll do a slow-cooked meal at the weekend so I can work late Tuesdays without having to think about dinner.
I’ll never deny the kids anything. If they want chocolate, that’s fine—but they have to try everything on their plate. Picky eating is a power play, but in our family, Mum and Dad are the deciders. We’ll tell you what to eat because we love you. It’s good for kids to know that authority happens.”
—Kerry-Lee, speech pathologist, mother of two
Just like your basic professional operating system, your House Rules will never and cannot cover every contingency, let you bypass all decisions, or relieve the complete getting-everyone-fed workload. However, as this example illustrates, the Rules—even when kept few and targeted—help lighten your overall practical load, reduce your number of daily decisions, and have the power to quell lingering, lurking self-doubts. If you set a House Rule that we order pizza on Tuesdays, it saves you some cook time, prevents you from feeling as if every day is a full-scale food improvisation, and releases you from the anxiety that you’re a crummy parent for ordering in again.
What preemptive decisions, like this one, could help you tame the Food Challenge—and let you save precious time and energy to put back into your career, self, or kids? Given the nuances and contours of your own workparent life, what would you strike out in table 18-1, or add? How else might you ease the strain of getting your family healthfully fed, and cap the overall amount of food-related drama and uncertainty? Work through your answers, and then, on a fresh sheet of paper, sketch out your own House Rules, being as honest, specific, and realistic as you can. If you’re a vegetarian, or on a tight budget, work that in. If you plan to order dinner five nights out of seven, that’s fine, just write it down. There are no judgments here: what you’re doing is creating clarity and granting yourself authority and permission—both practical and emotional. You’re done playing the role of frantic, guilty chef; you’re writing a new personal and family script.
Once you have your Rules sketched out, think about posting copies in your kitchen and dining areas, and walking through them with key Village members, such as your caregivers and Third Parents. If you worry that that’s a little controlling or Big Brother–esque, just remember: things are going to be vastly easier and more reassuring for you when you can point to your House Rules when needed. (“That’s not how we do things here. I work all day, and I’m only preparing one meal,” or “We can’t wait to hear about your first band practice! Can you tell the whole family over breakfast at the diner?”) Quickly the House Rules will become ingrained, and the Food Challenge will lose its sharpest edges.
As your family grows, and as you advance each time you switch roles, revisit your House Rules and revise them to suit.
Fail-Safe Ways to Make the Overall Logistics Easier
With your House Rules in place, you’ve already begun to declaw the Food Challenge beast. Now, it’s time to tame it even further. Five practical, diverse approaches will give you even more of the upper hand.
Becoming a CPO
If you’ve always been a great cook or enthusiastic foodie, it may actually—and paradoxically—make the workparent Food Challenge even harder: you’ll be haunted by the sense that you should be cooking from scratch for the family more or preparing more-complex and -varied meals, and that you’re dropping the ball or performing at second-best when you don’t.
Instead of acting as family chef, cast yourself in a new role: Chief Procurement Officer. Your job isn’t to stand by the stove and turn out impressive, homemade meals every day, but to manage the sourcing, processing, and delivery of good, nutritious food, however it comes—and then sit down with your kids to enjoy it.
- Think ahead. In chapter 10, “Time,” we discussed how to set up, or enhance, your workparent calendar, paying close attention to the importance of regular look-aheads. Whatever the forward-planning ritual you’ve settled on, think about making food and meal planning part of it. If you always use Sunday evenings to prep for the coming week, walk through your food plan alongside your professional deliverables, caregiving plan, and everything else you have going on: Monday I cook, Tuesday we order in, Wednesday leftovers; I’ve got early starts, so I’ll make the twins breakfast the night before, and so on. The more you have a jump on what’s coming, the less likely you are to be left standing in the kitchen at 7:00 p.m. with low blood sugar and no plan.
- Use time and money to save time and money. Maybe you shop at the prepared-foods section of the grocery store some weeks instead of actually cooking, or maybe you pay up for precleaned, prechopped ingredients that make your job in the kitchen easier. In either scenario you’ve spent a bit more money, and still had to invest time up front, but the end result is more overall time saved, and ultimately cheaper and more satisfying than constant restaurants or takeout.
‘‘Every week, I make three main meals. On the other nights, we eat leftovers, and once a week, we go out.
I write out what we’re having and need to buy on this paper planner I keep in the kitchen, where we can all see it. Having the plan visible makes it more likely that I’ll actually follow it than if I keep it on my phone, and because the kids see it, there’s also much less pushback. They know what’s coming.
I like going to the grocery store because I like getting the best deals. But if my husband is away or if it’s been a particularly busy week at work, I’ll have things delivered.”
—Rose, procurement leader, mother of two
- Stock it. Think of your pantry like a closet: just as it’s impossible to get properly dressed without the basic pieces, it’s impossible to cook good meals without basic supplies. If you’re not sure what those are, search online for “gourmet pantry basics” or “what every healthy (or kosher, spice-loving, diabetic, large-family, etc.) home cook should have on hand,” shop the list, and then put staples on regular online reorder. Never get caught one or two items short of a decent meal or having to make extra trips to the store.
- ABB. Always Be Building future capacity. Whenever you cook, double—or better yet, triple—the recipe. If you’re out to eat, order an extra serving, take it home, and freeze it. Keep creating extra slack in the system for when you do have to work overtime, or just need a break.
- Enlist the kids. When your kids are very small, you have to be in charge of their entire food universe—the nursing, the bottles, the purees, etc. Ever the conscientious professional and parent, you rise to the occasion, becoming extremely adept at managing it all. Don’t let that habit persist, or fall into the trap of thinking that top-to-bottom ownership of food matters is somehow correlated with good parenting. The kids should help, and they can likely do so from a much earlier age than you would naturally ask. A toddler can put paper napkins on the table before the meal, a six-year-old can toss the salad, your nine-year-old can pack a lunch, and so on. The “help” may not be so helpful, at the start, but you’re training your children to be part of the solution.
‘‘We’re pescatarians, so think a lot about meal planning and getting the right nutrients. Getting a good dinner on the table can be time-consuming—so we make our son part of it. He’s only two and a half, but he gets up on a stool by the sink and helps me rinse off the vegetables. I’ll talk him through it while I cook—‘now I’m going to put olive oil into the pan’—and show him how. It’s time together, and he loves it, and he’ll try all kinds of new foods because he helped make them, and it’s expanded his vocabulary like crazy.”
—Adam, program technical manager, father of one
Trickier Food and Mealtime Matters, and How to Handle Them
Certain parts of the Food Challenge terrain are going to be rockier and harder to navigate than others. Here are the most common rough patches, and special ways of getting through them.
Transitioning to solids; feeding very small children
To get your little one(s) eating well, without feeling as if you have to quit your job to get enough time to do so, try these strategies:
- Decide on a system for buying or making your child’s food, and stick to it. Whether you choose to do a weekly run to the farmer’s market and blend up everything yourself or your partner buys premade purees from the supermarket, make sure that everyone’s clear on the plan for feeding your baby or toddler and that you’ve worked it into your schedules.
- Keep a food log. Has he had enough rice cereal today? Tried apricots? Gotten the same rash around his mouth every time he eats tomato? A consolidated list of everything your child has eaten, and when, lets you, his caregivers, and any other Villagers, answer those questions quickly and stay coordinated on all things nutrition. There’s any number of easy-to-use apps for this, or you can keep a small notebook in the diaper bag.
- Stock healthy, age-appropriate, nonperishable foods everywhere you might need them. Keep rice crackers, fruit and vegetable pouches, etc., in your emergency-backup-care bag, at your Third Parents’ homes, in the car. Even if care plans change, or you’re stuck in traffic on the way home from daycare pickup, you’ll avoid hangry-child emergencies.
- Invest in a few rubberized, neck-to-wrist coverall-type bibs for the baby, and keep a full change of clothes for yourself at work. You don’t want to change him more than you have to … or wear applesauce to the weekly team meeting.
Fridgeability
If you’ve ever confronted a cold, glutinous lump of day-old spaghetti or tried to save the extra salad from yesterday’s dinner, then you know: certain foods are delicious when first prepared, but they store poorly. As you make your weekly food plan, think ahead as to what foods will be able to “go the distance”—e.g., what will still be usable and appealing a few days from now, in tomorrow’s lunchbox, or in reheated leftover form. That salad can last a few days if it isn’t dressed. Pasta gunks up fast, but a big pot of quinoa cooked on Sunday night will still be fluffy on Thursday and can make an easy, healthy base for any number of different meals. Hard-boiled eggs are good for grab-and-go breakfasts throughout the week. Use “fridgeability” as one of your new culinary criteria and save yourself working-parent time, hassle, and money.
Breakfasts
The start of your day is often frantic, and a difficult time in which to get nutrition right and quickly. A few tips to help:
- Start the morning earlier, or better yet, do the work the night before. Sacrificing sleep or ending a long day with yet another logistical task may feel barbaric, but an extra ten minutes of cushion will help you make breakfast happen. Put the bottle out on the counter, pour the glasses of milk and leave them in the fridge, put the bread next to the toaster, etc.—whatever eases some of that morning rush.
- Have a few standard, quick, no-fail options. These might include instant oatmeal, cold cereal, hard-boiled eggs, or anything else that’s easy and that you know your child will eat.
- Plan for grab and go. The bus is coming in ten minutes, or you need to get everyone in the car to drop them off early before an offsite meeting—there are mornings when things run smoothly and mornings when they don’t. Stock the pantry with foods that are easy to throw in a backpack or eat on the run: granola bars, fruit, individually wrapped cheeses, and so forth.
- As soon as they’re old enough, teach your kids to help themselves. That will give you time to eat and to take care of any last-minute tasks before you get out the door.
The grocery store as classroom
Even if you’re super pinched on time and dislike grocery shopping, be aware that in today’s cashless, I-can-get-anything-delivered environment, a trip to the market can serve a vital second purpose: as practical, real-time education. Those food-buying trips can become efficient, in-person opportunities to foster your child’s vocabulary, math skills, money awareness, and general can-do-ism—as well as being pleasant time together.
For instance, if your child is age:
- Two: have her say what colors she sees in the produce aisle, and count aloud as you navigate together over to aisle 8
- Five: read price tags, guess how many items you have in the cart, and learn names of new, more unusual food items
- Eight: calculate the total bill, assuming you have fifteen items in your basket and they each cost $3
- Ten: calculate the after-discount prices for sale items
- Fifteen: select all the items needed for a nutritious dinner, if she were cooking and had only x amount of money to spend
If you can double or even triple the benefits of that trip, it will feel like time well used.
Workparenting the picky eater
Everyone has preferences, and within very tight limits, it’s fine to honor them: not serving extra broccoli to a child who loathes it, for example. The role of short-order cook, however, is the very last one you should assume given your current workload. It’s a terrible use of your time, and worse, it sets up—or reinforces—a nasty precedent that you’re some sort of servant to your kids. If that doesn’t sound like a problem, then imagine how that dynamic will play out later in childhood, through adolescence, and beyond the realm of the dining table. It’s not a pretty picture.
When you are—inevitably—confronted with food pickiness or refusals, start by asking yourself if you and your child are really acting out some unspoken, non-food-related emotions. After a long day apart from you, your four-year-old may be craving some special, concentrated, just-for-me-type attention. She doesn’t know how to articulate that, so she demands that you separate the rice and peas. And you, feeling a little workparent-guilty, may think, I can be an ideal, attentive mother in this moment if I do that. Or maybe you’re bone-tired after a solid day’s work and just not up for fighting about it.
Instead of conceding, think about:
- Other, nonfood ways that you could show specific, immediate affection: ask about an interaction your child had at daycare, suggest you play a game together after dinner, or offer to read an extra book together before bed.
- Referring, gently but firmly, back to your House Rules: “Yes, I know carrots aren’t your thing, but we have to take two bites of everything that we’re served.”
- Offering a cheerful, no-hassle, nonoption option: “No problem! If you don’t want to eat it now, you can have it for breakfast tomorrow instead.”
- Reminding yourself of all the other, more critical things on your to-do list. Is picking the peas out of the rice really a good time investment?
- Diverting to another topic.
Pushing back on pickiness may be unpleasant, initially—but if you stick to your guns, you won’t have to live through it often.
Emergency Meals
When you’re hungry, tired, and/or running late, and you have no kind of meal ready or planned, it’s time to reach for an Emergency Meal. To qualify as such, a particular food or food combination has to be something that 1) you can get on the table in seven minutes or less, 2) the kids will actually eat, 3) is filling, and provides enough oomph to get everyone to the next feeding, and 4) is decently healthy.
Your Emergency Meal may be an omelet and salad, a frozen burrito with a piece of fruit, a bag of frozen vegetables cooked in the same water the pasta is and served with sauce from a jar, or something from the special stash of frozen leftovers you keep for just this purpose. Whatever that go-to is, be sure to have one. Just like with caregiving plans, you feel more in control when you know you have a quality backup.
Should you pay up for a prepared-meal delivery service?
Those meal-delivery services and prepared-meal kits you see advertised everywhere may be more expensive than cooking from scratch, but if 1) you have the budget, 2) they help you eat healthier, and 3) they save you time—e.g., if they get you to the table as a family more often, and for longer stretches—then they’re no luxury, they’re just smart options.
Be a thoughtful consumer, though. In the past few years there’s been a huge proliferation of “we make home cooking easy for you!” type companies, each offering its own twist on the concept. Some allow you to pick from preorganized weekly menus and drop all the needed groceries in your garage, others provide boxes of ready-to-heat ingredients required for a single meal, and so on. There’s no right or wrong, but be certain that what you’ve signed up and are paying for eases your real pain point(s). If the service doesn’t meaningfully shorten your family’s “time to the table,” then you may not be getting your money’s worth. Be discerning—and shop around.
Takeout, eating out, and fast food
Let’s accept right here and right now that since you’re a busy working parent, eating out, takeout, and fast food are all likely to become a regular part of your arsenal. You may not want to turn to them every day, but with a little forward thinking you can keep your nutrition and family dynamic on track even when someone else is doing the cooking.
- Hold on to your House Rules. Even in a different physical space, or when the food comes in a cardboard container, you can still apply regular standards, whether that’s milk with the meal, utensils, or no complaining.
- Take control of the ordering process. Just because there’s a menu doesn’t mean everyone has to choose. Consider ordering family style, or multiples of the same dish, to simulate the environment at home.
- Use the “add healthy” approach. If you’re running late from work and decide to stop at the drive-through on the way home, don’t beat yourself up. Sure, it’s not your finest culinary moment, but we’re dealing in reality here. Serve up the takeout with some carrot sticks, oranges, and glasses of milk and suddenly you’ve got a meal with vitamins A and C and calcium. Add healthy, lose the guilt.
Rethinking workday lunches
Whatever your standard work lunch—whether that’s a sandwich from the corner deli, leftovers brought from home, something wolfed down in the company canteen, or something whipped up in your own kitchen before you bolt back to your home office—think about what makes sense now given your overall workparent food system. Try to make lunch healthy and convenient, sure—but also make certain that whatever practical solution you come to doesn’t shortchange you from a career perspective. Deals are very often brokered, sales made, innovative ideas hatched, and relationships formed over meals. If all of your colleagues use their midday meals for internal networking or outside client connections, and your strategy is to eat solo at your desk, then yes, it will save you time—but you’re putting yourself at a significant disadvantage in terms of relationships and visibility. To stay on middle ground, consider setting yourself some kind of reasonable personal quota: join the departmental lunches once a week, ask your boss out to eat once a quarter, use lunch hour as videoconference catch-up time with the colleagues you don’t see as often. Be efficient, while thinking “advancement.”
‘‘Our family always has a meal plan, but we reserve the right to change it at the last minute. The other night, we were running late and we realized our favorite local pizza place was having a buy-one, get-one-free special, so we did takeout instead.
No one can do everything perfectly, or the way it’s culturally prescribed—all organic and homemade. Would I do drive-through every night? No, but a few nights a week is fine. Think ahead, about what suits the realities of your time, budget, and family—and then give yourself some grace.”
—Steve, educator and pastor, father of four
How to Make Family Meals Happen—and More Often
As every working parent knows, the cuisine itself is only one part of the Food Challenge. Even in the fantasy world where your family employs a full-time professional chef, it would still be hard to get the whole family eating together given your schedules. If the Family Meal is proving hard to pull off, or gathering around the table feels like a historic or near-mythical event (my grandparents used to have family dinners each night; we ate together during the holidays), then consider some of these tricks to help make it a more frequent reality.
- Assign it a higher priority. It’s essential to finish the budget report, get the car repaired, prepare for the big client meeting, make your daughter’s school-play costume … and on and on and on. Your calendar is crammed, your to-do list is a mile long, and it’s all marked Urgent. If you’re going to make Family Meals happen, you need to give them equal footing.
- Add it to the calendar. Block off the times you want to eat with the family. When they’re recorded as “official” entries, you’re much more likely to honor them.
- Think beyond dinner. Chances are when you think “family meal,” you imagine a hearty, hot, home-cooked dinner, served nightly and on real china. Yet the reality of workparent scheduling is that the evening isn’t always the best time to gather. Consider making your Family Meal breakfast instead, if school and work schedules favor that time slot. The best time for a Family Meal is whenever you can make it happen.
- Make the food incidental. Alright, so you’d prefer to sit down over a proper meal prepared in your own kitchen. You can still bond, and connect, and create the ritual of a Family Meal over takeout, though, or at the diner on Saturday mornings, or over microwave pizza. Nutrition is important, but family time is even more so.
- Label it. Call it whatever you want—“family dinner,” “our family meal,” “eating in the dining room,” or “sitting down together, all five of us”—but call it something, and be consistent. The label sends signals about the meal’s meaning and importance, and it makes even the simplest and quickest dinner feel like part of a larger family tradition.
‘‘Family dinner is a high priority. When we’re around the table, there are no phones, it’s just the five of us, and everyone speaks. We’ll each talk about the best and worst things that happened to us that day. If one of the girls had an argument with a friend, we talk through it. This way, they’ll still be talking to us when they’re fourteen.
We also say what we’re each thankful for. That started one evening during Covid-19 quarantine when everyone was in a particularly salty mood, and it’s amazing how quickly it improves the atmosphere. The kids love it, and will actually argue over who gets to go first.”
—Ashley, military officer, father of three
While at the Table: Enjoying Your Time Together
You’ve procured a meal, you’ve gotten everyone seated, simultaneously—now what?
- Keep things light. For the Family Meal tradition to take hold, time at the table needs to feel like a shelter from the experiences of the day—not a task but a reward. So stay positive: share any good news about weekend plans, for example, or an upcoming visit from Grandma, and start comments with upbeat lead-ins like “The funniest thing happened today,” or “You’ll never guess who I saw.” This isn’t the time to interrogate or broach tough subjects, like yesterday’s geometry test.
- Use a conversation starter. Dinner-party-style chatter and “let me tell you about my day” type recaps don’t come naturally to children, and family members of whatever age can experience performance pressure if, as soon as they’re at the table, they’re expected to be forthcoming, or hold the floor. What can work well and naturally is:
- A simple fill-in-the-blank-style opener that you’re willing to kick off yourself, like “The best [or most unexpected, etc.] thing that happened to me today was …” or, “a kind thing I saw someone do this week was …”
- Telling a family story
- Play a guessing game, like Twenty Questions
- Asking a lighthearted hypothetical like “If you were [an animal, a flower, etc.], what would you be?”
- Be brief. Children have shorter attention spans than adults do, and good behavior lasts only so long. Fortunately, Family Meals don’t need to be long to have impact—it’s their regularity and quality that count. When starting your new routine, aim for just fifteen minutes around the table. That timing will naturally lengthen as your kids grow and as the practice of connecting over shared meals becomes an essential, treasured habit.
No comparing: the media
Everything looks so beautiful as you scroll through the foodie pictures. And those cooking competition shows? They’re some of the best entertainment around.
What they aren’t, however, is workparent reality. Those images took multiple food stylists, a professional photo studio, and a lighting designer to produce, and the calm, smiling host of your favorite cook-off program doesn’t have to do his job after ten hours spent working elsewhere and with a low-blood-sugar toddler screaming in an adjacent high chair. You can get wonderful things from the media, and food media in particular: inspiration, new flavors, good quick-prep recipes. But the moment you start using it as a barometer for your own life and kitchen outputs, you’re going to feel inadequate. Stay away from the comparison mindset, and use what you see in a positive way: to stoke your own interest in cooking and food … and for some easy, low-cost escape and diversion.
Food as Part of Your Family’s Workparent Template
As you read chapter 1, you mapped out your own Workparent Template: your collected impressions, assumptions, experiences, and feelings about being a working mom or dad, about what it really means and how it works. Think back to that exercise now—or even look over the notes you jotted down.
Somewhere within that web, you’re almost certain to have a few—or more—entries focusing on the Food Challenge. Maybe there’s a note on how your own working mom tied on her apron each evening after getting home, or how you had to pack your own school lunches because she was too busy to do so, or how you and your parents sat down to dinner together most nights—or never got to. Time around the table, or its lack, and what food and mealtimes feel like, is a noticeable part of most Workparent Templates. It’s like a red thread woven through.
For your own children, it will be too. If you can set sacrosanct Family Meal times, you don’t just get to enjoy those half-hour slots—you send a powerful, consistent message that even while you’re working hard, family comes first. If you can seem more relaxed and “together” at the grocery store, or when scrambling to get food on the table, it’s a way to tell the kids, working parenthood isn’t always easy, but it’s possible. Even on the nights you reach for an Emergency Meal, and then sit down for a few minutes to enjoy it together, you help create a template of strong, calm, capable workparenting for your kids to look to in their own future.