Balancing kid needs with our own in the K-12 years, with Meredith Rodriguez

PLUS: Catch me live with Kate Lynch at 1pm EST to talk sped-momming specifically

NOTE: The interview below is Part Two of a series I’m doing with my go-to Mom Advice Friend Meredith, a La Leche League facilitator and parenting coach who also co-pilots our In Tending gatherings on Zoom with me. In this conversation, we focus on living in alignment with our values as a way of streamlining our parenting in the K-12 years. I will also get to discuss the notion of parenting and teaching from a heart-centered place as it pertains to supporting our neurodivergent kids in K-12 with Kate Lynch of

Atypical Kids, Mindful Parents

today (Thurs 5/22) at 1pm EST.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge here that, as a caregiver and an American, I often feel deeply broken-hearted and out of alignment with my values when I consume the news — especially every time I hear that mothers in Gaza are feeding their children insect-infested flour to stay alive, or searching through the garbage for scraps, while our leaders fail to apply needed pressure to get aid flowing again. (Sources: AP News, BBC, CBC) The situation this week is particularly dire. The concurrent sense of moral injury among caregivers like me is real and profound. As Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi shared this week, “Food should never be used as a tool in war. It should be a bridge.”

Given this, here are a few calls to action I’m amplifying today:

• U.S. citizens: call your politicians directly today to ask that they advocate for more compassion and care for families in Gaza. Here’s a script from 5 Calls you can use.

• If you live here or abroad: support Operation Olive Branch. This org provides vital support in turn to PAL Humanity, an initiative led by two female doctors who provide field visits, distribute aid (primarily diapers, menstrual/hygiene kits and formula) and medical tents in Southern Gaza. (See this IG post for updates on how this aid distribution is going amidst the current aid blockade.)

• Take care of yourself as you bear witness to suffering. It is better to mindfully practice with the pain than to check out or burn out. Here are two links to practices I’ve offered before here and have found useful during this time: One breath for you, one breath for me: three short practices for tough tending seasons; Sending loving-kindness to those impacted by disaster

May we continue to be bridge-builders for other caregivers and children, here at In Tending. May we continue to live in alignment with our dedication to love over greed, aggression and delusion. May we remember, as James Baldwin famously said, that “the children are always ours.” May we know that our dedication to building a better world for all children is a vital form of resistance.

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Meredith, carrying one load or another for her family with grace, as usual.

ON ENTERING THE K-12 YEARS

Ryan: So, at the time that we’re recording this, your four school-age kids are on a school break, and they are all at home with you. Yet we’re having this lengthy Zoom call between friends.

Please tell us, Meredith, what is your secret? What’s the secret to raising four school-age kids without losing all sense of self and sanity?

Meredith: I mean, them being on break just means less driving for me, honestly.

Ryan: You do do a lot of driving. Luckily, you also call me a lot from the road! Just an example of the juggling you do on the regular.

So, for the record, can you list off kids and ages?

Meredith: Elliot just went to kindergarten. Dahlia is in third grade. Ethan is in sixth grade, which is the beginning of middle school at our school. And Alice is in ninth grade, which is the first year of high school.

Ryan: All four kids are at an independent school in Riverdale, a part of NYC that is home to some very fancy families and schools. But you don’t live there, which is why you’re always driving. And you’re more likely to rock ripped jeans and Doc Martens than a Prada purse and Louboutins. So I’m curious as to how you ended up choosing this school. Because one big community-related challenge for parents of K-12 kids is this one, right? Figuring out where we and our kids fit in, school-wise.

For some families, they land in a school community not by choice but due to other factors, like housing insecurity or a partner’s job, and need to make it work. For others, they may have more freedom to select the neighborhood in which their zoned school is located, or to participate in school choice or charter lotteries, or to decide between public or private, at some point in their parenting journey.

So let’s start there. How did you end up at this school? And what makes yours workable for you?

WHAT MAKES A K-12 SCHOOL WORKABLE?

Meredith: Being a public school teacher, I was all set to send my kids there. But then we read an article in the New York Times that was written by the former head of school for where my kids are now, and we liked what he had to say about education, and the school’s philosophy. So when we had the opportunity to apply, through a free diversity program that sort of walked us through and had our back through the application process, we moved schools. Because my kids are Mexican-American, as a part of the process, we had to submit my husband's birth certificate to show that yes, they really are diverse. And we had to repeat that for our three other children, who also attend the school now.

I am incredibly relieved that we did, because at this particular school, I'm able to push where pushing is needed. The commitment to difficult discussions is very real. It is not perfect, but it is very much a place where I feel like I can grow, my family can grow, and the school can grow.

One of the values of the school is outdoor education and stewardship, for example, so kindergarteners spend all day Friday, rain or shine, outdoors in the park along the Hudson River. There’s this sense that they are becoming stewards of something so much bigger than their tiny 5-year-old selves. For us, it feels like, “Yes! That right there, this is why we’re here.”

Still, though, it can be hard. We ask ourselves if it is still workable every single year before we sign the school contract for the next year. But “yes” has been the answer so far.

Ryan: Now, you've had four kids go through kindergarten, so four very different kids in the same environment. What do you think are the constants, and what do you think are the variables, when it comes to beginning your K-12 journey with your kid?

Meredith: These years come with some funny tensions, between the individuals in the community and the community itself. Kids are learning to be community members, and yet at parent meetings, parents will push back on this or that community practice.

I’m always amused when admin is sort of like, “Yeah, but you choose to send your kids here, and this is the way we do it.” Like, we get that your kid will only eat plain bagels, and we’ll figure that out, but we’re not going to start serving plain bagels if that’s not what we do here.

In K-12, parents are coming to understand that a school is a place that is allowed to set some expectations and non-negotiables – and they as parents are also allowed to do that.

Ryan: I think that that's something that's really important to highlight. I have seen situations in schools where you have ten different parents and they want ten different things out of the school. And I have seen schools that try to be ten different things to those ten different parents – typically private schools where parents are paying customers – and inevitably, nine of them are really dissatisfied.

I've also seen schools that do what you just described. They say, “Look, we may not be right for every family and we may not be right for you. We are, however, about something. And we are a school for people who are also about that thing.”

Sometimes that thing is a set of secular values. Sometimes it’s a set of religious values. And sometimes, real talk, it’s about the cult of capitalism, about manufacturing privilege and maintaining it for your family, with everything at the school being organized toward that end, which can feel gross.

In any case, the school is about something, and they get to be about it. And at any given time you might have five parents that are sort of upset about that, and maybe two will leave. But there are usually also five parents that are like, “Yeah, this is what we signed up for.”

So ironically, schools that do less to please everyone end up pleasing more people, because they're doing what a good parent does. Which is to say, they’re comfortable with saying, “This is what we do around here and this is your part in it. We’re open to your ideas, but we’re not going to completely change direction simply because someone here is having a tantrum.”

I see this divide happening in families at this age and stage, too. Some are getting ripped apart by the different demands of their children’s schedules. They’re losing the weekday dinners and lazy Sunday mornings that used to stitch them back together after long days apart. In other families, there’s a different vibe, in which adults say, “There is gonna be some baseline thing that we're about, and everybody gets to express that in their own way, but not at the expense of the thing that we're about.”

Meredith: I think that comes through so much from my kids’ school. It's very clear there that you will hear the word no from time to time, because what's right for you may not be right for our community, and your individual goal may not serve this particular community at this time.

For example, this is the first year that there have been no cell phones allowed anywhere on any of the campuses of this school. The school said, “Here's the research. We're not basing this on our whim today. We know that this is the right move. Join us or don't. It's gonna go into effect next year.” That was new to a lot of parents. Some did leave. But the rationale was that the new rule would give something to kids and families, even if it was also removing other options.

CARING FOR THE WHOLE VS. CATERING TO THE INDIVIDUAL

Meredith: I think when you are at the head of a family with so many different needs, this is also necessary. It’s easy to default to solving for “How do I help this individual kid?” But in reality it is often easier to make things work when we look at the collective and ask, “How can we help all of us?”

For example, connection is a value in our family. It’s our job to figure out how this looks when you're five, how it looks when you're nine, here's how it looks when you're 15. If you’re nine, does the fact that you want to go do tae kwon do four times a week serve our family connection? Or is it standing in the way? If it's standing in the way, we need to do something about it. Does the fact that you are 15 years old and want to be on your laptop 24/7 serve connection, or hinder it? Same deal.

Ryan: I am with you. I think that understanding also comes from us being educators who know that even when you’re designing a lesson that feels right for the majority of your students, there's still often gonna be three kids in the back that are wailing, “What? Why?” But you learn that that’s okay. Because tomorrow, you’ve got something planned that they’re gonna love.

So, even before I had a kid, I had a lot of practice with saying, “You get to not like this choice. That’s not threatening to me. It’s cool. We’re cool.” And, at the same time, teachers also get a lot of practice with saying, “We’re also not changing the current plans based on your dislike of them. We’re taking your feedback into consideration for the next set of plans.”

I wonder if this is part of the work of caregiving in the K-12 years too – developing a tolerance at different ages and stages for kids to have autonomy in terms of how they feel as individuals about your decisions, but without changing the decisions themselves, if those decisions are grounded in a skillful understanding of what the whole group needs.

Otherwise, I feel like you’d just constantly be paralyzed or frustrated. Like, “Well, this kid doesn't wanna go to the beach, so I guess none of us are going to the beach!” That serves no one.

I also think developing this tolerance for others’ discomfort helps us as adults to create a space and schedule that works for us. Among mothers of K-12 kids who are newly in full-time school, I’m seeing more and more this energy of, “No, I will not be canceling my new pottery class so that you can do two more days of tae kwon do.” I love that for us.

CARING FOR OURSELVES

Ryan: At the same time, including our own wants and needs in the equation is another step that sometimes gets skipped for some parents as they’re adjusting to the K-12 years. There are so many fun things that kids can do, and yet some parents aren’t yet making sure that they too get to do some fun things.

And I get it. Sometimes there's so many competing demands that it feels like, “Well, I don't wanna introduce my own demands into the situation, 'cause that's just gonna make solving this particular problem harder.” But if we continuously neglect our needs, then that makes life harder in the long run.

I see that you do a really good job of being flexible and willing to support all four kids in their endeavors, Meredith. You do do a fair bit of driving them around to their different things. But as we’ve said, you're also talking to me while you're driving around. And you do a pretty good job of still centering the things that are important to you as an individual, and tolerating the fact that sometimes that is going to impact your children–one or all.

So, how do you do that? How do you, as a mother of four, continue to make space for things that are important to you?

Meredith: I think a non-negotiable for me is — and people are probably gonna have opinions about this – I often tell my children, I don't work for you. I am an entire person all on my own. That doesn't change. I choose to be your mom and I choose to do a lot of things for you, but you're not my boss. I get to make choices and so do you. We are in relationship together.

This is also something I say as a La Leche League facilitator, because this really begins in the newborn years. This is a partnership. There's two of you in this nursing relationship, or three if you have twins, or whatever. When it stops working for any of the parties involved, it's time to re-evaluate. That could be them. But it could also be you. Because you do not exist only to serve your children.

That is a really, really important start to our relationships with our kids. For my youngest, when it is assumed that I am going to listen to the music that my five-year-old wants to listen to in the backseat while I’m driving him around, and nothing else, there's something off there. But I can teach him that we can make a compromise and make a playlist together.

I also now have a fifteen-year-old who finished an exam at 1:30, while I was in a writing circle. I texted her, “I’ll be there at two.” The expectation is that she’ll find something to make the waiting doable for her. And thus her response back was sort of the opposite of entitlement. “Can't wait to hear about writing circle, I'm gonna be at the library.”

So, in addition to valuing connection, there’s also this year-by-year development of respecting autonomy on all levels in the family. That is also a learning process. That's the work that I get to do as a parent. I get to say, “Here's who I am, here's what makes up me, and here's what I really hold onto and want the world to see.” And that world includes my children.

So far it seems to be working – not perfectly, but like a conversation that never stops.

Ryan: What I'm hearing is that to get that sense of autonomy and space for yourself, you're putting in some time upfront to create that, and to teach into it with all your kids. It doesn’t just happen. It starts with the five-year-old that's like, “Why can't I listen to my own music all the time?” Which is very much my own five-year-old right now. At that age and stage, it’s about being sort of being a broken record and saying, over and over, “You're not the only person in the car. You're not the only person in the car. You're not the only person in the car.” It takes fifteen years of explicit teaching to make that fifteen-year-old who has learned to say, “Enjoy your writing class!”

Meredith in scheduling mode.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO COLLABORATE IN YOUR OWN OPPRESSION

Ryan: I’d like to pivot to talking about how sane and yet how counter-cultural your approach is, Meredith, when it comes to thinking about how mothers of large families are supposed to feel and function. And conversely, how mothers of only children, like me, are supposed to feel and function. Because in some ways, the script of maternal self-negation is the same no matter how many kids you have, and in some ways, there’s an hierarchy there that I find really problematic.

One thing I notice is that people assume that when my child is struggling to share, or being assertive when it comes to telling kids how and what he wants to play, stem from a lack of pushback in our home, a sense that he’s doing it because he’s “spoiled.”

In some ways, sure, it would be easier for me if we had living children that were also doing the “not the only one in the car” labor alongside me. But in my mind, we owe that to my son regardless. These only-child assumptions suggest to me that many people carry around the idea that parents don’t have strong desires of their own, at least ones that would contradict or compete with their children’s desires.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m completely okay with telling my kid no, and playing my own music in the car. But I also know that it’s developmentally appropriate for all children to struggle with sharing. And my child is neurodivergent, so there are some aspects of social interaction and cognitive flexibility that come along with that. They’re his factory settings. There’s nothing inherently wrong with our child or our family, and yet we’re constantly subjected to the toxic notion that parents of only children should have more kids whether or not it is physically or financially wise to do so, so that we can “fix him” or better align with someone else’s idea of “enough.”

The flipside of this is something I see when I’m spending time with mothers who have three or more children. I never feel this from you, but sometimes, from them, I feel that there’s an assumption that the difficulty of your parenting journey correlates primarily with the number of children you have. Or that the more children you have, the less space as a mother you get to take up in your family. Ironically, when people like this come to adult parenting spaces, they often use this narrative to justify taking up more space. There’s a sense of, “Well, I’m suffering the most! Obviously!”

I think when we leave the checklist mentality of parenting behind—which we talked about in Part One of this interview—then we have to trouble this idea that our worth as parents comes from having lots of kids who have lots of activities. And if we do that, we also have to leave behind this idea that we get to engage in this kind of self-aggrandizing martyrdom around that.

The truth I’ve learned from facilitating lots of parenting groups is that having a lot of kids is hard, and having one child with significant needs is hard too. I’ve learned that having an unplanned pregnancy, or two under two, is hard, and it is also hard to lose a pregnancy, or to conceive a child after multiple IVF attempts, or to not be able to grow your family even if you’d like to. In all of these cases, I do not think it is a foregone conclusion that a mother must lose her agency. But that narrative is so prevalent regardless.

And of course, there are structural reasons why all of these things are hard that we cannot escape. It’s not all self-created suffering. But you do not have to collaborate in your own oppression inside the four walls of your own home, inside of your own mind. I think if you live with people who do think you should erase yourself, or you expect this of yourself, then as you said, something is off, and you have to address that more directly with the people in question. Venting to friends can help you prepare for that conversation, but it’s not a substitute for that conversation.

Meredith: When I hear, “Ugh, it's so hard to be a mom,” I think, “Dude, it's hard to be a person. Full stop.” And there is a range in all of it.

EVERYONE HAS AGENCY

Meredith: That sneaky-gold-star, super-mom thing has driven me crazy forever, because the individual in me just absolutely bristles at it. What I am doing for my four kids – it’s not a “super mom” thing. It’s a Meredith thing. I am choosing to live my life in such a way that every morning I wake up and I'm like, “Wow, do I have a whole lot of choices to make.”

And some of them are real annoying. Like, I wish I didn't have to drive to school in 40 minute traffic. Sometimes I do get stuck in that, and I spin my wheels, and I'm like, “God, this traffic!” and I'm texting my friend about it. But on some days I'm able to be like, “What would I rather do, stay at home and homeschool 'em? That would be a whole ‘nother set of choices to make.”

I think what's really important for me, too, is that I have a partner in all of this who also sees nothing but options. And then also does this real annoying thing by reminding me, “You get to choose.” Which makes me think, “Yes, but I would love instructions right about now. Just tell me what I have to do so I don't have to think about it. Take the responsibility.” But he’s like, “Trust your instincts! If you wanna homeschool these kids, go ahead, that's fine.” And then in my own mind I'm like, “Yes, but what about blah blah blah blah.”

And where I land is that I don't wanna give some other things up to do that. And that is the crux of it.

Everyone has the agency to ask: as an individual person, what am I willing to participate in? What systems am I willing to be a part of, to uphold? What am I willing to actively tear down? And then to live with that.

Ryan: I wonder what it looks like when you coach other parents of school-age children through this. You’ve just gotten certified with Simplicity Parenting; could you describe what that is in a nutshell and why you were drawn to this approach?

[Meredith’s youngest son wanders in at this point, and wants to join the call. She sends him off to pack his backpack for their afternoon playdate.]

Meredith: So Simplicity Parenting is a book written by Kim John Payne, who is a psychologist and social worker who has a wealth of experience in terms of understanding child development, family systems and education. He talks a lot about keeping all of the systems in which we are raising children very simple, hence Simplicity Parenting.

I’ve dipped in and out of both the book and the philosophy ever since my oldest was about two. At first, I thought, “I don't get this at all,” because as a newer parent I was looking for answers. “What am I supposed to be doing? What's the right move here?” And that's not necessarily what this provides.

I'm still not gonna agree with every single thing in it, but it provides a way of thinking about things that feels more supportive and helpful to what I'm doing now.

Ryan: What is that way of thinking about things, and how does it change your parenting practice to think in this way?

For example, you told me recently about a client who is really struggling with the sense that they can and should “have it all.” They have a young child, they are trying to balance things at work, they want to have a perfectly clean home, they want to host beautiful dinners with their friends … and they are finding that they just don't have enough time and energy to do all of those things. They felt really sad about that. So they came to you.

How do you reframe that dilemma, within the Simplicity Parenting framework? How do you view that kind of suffering and skillfully work with it?

Meredith: I think it first comes down to asking a lot of questions that amount to holding up a mirror. Some people are ready to see what they're saying about “having it all” and how, if this were their best friend, they would be like, “No, no, no, you don't need to do all that. You're doing too much.” Other people need time. Sometimes, people can’t quite see what their values and their choices even are.

That kind of conversation is nuanced. It’s about getting to the heart of what is important to you over time. What kind of person-slash-parent do you want to be? What would make you feel confident and successful?

Even words like “confident” and “successful” are so loaded–you get a picture in your head–so the work is also dismantling that picture, and painting your own picture. What do I look like as a version of myself that feels successful and confident?”

Ryan: It sounds like that work is probably very appropriate to do either for the first time, or as kind of a self check-in, as your children enter these K-12 years. People with kids over five have been parents for a while. At this point, it's an established part of your identity. But maybe you've lost touch with other aspects of your identity by now. Maybe you need to revisit what some of your values are, because real life has challenged and transformed some of them. Maybe you need to grieve some of the selves that are gone for good.

Relatedly, that is very much what we’re talking about in this week’s subscriber chat — not becoming “the obsessed exes to our former selves,” as you hilariously put it.

This all adds simplicity because you're only making choices based on who you are now, versus simultaneously trying to be something you were. But it’s not simple emotionally. Having a coach like you would certainly help.

WHAT IS YOUR WHY?

Meredith: Right. And it goes so far as to have this lofty ideal of then being a little bit cycle breaker-ish, in terms of teaching our kids that way of being as well. So that hopefully, they are growing up with this values-based reflection just being sort of ingrained. It’s about creating a space in which it is my job to say, “Here's why I do it this way. Tell me about your way. This is my why. What is your why?”

Ryan: Yes. We need communities in which there can be different whys, but there’s no sense of someone’s “ought” overriding someone else’s.

Two people sharing their “why” and “how” is also very different from a situation I think many of us find ourselves in when we’re talking to other parents, even our own co-parent, where one of us is talking about engaging in a task that’s connected to a deeply-held set of values, and another parent is taking action from a place that is harried, or reactive, in which the why is conspicuously missing.

Meredith: Yes. And when we feel that lack as parents, I think we can get really almost defensive about that. Because someone’s holding up the mirror and showing us where our “why” is missing, right?

Ryan: Right. Going back to the example of playing travel soccer in Part One of this conversation–that could be something that feels very aligned for you and your family. But so often I hear, “Ugh, I don't know why we're doing travel soccer. My kid really wanted to, and when I pushed back, they had a tantrum, and … and now we're doing travel soccer.”

I think that allowing a tendency towards non-confrontation to dominate your life is both really understandable and really self-defeating. We live in a capitalist patriarchy. If we’re women, somebody's always gonna be mad at us, and want more and more from us, until we are all liberated, together.

I would imagine in your house, with four children and a partner, somebody is mad at you all the time. Elliot is mad at you right now, in fact, because he wants to hang out with you, and you’re talking to me instead, because you value connection. His older sister is mad because she didn’t want to help him get his snack while you were talking to me, and I heard you tell her that she had to, because she has that role to play within your family’s system of values.

But as we’ve established, it’s okay to make one or all of the kids mad. Discomfort or displeasure is not danger. Kids can survive it. And we can survive them feeling it. Sanity at this age sometimes looks like simply breathing through someone else’s displeasure in the face of you flexing your agency and centering your values, and letting that be. Then eventually, letting it pass. It’s not about always keeping everyone “calm,” including yourself, in the moment. It’s about playing a long game in which you are ultimately at peace with yourself, because you are living in integrity with your values, and showing your kids how to do that, too.

Meredith: All of that. It’s okay for them to be mad. It’s also about acknowledging the fact that sometimes I'm the one who’s mad, because like, what are you yelling about? I want some peace and quiet. But here we are.

[Elliott arrives, with his snack bag packed.]

Elliott: I packed two bananas, two cheese sticks and two Gatorades.

Ryan: What else is in there? Like, what do you value, Elliot? What's going in your backpack? Because, you know, you’re the one that has to carry it around.

Elliott: I also packed two oranges, because I want to stay healthy.

Ryan: Healthy is a great value to have. Stay ahead of that scurvy, Elliott!