Getting off “the hamster wheel of competitive parenting” with Kate Lynch
The creator of Atypical Kids, Mindful Parents talks about becoming a parent at 41, and leaving fakeness (and the fashion industry) behind
“Before Ocean, I was impatient and insecure. I have more perspective and confidence now. Raising him has been a liberatory practice that no spiritual tradition could match. But without my mindfulness practice, it could have gone sideways.” —
This week in our Community Tuesdays Chat, we’re talking about the art of giving less f@#$s. Which means it’s the perfect time for us to connect with the work of Kate Lynch, a mindfulness coach and parent born and raised in NYC, who had to learn this the hard way when she became a parent to an “atypical” child at 41.
A major milestone on this journey, as we discuss in Kate’s interview below, is embracing the fact that having an atypical child means you will have an atypical parenting experience. The good news is that this means you have permission to get off what she calls “the hamster wheel of competitive parenting.” You can just… do your own thing. Because doing what everyone else is doing isn’t going to be possible anyway.
I’ve learned much from Kate, who is a bit further out in her parenting journey than I am, since we first connected around this post on navigating verstimulation and overwhelm during the holidays. Kate’s newsletter, Atypical Kids, Mindful Parents (a Substack Featured Publication in 2023) was among the most popular resources I linked. Since then, Kate and I have checked in with each other regularly; for example, we recently recorded an episode of her podcast (which drops in May!) about the emotional rollercoaster of having your child evaluated for special education services.
Yet we’ve both found that the work of parenting an “atypical child” – the terminology Kate’s son prefers – does not begin and end with the school system, but within our own nervous systems. It begins with learning to tend to ourselves so that we can better tend our children. (And, yes, survive their next IEP meeting.) May the interview that follows be of benefit to anyone who is walking this path alongside us.
In this interview, Kate and I talk about how her life experiences prepared her for this season of giving less f@#$s, i.e.:
How she learned to tend herself, during a “scrappy” childhood split between city streets and upstate creeks
How her mindfulness practice led to her quitting her job in fashion and becoming a yoga teacher
How mindfulness helped her to navigate her son’s intense tantrums — and getting side-eyed at the playground by other parents
How she came to do the work she is currently doing to help other caregivers to support “atypical children” in mindful ways, without “sugarcoating” how hard that can be.
May this interview serve as your permission slip today for you to step off whatever hamster wheel you’re on, as well, and consider what else you can do instead.
Ryan: Where did you grow up? What else grows there? What was it like for you to grow there?
Kate; I was born and raised in Manhattan. My mom moved us downtown to be closer to SOHO 20, the feminist art cooperative she was a founding member of.
What else grows there? Millions of people. Hardy plants and animals. I think of the Tupac poem The Rose That Grew From Concrete.
In the ‘70s, we had a lot of independence with public transportation, drawing with chalk on the sidewalk, and very little supervision. I felt tough and scrappy… but we were neglected, honestly.
My childhood was an adventure, full of loud bars, gallery openings, nightclubs, and financial uncertainty. For a highly sensitive kid, it was overwhelming. I figured everyone felt the constant hum of hyper-vigilance, the clenched jaw and knotted gut—symptoms of my effort to ignore sensory overwhelm. By the time I was seven I’d developed a prickly shell of sarcastic wit and a handful of stress-induced symptoms that kept me home from school often, safely in bed with my books and my sketchbook.
I’m grateful that my parents got a little farmhouse on a dirt road in the Western Catskills when I was two, because it was the only stable thing throughout my childhood. So I’ve also grown up foraging for raspberries, exploring woods, swimming in fresh water, catching salamanders, and smelling Queen Anne’s Lace.
What is your earliest memory of tending another being?
When my parents divorced, we moved into an artist’s loft on the Bowery, and my mom somehow ended up inheriting a dog named Pee Pee. It should have been obvious from the name, but this was not a well-trained dog. My sister and I were 5 and 6, and we would try to take Pee Pee for a walk before my mom got home from work. He would not go with us, no matter how hard we tried to walk him around the block. Instead, he would pee in the middle of our loft’s wood floor.
Once you came of age as an artist yourself, you parlayed that into a career in the fashion industry. What was that like? How’d you get into it? What made you want to leave it to become a yoga teacher instead?
In high school in the 80’s, Vogue was my escape. Obsessed with Rei Kawakubo and Karl Lagerfeld, I attended Rhode Island School of Design, then threw myself into a career in the fashion industry. While I loved being financially safe, I hated the 14-hour days under fluorescent lights, pinched into heels, attempting to win over ruthless coworkers. It was soul-sucking, and I felt like part of the problem rather than part of the solution. But financial security was important to me, so I stayed for 10 years.
By my late twenties, I was burnt out and ready for my Saturn return1. That’s about when I attended my very first yoga class, and discovered a feeling of contentment. I kept going back, because I had glimpsed self-acceptance. I’d witnessed what paying attention to my breath could do for my stress level. As I moved consciously, my body and mind momentarily became partners. My mental chaos slowed, and underneath the chatter was a part of me who knew that more was possible.
In time, yoga gave me the courage to leave my stressful, unfulfilling fashion career. I moved to California, fell in love with ceramics, worked at a health food store, and backpacked around Asia for 6 months before landing in Australia for 6 years (that’s another story).
When I finally landed, I had such a strong desire to lift suffering (mine and the world’s) that I sought training to become a yoga teacher. Now, over 20 years later, I’ve absorbed the tools I need to support and regulate my highly sensitive nervous system, and now I teach those tools to others.
What or whom have you most loved tending since that long-ago Saturn Return?
I have a lot of mama bear energy, and resonate with Mary Oliver’s line, “My work is loving the world.”
In particular, I most love tending my son, Ocean, my wellbeing (emotional, mental, physical, creative…), and mindful communities.
My hope with Atypical Kids, Mindful Parents is to channel my experience with tending mindful communities into a monthly gathering for parents of neurodivergent kids, where we can practice self-compassion, connect around our joys and struggles, and learn some helpful mindful parenting tools.
For our purposes, as well as for people who may not be familiar with the terms we’ll use here: How do you define “atypical”?
When I started writing about my parenting experience, I asked my son what term he was most comfortable with. He liked “atypical” because he has no interest in being typical.
Atypical means diverging from the norm, but it’s not hierarchical. It’s no better or worse. The more common word now is neurodivergent, but it wasn’t as common five years ago. I didn’t want to focus solely on one diagnosis, like autism or ADHD, because parents of kids with all sorts of disabilities, traumas, and invisible differences benefit from this work. It’s less about the definition, and more about the mindset shift that helps us parents shed our internalized judgment.
You do a lovely job in your writing of balancing appreciation and profound respect for your son, who is now a teenager, with real talk about what it’s like to support him. What else can you tell us about his unique strengths and gifts?
Thank you. I’m lucky because Ocean is and always has been an incredible person with a fantastic sense of humor. He knows what he wants and has a clear creative vision. He has a strong sense of justice, and advocates for himself and his friends. He’s honest, and has the strongest B.S. detector of anyone I know. He’s matured into a self-motivated leader.
Relatedly: What other strengths and gifts of yours have you uncovered through parenting him?
Before Ocean, I was impatient and insecure. I think that sums up so much. I have more perspective and confidence now. Raising him has been a liberatory practice that no spiritual tradition could match. But without my mindfulness practice, it could have gone sideways.
What has surprised you about the experience of raising your own atypical or neurodivergent kid, that you didn’t know before becoming a parent? What do you think people need to better understand about that?
Where do I start? I was surprised by all of it! I was sometimes delighted, sometimes despairing.
I won’t sugar coat it: I had my son when I was 41, and didn’t sleep more than 2 hours consecutively for 2 years. He had multiple meltdowns a day for several years. I was at a complete loss. I almost broke. I was sure I must be the worst mom ever.
I wasn’t alone, I had a wonderful support system, and I still felt profoundly lonely much of the time. Especially when my kid behaved just differently enough at the playground that other kids would be confused, and other parents would give me the side-eye.
Not many people are open about how hard parenting neurodivergent kids can be. We don’t want to complain in case our kids think we don’t love them, but it’s hard precisely because we love them so much, and we see how cruel and ableist this world can be. We don’t know how they’ll survive when we’re gone, so we fight for their rights until our knuckles are bloody, but it never feels like enough.
If we can’t be vulnerable and honest about these struggles, how will others know we need help? I have no interest in being fake. It’s exhausting. If I wanted to be inauthentic, I would have stayed in the fashion industry.
I often think of the phrase “strong back, soft front” when it comes to parenting an atypical child. As you say, you have to constantly be balancing a sense of compassion for yourself and your child with a strong determination to advocate for them in a world that doesn’t always see their strengths, or their needs. This phrase, in this context, brings to mind the scrappy version of you that came up through the concrete in NYC, as well as the present and appreciative version of yourself that swam through clear water in the Catskills.
How do you bring these two complementary energies or selves together as a parent – your strong back, your soft front? How do you bring them together as a mindfulness practitioner?
As I parent and advocate for Ocean, I often think of what would have helped me to feel safer growing up. One framework I use is that of trauma-responsive care.
To me, this means that in parenting and in my work, I prioritize connection. For example, rather than rushing in to fix his problem, I start with self-empathy. Once I attune to myself, then I’m more open to empathize and relate to Ocean as the wise being that he is, and I’ve seen how being witnessed in this way empowers him (and others).
Then, I seek meaningful consent. Before offering advice, I’ll ask him whether he wants it.
After that, I’ll offer options. For example, in my yoga classes, there are usually three different variations of a movement that students can explore, so that their body can choose what it wants at that moment. When Ocean was 3, I told him that he had options for lunch, and then told him the two choices. He replied that he would have “the options.” (Is this funny? I thought it was so funny at the time.)
Finally, I provide context and perspective [for his decision-making] through education and stories. For example, I think we all benefit by understanding how our nervous system works, so I talk about it all the time. And Ocean may groan when I mention the story of the monk who pulled his own tooth2, but he knows exactly what I’m talking about.
While from the outside my approach may look similar to the way I was raised (hands-off, trusted to make decisions, spoken to as an equal), the foundation, scaffolding, and structure are all there holding him up. If he falters, I notice. Even though it would be easier to jump in and do his work, I regulate, breathe, and walk beside him instead, so that he can grow into himself. Now that he’s a teen, I’m often running behind him, haha.
Some will argue with this approach, but if you have a kid with such a strong drive for autonomy as mine, you get it. He’s always been this way, and you know what? So have I.
Remembering these trauma-informed terms and how I live them – connection, consent, and context – helps me to remain consistent with Ocean, and to heal my own fractures along the way.
It’s interesting because I find I use a similar approach when working with teens. Often, when I was a middle school classroom teacher, my students would come to me at lunchtime, asking for dating advice or complaining about a problem at home. I would very rarely tell them what to do.
Instead, I’d usually listen, ask permission to lay out some options for them – I think of it as “framing the choices” – and then sometimes tell a story about how I made the wrong choice in the past and how that turned out (I’m lucky to have many such stories). Then I’d wait to see what they’d do.
Sometimes they’d keep pursuing a relationship beyond the point that it was healthy for them, or blow up at their family member. But they’d know that I was a safe place to come to after they did so – not because I’ve done everything perfectly or have all the answers, but because I too have made all of the mistakes.
I’m curious to hear more about how you take care of yourself before these conversations, Kate. What mindfulness techniques do you think are best suited for parents of neurodivergent children?
Our culture doesn’t adequately support parents of neurodivergent kids, and time to breathe and recharge is scarce. But you can do something, even for just 30 seconds, and it counts. I had a student who sat in her car after dropping her neurodivergent kid off at school. She took one long, slow breath. She reported back that it was worth the 30 seconds it took. We celebrated!
So I would invite parents to consider these criteria: What’s so simple that you’ll actually remember to do it? What’s so quick you can easily add it into your life? What shifts your nervous system to a more regulated state most effectively?
For example, you can try running your fingers through your scalp, yawning like a cat, or breathing in and making a tight fist, then releasing your breath slowly, while uncurling your fingers. Each time you try something, notice how you feel afterwards.
If you're looking for other quick and simple mindfulness tools, I offer a few in my Mindful Meltdown Cheat Sheet, and more in a challenge called 5 Days to Calmer, Kinder Parenting. In my 1-1 coaching, I support people with customizing these practices to their specific needs.
What kinds of mindfulness techniques do you think are best suited for parents who are neurodivergent themselves?
For neurodivergent parents, I actually think it helps to treat ourselves in a trauma-informed way. Surviving in a world that wasn’t designed for us can be traumatizing, and we have to give ourselves grace. So above all, trust yourself to know what’s NOT right for you.
For example: If you don’t want to close your eyes, by all means, don’t.
If you start dissociating, notice, be kind, and invite your body and mind to befriend each other casually. They may need space from each other sometimes. If 30 seconds is your limit, great.
If the voice in your guided meditation makes your skin crawl, or you feel condescended to, or it seems fake, or you can’t get into it at all, try something else.
Finally, when you do find something that works, repeat it. It’s okay to get a bit bored.
Surviving in a world that wasn’t designed for us can be traumatizing, and we have to give ourselves grace. — Kate Lynch
You’re starting a new group coaching offering for parents along these lines this year. Can you tell us more about that?
Yes, I’m so excited about it!
Most parents of neurodivergent children I know are seeking three things: Connection with other parents who get it; help through the rough spots; and resources to help our children.
Knowing we’re not the only one dealing with these struggles is healing. It does take effort to show up, especially when it’s something new and you feel vulnerable around it. In my experience, it’s worth it. It’s a club we didn’t expect to become members of when we imagined our parenting journey, but I feel so grateful for it. I’ve hosted many of these groups with parents, and there’s nothing quite like the solidarity, validation, and wisdom in these neurodiverse spaces.
When we’re not in crisis ourselves, we can share our successes and support other parents, which is empowering because it shows us just how much we’ve learned and grown.
When we’re forced off the hamster wheel of competitive parenting, when we have to do things differently than the way we were raised, it’s an opportunity for awakening.
Amen. Where can people find you if they want to engage further with your work?
On Instagram, at @selfregulatedparent and @healthyhappyyoga.
On Youtube, at Healthy Happy Yoga.
And of course, my newsletter:
Per astrology queen Chani Nichols: “A Saturn return is when the planet Saturn finds its way back to the same place it was when you were born. It takes between 27 and 30 years for Saturn to travel through the zodiac, so that means everyone goes through a Saturn return at the end of their 20s, 50s, and 80s. Thanks to Saturn’s slow speed and retrogrades, each Saturn return lasts approximately three years.”
Per Tricycle Magazine (paywalled): “Ajahn Brahm, a British Theravada Buddhist monk, pulled out his own tooth without anesthetic. He said that the pain was only for a couple of seconds when he wiggled the pliers and pulled, and that it didn't hurt much once the tooth was out. He explained that fear is the major ingredient of pain, and that he didn't feel much pain because he didn't anticipate it.”
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I'm cross-posting this on Sunday Ryan!