Working While Managing Your Child’s Mental Health

AMY GALLO: You’re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Amy Gallo.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And I’m Amy Bernstein. Most working parents in the US are at least somewhat concerned about their children’s mental health. Just over half are either very or extremely concerned. A third of them said they didn’t think it would be okay to leave work to attend to their child, and a quarter of parents agreed that no matter what’s going on with their child, they are not allowed to let it interrupt their work. Those are a few of the insights that the children’s mental health advocacy group, On Our Sleeves, unearthed in surveying working parents over the last two years. Here are some more. Over half of working parents had turned to their child’s pediatrician or reached out to a psychologist or counselor to get them professional help, and then over half of those families received a diagnosis.

AMY GALLO: When your child is struggling, whether it’s with social anxiety or anger management or autism, it’s nearly impossible to focus on anything but how they’re doing. So, I wasn’t surprised to read that parents on average estimated that a third of their thoughts during the workday were about their child’s mental health and well-being. For a quarter of parents who were especially concerned and whose work had been regularly disrupted, that average was nearly 50%. These disruptions, the calls that must be made, the appointments that must be attended, the unexpected pickups from school affect parents’ productivity and the way they feel toward their job. Half reported feeling hopeless about finishing certain tasks, under prepared in a meeting, and the quality of their work was slipping. Even among parents who were just somewhat concerned about their child’s mental health, a significant fraction said they were also missing work and falling behind.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And being repeatedly torn between protecting your child and meeting a project deadline is simply unsustainable. No wonder 32% of parents change jobs or quit altogether in the past year. Many more plan to do the same in the coming year because they’re not receiving the flexibility, understanding, and paid time off they need. That’s bad news for companies that don’t have family-first cultures and policies.

AMY GALLO: So, how can we make work more manageable for women trying to keep their kids safe? The executive director of On Our Sleeves, Marti Post, is here with ideas.

AMY BERNSTEIN: This is an episode that our colleague Erica Truxler pitched. She’s been on the show several times before and hosted our family management series, so she’s going to sub in for me.

AMY GALLO: Another heads up, in this interview, we touch on the topic of suicide, which we know is tough for some listeners. If that’s you, you may want to skip this episode.

ERICA TRUXLER: Marti, thank you so much for being here. I spent time reading the two reports from On Our Sleeves, and the stats in both are shocking, eye-opening and depressing. I feel like before the pandemic, this was clearly a crisis, and now that we are two plus years out, it feels like we’ve really reached a tipping point. And I’m curious, how are you making sense of these stats? How are you interpreting them?

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Well, at On Our Sleeves, we are so focused on getting resources to the communities that most surround our children: the parents, the teachers, the coaches. And we’re focused on that because of the crisis, as you mentioned, and also the fact that many of today’s adults did not grow up discussing mental health in their homes. So, many of us – and I’ll include myself in that – don’t feel equipped to meet the crisis. We’re not medical professionals, so we feel ill-equipped for it. What I think you’re seeing in these two work studies is how when someone is asked at home to do something for which they feel ill-equipped and has potentially very high consequences of a child falling behind in school, socially struggling, potentially harming themselves or committing suicide, those are high stakes situations to try to meet without having the proper training and they are chronic situations. So, we really took the data as an indicator to us that this is not going to go away when the world, if we can even say these words anymore, returns to normal because the after effect of it will continue to impact parents’ interactions with their kids and parents’ abilities to function and focus at work.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. I want to pick up on what you just said about focusing at work because we know from data and research, lots of research, that there is something called the maternal wall bias, which is that when women become mothers, if they become mothers, they are seen as less competent and less committed to work. And I have to admit, my concern about raising awareness around how consuming these events can be, particularly in a woman’s life, in a mother’s life, is that we somehow increase that bias. We somehow present women as distracted, torn, less committed to work because their mind is elsewhere. Do you have any thoughts about how we can both raise awareness about the burden that mothers are carrying here without causing people to question how they handle their work life?

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: That is such a good point. We especially don’t want, well, any parent, but especially mothers, to fall into that feeling of I have such high expectations and such high visibility on me because I’m a mom. I dare not fill in the blank. I dare not be late, I dare not be distracted.

AMY GALLO: Right.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: In both studies, we were expecting a gender difference in the findings around things like level of concern, level of interruption. We found in the first study in the great collide that there’s a difference between interruption and disruption. I can be interrupted multiple times, and those may be either they’re very quick or I feel less worried about them and I just redirect my attention. What we did find though is that the disruption is interruption that kind of takes a toll. It means it’s either harder to get focused or it’s harder to complete the task or it’s harder to feel joy in the task. So, we expected a gender difference there as well across interruption disruption, across concern level. And we did not see it, not a statistically significant gender difference.

AMY GALLO: Right.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: But then, what we all know from other data is that women do more of the unpaid work. So, within families, it’s very likely that if you’re solving for a mental health issue for a child, it is very likely that the mother is doing more of the making of the appointments, transporting to the appointments, following up, getting prescriptions filled, whatever those tasks might look like. So, I guess in some ways I feel heartened that the concern and the problem are equally affecting fathers and mothers because that tells us that we don’t have a gap in fathers and mothers seeing the issue.

AMY GALLO: Yep.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: We’d love to get to a day where there’s no gap in how fathers and mothers solve the issue.

AMY GALLO: Well, and also no gap in how parents are perceived by their coworkers, their bosses, their direct reports. Because even if the concern interruption disruption is shared, we know again from this research that it’s more likely a woman will be seen as less committed, less competent if she’s attending to those needs than if a father is attending to those needs. I mean, based on the research, we know about how men express vulnerability at work and how they’re often rewarded for doing so, right? They might actually incur a bonus, an emotional one or a reputational one for being the concerned parent, whereas the mom might be seen as distracted and not able to do her job.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Again, as a children’s mental health organization, we’re not in the business of making HR recommendations. However, what we see over and over and over is the benefit of open conversation about this topic, because mental health is often discussed as a problem that affects adults and maybe teens, not necessarily children, but half of all lifetime mental illness will present before the age of 14. So, that’s the first bit. The second bit is that there’s stigma around talking about mental health very differently than we speak about physical health. We call this the casserole effect. If your child was diagnosed with a chronic illness of some kind or had a heart episode or blood disorder, your community would rally to your side probably without you even asking really. As soon as the first person knew what was happening, you would have casseroles and cards and flowers and gift cards and offers to babysit and your lawn would get mowed. And it would just happen because other people would say, “We have to support this family.”

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: But if you come out and say, “My child has crippling anxiety or depression,” or, “My child’s ADHD is not manageable right now,” there’s almost like a silence that happens instead of casserole and gift cards showing up. So, we have to remember that kids are part of the mental health conversation like adults, and as much as we can, we have to talk about mental health the way we would think about and talk about and support physical health.

AMY GALLO: Yep.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: There’s a lot of great resources of how to do that well. We have one at onoursleeves.org. It’s the do’s and don’ts of talking about mental health. One of the tips is to use person first language. So, my child has depression, not my child is depressed. And that’s an important shift in the way we speak about this because it allows everybody to acknowledge that this is happening to the child and that it is not a part of the child’s character or personality or who they are.

AMY GALLO: Right.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: And to bring this back around to the workplace, we want to encourage leaders, one, to assume that there are some latent child mental health concerns going on with employees basically across the board and that they might be the last to know. And then two, to bravely step into that conversation first and not expect the employees to raise their hands and say, “I’m having a difficult time focusing because my child’s school is calling three times a day about class disruptions.”

AMY GALLO: Right.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: We’re asking the employers to step into that space proactively from a leadership level to set the stage that this is safe to discuss because if we don’t do that, we’re missing out on our ability to harness the power of corporate America to solve this problem.

ERICA TRUXLER: Yes.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: We will never have enough therapists to solve this problem with one-on-one treatment sessions. There just will never be enough. I mean, we have a quote from the president of the APA in March of this year who declared that in a global session. But with briefer models of treatment, meaning fewer sessions or prevention programs like the education that comes from groups on our sleeves, we can start to mitigate the need for such intense treatment if we can start to reach these children and meet their needs much sooner. And who better to help reach out to and support parents than the employer who not only is giving them their sustenance in terms of their financial support, but is also in many, many cases connected to their health insurance and benefits?

AMY GALLO: Yes. Right.

ERICA TRUXLER: Yeah. I’d love to hear more about, let’s say you’re going through this right now. You’re trying to get a diagnosis for your child. Do you have recommendations for how to speak to your manager? What do you recommend in terms of an opening for that conversation?

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Well, every family is different, every situation is different, and of course every workplace culture is different. One of the things that is very true in the workplace is that the policy and the culture may or may not align. So, the policy may say you have flexibility as long as it’s known more than two hours in a day to do whatever you might need to do and the company doesn’t need to know about it. The culture may tell you that if you try to leave early or come late or flex that at lunchtime, that you’re going to get questioned or questioning look or something like that. So, I think the first piece is to take stock of, where is my team and my direct manager on this culture piece? What really is the culture?

AMY GALLO: Right.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Has my boss ever mentioned therapy or a therapist or counseling in anything? Or does anyone on my team talk about that? And then also assess your own personal comfort with disclosure. We heard very strongly in both studies that there is sensitivity around disclosing this for two reasons. One, it feels like a reflection on the parent.

ERICA TRUXLER: Right.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: And the second thing is my child’s privacy. I don’t necessarily want other people to get an idea of my kid as one way or another. So, I think it’s assessing the culture, assessing comfort level, asking yourself also some counterbalancing questions like, Would I be hesitating if this was a physical illness?

AMY GALLO: Right.

ERICA TRUXLER: Exactly.

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

ERICA TRUXLER: Even just creating that trust with a manager and being open and honest about what you’re going through, I feel like only can help ultimately, but it’s really difficult to do. And I think there’s sometimes you catch yourself saying something you wish you didn’t say. And I’m curious if you have any almost mistakes to avoid or what not to say in these conversations or anything that you would be more hesitant to convey right off the bat.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Sometimes when we’re in distress, we overshare because we are off guard a little bit. So, I think watching that tendency is important. But I do think it’s okay to say, “My child has been diagnosed with XYZ. My child has XYZ, and I am supporting him or her or them.” Hopefully, you can then expect the employer to say, “Okay, now how can we support you?” And that’s the goal. The anonymous email to my boss that we included in the ripple effect report was very clear, the woman’s POV was, “You support me so I can support them and then I can turn around and bring my best to work.” And I thought that was so powerfully communicated in that piece.

AMY GALLO: The anonymous email that Marti just referred to really does embody the fact that mothers managing their child’s mental health are giving work everything they can under the difficult circumstances they’re in. And I wish I’d asked Marti to read it while we were speaking, but I’ll just read from it now before we go to an ad break, and then we’ll get back into the conversation with her. “Dear employer, I wish you knew what a heavy load I carry right now as a working mom of two young kids. Life is completely unpredictable and the kids need me constantly, which is a huge drain on my time and my sanity. Please know that I am doing my best. I try to bring my whole self to work every day. And if for some reason I can’t do that or have to be away, please check in with me to see how I’m doing and ask how you can help. Don’t hear me say that I’m drowning in work and life and throw me more. Let’s instead talk about a reasonable workload that allows me to be there for my family and all of their needs. Please allow for time off for unexpected emergencies that doesn’t take away from our hard-earned vacation time pool. Allow for generous definitions of what sick time could mean. Be flexible with calls from office waiting rooms, calls in the car, and kid noise in the background. Support the employee and allow us to support our families so that we can in turn give more of ourselves in full to everything we do, including work.” Okay, that’s the email. We’ll be right back. I had a colleague tell me that they were sorting out a developmental issue with their child and therefore their schedule was going to be unpredictable for the next few months. And I thought that was an interesting way to share it. I think truly she didn’t know yet what kind of support she would need, but at the moment what she needed was grace from her team. And I’ll admit, I was curious, I wanted to ask more questions. I didn’t, I respected her privacy, but it was specific enough that I knew what she needed. And it also I think protected her child’s privacy, which as you say, is important. Her child’s young. I have a dear friend who has a teenager, who has some mental health issues, and there was a crisis that occurred and I didn’t hear from her for a few days, which is very odd. When she finally reached out, she just said, “This is not my story to tell, but what you need to know is I’m supporting him right now.” And this is someone who I know so well. I was like, “Why aren’t you telling me?” And she just was very clear like, “It’s his story to tell, not mine. So, I really wanted to respect that.” And I do think it’s different if we are the one who has the issue and then we get to make the choice. It’s another layer of decision making to decide whether to share the story or the details. And I think the caution to not overshare is an important one because I think for… I know Erica and I are both oversharers and I think that would be our instinct, especially in a crisis moment.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: When we first started investigating the overlap between children’s mental health and the workplace, there was an executive level meeting among the funding partners and somebody just asked the question in an executive boardroom around a mahogany table, “How many of you in this room have been affected by an issue related to child’s mental health close to you?” And eight out of 10 hands went up. That’s no detail, that’s no privacy breakdown, but it is solidarity and it is the realization that this is one of those topics similar to things like infertility that we don’t talk about. And then once somebody breaks open the topic, the flood comes out of, we went through that too, my sister’s going through that, I’ve heard of that. I think that it’s a stigma, the cap of which I hope is about to come off, but maybe it stops short of like you said, sharing someone else’s story per se.

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

ERICA TRUXLER: Yeah. I have a number of friends right now going through just the initial diagnoses, trying to get therapists, trying to find support for their children. Of course these places are only open during work hours, so they’re trying to find the time to call in between meetings. And the reality of that is just so difficult. And I’m wondering if there’s really any advice or anything that you would want to say to these people who are really trying to get hope for their children and are struggling with trying to fit that into their work life right now?

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: I think it comes down to the word I might hate the most when it comes to talking about moms and work, which is juggling. But I think there’s a tendency to think, I have to hide that I’m making this call right now. And in some workplaces you truly might have to. I think that’s why so many people changed or adjusted jobs in the last two years and cited this as one of the reasons. We had one specific respondent tell us that they got chastised for taking a call in the middle of the day related to their child’s mental health, and they made a job change.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. Are there employers who have implemented policies that assist parents with finding the professional help or giving them the space they need? What I would love to share with our listeners are the employers who are actually doing these things right or at least moving in the right direction. Do you have examples of those?

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Personally, at On Our Sleeves, we have five corporate partners who’ve leaned in with us on this initiative in particular. They have helped us by piloting the digital resources that we created for working parents to educate these parents on child mental health, and they let us collect pre and post data on the pilots. What we see is that we are able to move the needle on parental confidence with these courses. I came out feeling more confident that I can handle a mental health issue or question from my child than I went in.

AMY GALLO: That’s incredible.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: They are not just for parents, they’re for any caregiver or anyone trying to relate to a child. They are a series of short videos and micro courses on a digital platform that you can interact with, answer some questions about the child in your life and your own self as a caregiver, and then be directed to either a set of courses that we call Flourish, which are for families and children where things are basically developing normally, but you might want to build some proactive skills to meet stress and mental health challenges. So, these are things like practicing mindfulness or building a gratitude habit into your day to day. Then we have a set of courses that the system might direct you to for manage. If you have a mental health diagnosis for a kid in your life, this is where you’d find that course on how to balance work and therapy and videos on specific conditions. And then at the end there is a short module for if you have a child you believe to be approaching crisis. in that particular module, we partnered with the Center for Suicide Prevention and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. And it’s so critical that a parent who’s wavering on the edge of that concern here directly to the camera from a doctor asking your child if they’re having thoughts of harming themselves or committing suicide does not give the child that idea. That is an old-fashioned stigma myth that we have to get rid of. So, the Protect module inside the Bloom course, it’s short and succinct, but it’s clear and it has next steps for parents who are concerned. We run all of this on a digital platform that we maintain access to so that no parent will ever be in a position of their employer finding out they watched the Protect course three times last week. So, we’ve piloted the courses with Nationwide Insurance, the funding partner of the research studies, also national retailers like Big Lots, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Homage. And then we piloted it here at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, the hospital that’s associated with On Our Sleeves from a behavioral health standpoint.

AMY GALLO: Are these courses available to any employer who wants to offer them?

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: They are actually. So, you can go to onoursleeves.org and fill out an interest form and then we’ll work with you to get it set up. If you are a small business with fewer than a hundred employees or a nonprofit with fewer than a thousand employees, we can offer it to you for free. Thanks to the funding from our partners. If you’re bigger organizations than that, we do have a sponsor agreement and a fee exchange that will ask for in order to help keep the course free for those smaller groups. We really hope that this is something that can change the trajectory for families of being concerned, staying silent, making a job decision based on this without talking to anyone about it.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. And what I really like about the model of having employers offer these resources is that it shows that employers know this isn’t an issue, and it reduces the stigma and it reaches a lot of people who probably wouldn’t necessarily find the resources on their own.

ERICA TRUXLER: One thing I wanted to go back to, Marti, is sometimes you do reach a point of crisis, you do reach a point where you feel like, as a mother, you need to be home with your child. And I’d love to hear if you have advice for someone who might be going through that right now, literally sitting at her desk, maybe listening to this and saying, “I’ve been wrestling with this for months, even years. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do. Do I keep working? Do I give it up?” That is such a loaded, huge question and I think one that no matter where you are in motherhood, comes up. And I’m wondering if you have any advice to give to someone who might be going through that right now.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: One thing that I have personally seen is that there may be more opportunity to stay in the role and get flexibility than you quite realize. So it’s hard in a moment of crisis to take a step back and use all of your reasoning abilities, but a conversation at your employer’s HR or wellness office or team could help you find out that there’s a way to take time off, take a partially paid leave, whether that’s under short-term disability or some other benefit. I think also, you also have to consider, as a caregiver, your own mental health. And I think this is something that is critical and often overlooked, especially by mothers. I will share a personal anecdote here. When my daughter was six years old, we received a pretty difficult diagnosis as it relates to behavioral health. See, even I as the executive director of On Our Sleeves, I am not going to blurt out what that diagnosis was, but it was upsetting to me. And then I confided in a friend and the first thing she did was validate that this can be upsetting. So, that was huge for me. And the second thing out of her mouth was, “You’ve got to get to a yoga studio or get a gym pass or get yourself some kind of self-care routine going.” Of course my thought was, “You have to be kidding me. My world just blew up and now I have to do all these other things to help my child, and you want me to invest multiple hours a week in myself?”

AMY GALLO: Yeah. And maybe money, right?

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: And maybe money. But she was so insistent about it and she said, “You are a good mom. You are now aware of the problem. You are going to work your tail off to get your child what they need. They’re going to get what they need. It’s going to happen. It won’t be tomorrow. It won’t be easy. It probably won’t be cheap, but it’s going to happen. You however cannot go down in the process.” And I really appreciated that. And I think that is so critical and it can feel very out of left field when you’re trying to solve something for your child, but I cannot reiterate enough how crucial that is. And acknowledge the emotional rollercoaster that may come along with all of this.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. One of the things I think to keep in mind too is that things will change. You don’t know which direction they’ll change and you don’t know how they’ll change, but things will change with your child’s situation, with you and with your employer too. Right? The other thing I think a lot of us get trapped in is thinking that, I have to be the best mom, I have to be the best employee, I have to be the best spouse, because maybe my partner is also struggling with this. And it’s okay to not be the best in all those roles at all time. I can’t tell you how many friends I’ve counseled of saying, “Trust me, you’re 50% at work is better than a lot of people’s hundred. Just keep doing what you can do and focus where you need to focus. This will change. Either you’ll be able to give more later or you won’t, and you’ll make the decision to leave, but just remember to be easy on yourself.” None of us are perfect in all these roles all the time. In fact, none of us are perfect in these roles any of the time. We’re just doing the best we can.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: I love that notion because prior to coming to On Our Sleeves, I ran a consultancy called Apparently, and we were focused entirely on helping employers support working parents. And we were doing that in two ways. One, we were encouraging employees to take a look at those standards and expectations they had of themselves and where could they make a conscious decision to dial something back. I think that’s always better than an unconscious realization that you’ve dialed back and you didn’t mean to, or that wasn’t where you would’ve dialed back had you thought it through. But also, asking employers to really take a look at load balancing. I think we are chronically understaffed in many, many, many teams and industries. And it hit me earlier this year, I read a story in The New York Times about the preview week for Music Man when it opened with Hugh Jackman, preview week being critical of course with the reviewers in the audience and everything. And half the cast got COVID. Well, guess what? They opened anyway.

AMY GALLO: The show went on.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: The show went on with understudies and swings. So, people who found out that day, You’re in the lead role, you’re in the second. So, at the curtain call, he stepped forward to all the critics and said, “I don’t know if you know this, but this cast came together in the last six hours, because we had to.” But guess what? They were ready to do that.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. This metaphor of, work will get done. There will be people who can show up or there won’t, or things will get delayed. Some client might be unhappy, but there’s likely to be another client. The show will go on. And maybe that’s the mantra.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Yeah.

AMY GALLO: If I have to call in sick today because I have to deal with my child and be available to my child or take my child to an appointment, the show will go on.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Yes.

AMY GALLO: And at some point, maybe the show becomes too difficult to manage and then we make other choices like taking a temporary leave or maybe making the very tough decision to leave your job, but it’s okay if it’s not great leading up to that.

ERICA TRUXLER: Yeah.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: And for the managers, just to finish out the Broadway analogy, could your team keep the show going, whatever the show is for you, if even one person went out with COVID, let alone half? Because I feel that we have put ourselves in a position of being strung so tightly. I mean, honestly, if a one-hour appointment is going to make that big of a difference across a team of workers, it seems like a bigger issue.

AMY GALLO: Yes.

ERICA TRUXLER: Truly.

AMY GALLO: Well, and also for managers to think of contingency plans, when we’re talking about someone needing to take a day off, an hour off, maybe they need to take a few months off. Are you equipped to help them do that and keep the show going? That’s a really important question, I think, for managers to consider. That of course doesn’t address the stress that parents feel because it’s not just about missing work or taking a leave, but it’s even about showing up to your meeting unprepared because you had to spend your hour calling therapists, or you had to take a call from your child’s provider or school like you said. So, there’s that stress of not doing what you want to be doing in your job. Any further advice for parents in that regard?

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: When I first started my business to help working parents, I heard a lot of working moms say, “I’m just half-assing everything.”

AMY GALLO: Erica and I are smiling.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Well, I started thinking, okay, so what’s the opposite of that? I mean, you can’t whole-ass something, but what is the opposite? I felt like the travesty was, I wasn’t giving my most creative ideas at work and I wasn’t giving my most patient responses at home because nobody was getting the best of me, and how much sort latent potential was being missed because so many women were feeling that they could only give percentages instead of all. So, while I understand the desire to lower the expectations and lower the stress, I also think we have to find ways to support women, mothers especially, so that they can show up and give their full potential in a certain meeting or a certain moment.

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

ERICA TRUXLER: Marti, do you have any advice if you do find yourself your productivity and focus declining or your performance slipping and you’re just feeling like you’re falling behind, which I know like you said is common? But is there anything that you should do or tell yourself to get through those moments?

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: I don’t know. That one’s a little tricky. I feel like we’re really not in the business of helping that level of nuance, I don’t think.

AMY GALLO: Well, and even talking to your boss, I imagine it would feel good for me to get ahead of it. So, rather than have my boss be like, “Wow, you’ve missed three meetings this week and you seem really distracted, what’s going on?” which would feel that would make my stomach hurt, my heart sink, but to get ahead of it and just say, “Just a heads up, there’s a lot going on at home this week. You may or may not notice I’m distracted, but just so you know, if something’s going to slip, I’ll give you a heads up.”

ERICA TRUXLER: Mm-hmm.

AMY GALLO: Sort of get ahead of it. Like Erica said, you do feel like everyone’s noticing that you’re messing up. My guess is, half the time they’re not noticing. I remember I actually was really consumed with something going on with my teenage daughter actually for a podcast interview. And I told Amanda, our producer, afterwards, I was like, “I’m so distracted, I’m so sorry.” She’s like, “You sounded great.” And I listened to it, I was like, “Oh, I did sound pretty good.”

ERICA TRUXLER: You’re so aware.

AMY GALLO: You have to remember the experience you’re having is not the same that everyone else is seeing.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Right.

AMY GALLO: One of the things I’m thinking about, Erica and I are longtime colleagues but also friends and have supported each other through some of these times, so it’s funny to be talking with her about this because I think one of the resources we haven’t mentioned is your peers. We’re talking a lot about what managers can do, what leaders can do. And we know your study found that even though adults believed that talking about their child’s mental health with another adult would be helpful, only 30% of them said they’d feel comfortable doing that with someone in HR and only 39% said the same for their boss. But I know from my experience, I do feel comfortable talking to my peers and to my friends at work. And I’m also thinking about people who are in shift jobs who can’t take an hour off because they’re going to lose money or they’re lose the whole shift. But if you have a friend at work who you can confide in and say, “Hey, this is a really stressful time for my family. I have this unpredictable schedule. Is it possible for you to cover for me when I need to either take my shift or to handle this meeting? Or can you give me the cliff notes on that meeting so I’m ready for my next one? Because I had to miss that for a phone call.” I do think that there’s peers that can help us in these scenarios.

ERICA TRUXLER: Yeah, even just to get a confidence boost. I know I’ve talked to you, Amy, multiple times and I’ve gone through things and just need someone to be like, “You’re doing a good job.” And just getting that validation in those moments is really important. And reality checks too, because I think, like you said, Marti, moms are so hard on themselves and the vulnerability you always feel, or you feel like all eyes are on you when in reality they’re not, but you feel that way. So, having someone like a peer or a coworker validate or even say, “You did that really well,” or after a meeting, “You made a really good point,” I think is absolutely valuable.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Yeah. I think there’s something so powerful about activating peers and doing it ahead of time. Because if you were really, really in a pinch, you got stuck in a traffic jam and your child had to be picked up by six, I bet you could name three people you could call, or vice versa. You can’t leave home, but the meeting is starting in 10 minutes, who would you call? And then back up and say, “Well, let’s not get to the pinch.” Let’s talk to each other proactively about taking things off of each other or supporting each other, looking for places and people who are doing the same things you’re doing, looking for people who understand your position in the organization and how to give you the right three things that came out of that meeting.

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: I also think we should be doing a better job post-COVID at documenting decisions made in meetings and setting up agendas so that people don’t feel that they have to be in the meeting the entire 60 minutes.

ERICA TRUXLER: Mm-hmm.

AMY GALLO: Well, that also gets to the point you made about managers and asking like, “Are you doing things on your team so that if people need to take time off for whatever reason it is, are able to keep up, able to do their jobs?” Do we have substitutes or understudies? We’ve talked about that previously on the show, like we would all love an understudy for our job. So, if we had to take an afternoon off to help our child through a crisis, we could do that.

ERICA TRUXLER: Mm-hmm.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: If you get ready to take time off and you’re putting together your automatic out-of-office reply and you don’t have somebody you can put in there as, if you needed an assistance, get in touch with this person, or if it’s somebody who would only be able to answer one or two cursory questions and couldn’t actually cover or fill in, that’s a problem.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. And that’s not just a problem for you, that’s a problem for your manager.

ERICA TRUXLER: Yeah. Marti, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to talk with us today. This is a topic that I personally, given how many friends have come to me and talked to me about these issues, I’ve just felt this pressing need to validate and put out into the world. And you coming here has really helped do that, so thank you so much. And I’d love to end with concrete resources that people can really go to whether or not they’re going through something like this or they have someone in their life who is, or an employee, or a coworker. Is there anything that you would recommend?

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Absolutely. Thanks for the open dialogue on this. It is a tough one, isn’t it?

AMY GALLO: Yeah.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: At onoursleeves.org, we have free resources around a variety of topics. Some that are really important right now and parents are eating up are articles like How to Talk to Your Kids About Politics or How to Talk to Your Kids About Current Events kinds of resources. We have resources on dealing with divorce and separation. We have a weekly email newsletter that comes out with a tip about something to try that could be a gratitude practice. It could be the upcoming kindness challenge we’re going to do around World Kindness Day. We also have resources about the do’s and don’ts when talking about mental health. You can even find an area at onoursleeves.org where we’re specifically talking about these workplace studies and the workplace courses that I mentioned, which are called Bloom. You can get in touch with us that way if you’re interested in any more of this.

AMY GALLO: Yeah. I’m thinking about people who want to access those resources, and I just want to wrap up by saying, even if you don’t have a child who’s currently struggling with a mental health issue, it could be that that is in your future or it could be a friend that you need to support, an employee you need to support. It even could be like your neighbor’s kid who comes to you and you need to figure out how to respond. So, I’m thinking those resources are for everyone, not just the mom who’s listening who’s in this crisis at the moment, but as you have made clear, we are all affected by this crisis and by the current circumstances and I think we could all benefit from what you’re sharing. So, thank you.

MARTI BLEDSOE POST: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

ERICA TRUXLER: Thank you so much.

AMY GALLO: That’s our show. I’m Amy Gallo.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And I’m Amy Bernstein. We put the free resources that Marti mentioned in the show notes, and you’ll find more advice for being or supporting a working parent on hbr.org.

AMY GALLO: HBR has more podcasts to help you manage yourself, your team, and your organization. Find them at hbr.org/podcasts, or search HBR in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Women at Work‘s editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoch, Tina Tobey Mack, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates. Robin Moore composed this theme music.

AMY GALLO: Thanks for listening. Email us anytime at womenatwork@hbr.org.