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We will need you to download an app for the school dismissal system. Please tell us how you will be getting your child to school! Here is the new driving map, which has changed from last year. If your license plate starts with the letters A through K, your new drop-off line for cars now goes behind the school and across the tennis courts. If your license plate has odd numbers, we would like you to wait on the football field. Please don’t drive too hard, we need to maintain a pristine field! Even when it’s a parking lot. Please do not drive across the basketball court as we are re-paving it and your car will probably get stuck in the fresh asphalt!

If you are sending your child on the bus, we have good news! We have enough bus drivers this year for at least half of your children! The bus will pick up your child as long as you figure out how to log into the app. This can take up to ten minutes. Do remember what color bus your child is on. **This is important.** But please also be prepared to drive them to school if we don’t have enough bus drivers! If there are no more bus drivers available that morning, you will be driving your child to school! We recommend never scheduling any meetings before 10 a.m. for ease of the drop-off transition.

Please encourage your older children to walk to school! That way we can reduce the number of cars on the tennis courts, and save space on the buses! But please be careful, as there are no sidewalks, so please teach your children how to walk in the road safely. We recommend you walk them to school wearing brightly colored vests!

Oh also, there are a few more apps you’ll need to download for music, gym, library, technology, and the use of the printer! None of the apps work together, and they are all rated 2-stars or fewer and frequently crash because we have no budget, sorry about that! Please also note that your child is limited to one sheet of paper per day!  

As you get adjusted to back-to-school systems, do note that we operate on a week that is six days long, and doesn’t match any other calendar you use! You’ll need to log into the school website so you know what day of the week it is!

Your elementary children who are ages five to seven years old can arrive at school between 8:20 a.m. and 8:35 a.m. but cannot arrive earlier than 8:15 a.m. For those of you with siblings, please note that any elementary children who are eight years and older can only arrive at school between 8:35 a.m. and 8:50 a.m. Please have them walk to school on their own if they can! But do not form a crowd outside the school for too long. Also, the staggered start is good for children! You will now get to spend an hour each day getting two children to school, which should be great quality time.

On the days that school is dismissed early at 10:45 a.m., you will get to spend two hours driving for two hours of classroom time. Don’t worry, we will feed them a snack, but please remember there is no lunch on early dismissal days! Enjoy your coffee hour And speaking of lunches, your child will get a five-digit code to access the school lunch system. Please have them memorize this code and practice punching it in.

Don’t lose the piece of paper your child came home with! It is a very tiny slip of paper, because we used one piece of paper to print them all. On this slip of paper is your secret QR code for the app. Which app? That’s a mystery, because we didn't have enough space to put it on the paper! Check your email for the instructions! They are inside of a PDF attachment on the last page! It is not searchable, so good luck! Please note that if you lose it, we can’t print it, because we only use fax machines. 

One last thing, we also need you to bring in six boxes of Kleenex, four cartons of water, and the entire aisle of school supplies from Walgreens. We also need a framed photograph of your family for your child’s cubby. And please label everything that is not permanently attached to your child! You can also label your child! If you’d like to get tattoos made of your QR code, you can apply them to your child each week. They can use them in the lunch line if they forget their unique ID number.

Good luck everyone! We’re so excited to teach your child! And don’t forget that school gets out at 2:20 p.m. for the small children and 3:05 p.m. for the older children, except Wednesdays, when school gets out at 1:40 p.m. for everyone, and we will be sending out a new driving map for Wednesday’s special pickup routine when every parent arrives at school at the same time!

PS: The PTSA will be reaching out next week with our fundraisers and to get all of you onto a volunteer slot!

PPS: Don’t forget that Spirit Week is coming up!

— Sarah Peck

I hope you all are surviving the back-to-school era. It’s a crush of paperwork and forms and schedules and tiny details. I posted a shorter version of this on my LinkedIn page, and a teacher wrote back, “I'm a teacher and I'd like you to know that I have no idea where the piece of paper is either.” and I about died with laughter.

Please know this: I love teachers. And school. And childcare. The teachers work SO HARD. The budget is not enough. I am happy to bring the entire aisle of school supplies for you, and scavenge the free websites for new classroom bookshelves or containers. Thank you for all the work you do.

It’s the chaos of all of it that is mind-boggling. I know you get it.

I’ve met all kinds of founders—solo indie builders, authors growing speaking platforms, friends launching coffee shops with babies in tow. Some are bootstrapping, some are on their third venture; others are pivoting or responding to a fast-changing market. Many are scaling…

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Here are the six steps I use to get writing done with children around—it’s so simple and easy!

Step 1: Wake up around 5am or 6am, depending on when the children wake up. Try to wake up before them. Creep down the hallway. Why are the wooden floors so loud? They are rustling. You freeze. Do not wake the children.

Step 2: Acquire coffee.

Step 3: Try to write through depression and discouragement. Your eyes are tired. You drink water. Wonder what you should write about.

Step 4: Read the news.

Damnit. DO NOT READ THE NEWS.

Step 5: Six words. Now ten. Maybe an idea. Is this working? You decide to write a post about how working parents are doing right now. But will posting regularly make it seem like everything is fine—everything is just as usual?

NOW YOU WORRY, WILL EVERYONE THINK THAT WORKING PARENTS ARE DOING FINE RIGHT NOW?

Worry about the existential angst.

Begin writing a post that says “Working parents are not okay.”‘

Delete sentences because no one is okay. There isn’t really a comparison game to be played here. Try again. New post: "Someone please take my children. Anyone, take them?" 

Delete that, too, because someone might take that literally and or report you to the authorities and you love your children, you just need a 24-hour break, and one day to sleep in. Although, to be honest, sleeping in sounds like a fantasy—could you even do it anymore if you had the chance?

The bedroom door bursts open and the stampede of children’s feet come racing down the hall. Your heart leaps in panic as you realize your time is now done. They run to the living room. They’re doing okay. You exhale. Maybe you can keep going.

Step 6: Go back and count previous steps, because you forgot where you are.

Step 7: Call your friend who is ALSO awake this early with children—you realize that you’re having trouble stringing words together. Hang up the telephone because both of your children and pushing buttons on the phone and you can’t actually have a real conversation while children and buttons are in close proximity. What was it that your friend said right before you hung up? Oh yeah: WHY DOES OPENING MY COMPUTER EQUAL A PAVLOVIAN RESPONSE FROM MY CHILD?

Step 8: Try to disentangle children wrapped around your legs. Realize they need to be fed.

Step 9: Have one child scoop the coffee for you (yes, the second coffee). They should be fine playing with the grounds, right? Right? What are they LICKING? For effs... FML.

Step 10: Create breakfasts for children. String cheese and apples it is. Put them at the table. They are sitting at the table. They are sitting on the table. They are on the table. They are standing on the table. Ask yourself if you really care—can you write an email from the kitchen while watching them?

But you also wonder if a one year-old falling off a table would be bad enough to go to the ER. You do not want to go to the ER. So you walk to the table. Say “Sit down please,” at least twelve times. Sit at the table with them. They scream at you that you're touching them. You're too close. "GO AWAY MOM STOP TOUCHING ME"

What were you doing?

Step 11: What were you doing?

You decide to take selfies to accompany the post. People like posts better with images of faces, or something like that. Now you'’re on your phone. Realize half the selfies you took your eyes were closed. Do you post the eyes closed version?

Step 11,458: It is now 1:08pm.

You have spent the last six hours writing a handful of paragraphs in between the constant stream of tiny—but very loud—demands. The three-year-old had a meltdown because the apple was too red. The one-year-old gleefully crushed the banana between his fingers and ran shrieking down the hall with banana mush covering everything. You changed them. You are now exhausted. The children are now in their beds. They are supposed to be napping. You open your laptop. You are writing.

What are you writing? You don’t know. 

It is now 1:38pm.

You also need a nap.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

Learning isn’t always pretty. In the moment, growth can feel a lot more more like chaos or failure. But the truth is, you are gaining skills so rapidly you don’t have time to catalog your own transformation. Plus, you’re too tired to pause or think. Yet through trial and error, through sleep deprivation and tears, and through those thousands of hours of bouncing and sweating and swearing, you’re undergoing massive growth.

Here are just some of the tools and skills you learn through parenting.

Parenting is a time of deep transformation, but we don’t publicly celebrate the growth you undergo when you become a parent.

The ability to tape, glue, or MacGyver your way out of nearly anything. Yes, my child's current puffer jacket has been reinforced with duct tape.

The superbly developed, pressure-tested skill of ultra-creative negotiation. Formed from years of dealing with unreasonable, fickle, tiny human beings, you know how to coax them to eat, bribe them out the door, dangle choice ideas in front of them, and even—gasp—get them off of devices. The forced choice, the psychological incentives, the dangling bribes: you can do it all. 

The ability to move and live within uncertainty. "I'm not sure when that's going to happen, sweetie. I can't tell you or promise that for you right now."

The need to be impeccable with your word, because if you make a promise to go to that amusement park tomorrow and you fail to keep that promise, YOU SHALL NOT PASS that exit on the highway ever again without hearing about it. You are forced to keep promises or you'll never let it down—eventually making you a stickler for precise language and much more cautious about making any hand-waving promises.

The ability to say no better than your last boss. Was it hard to say no before? It isn’t any more. That amusement park—NO. WE ARE NOT GOING TO THE PARK. STOP ASKING. Nope, no way, sorry kid. Now? Now you can say no to anything and everything. Don’t touch that. Stop that. Get off there. Put that down. No you cannot touch the stove. No you cannot climb on top of the car. We are not having candy for dinner.

The ability to empathize and understand so many people. "That looks like it hurts so much. You really didn't like it when your brother punched you in the face. I'm so sorry that happened to you."

The amount of stamina, resilience, and adaptability needed. So, real talk, I never realized that a 2-year old and a 4-year-old are like walking around with animated dumbbells, and that parenting was actually weighlifting, and that at the WORST times, I'd be carrying 75+ pounds of wiggly, defiant humans in both my arms while they tried to escape. When the 2-year-old dissolves in a puddle in the middle of the crosswalk and your 4-year-old is gazing at the birds, and the light changes color, you’re bending over with double backpacks on trying to scoop them up and carry them across before you all get hit by cars. Are they helpful? No.

The ability to put others before yourself. Oh you need to poop? Go ahead, I'll just cross my legs in a pee dance for the next twenty minutes. Or refer to adaptability, above, when you pee in your sink instead (I’m not telling) or you use an old coffee cup or the bathtub or … well, anything. CREATIVITY. THIS IS CREATIVITY. Yes, I bleached the sink afterwards. If you know, you know.

The skills of tending, befriending, and community building. You're going to see these parents everywhere—school, around town, after-care, and they're probably going to be in summer camp with you. You learn the range of skills required: tolerating people you dislike, making small talk on the daily, escaping the chatty ones, corralling them together for parties, kicking them out when you’re tired…

But there’s something bigger about all of these skills…

Parenting is mostly made invisible, so we don't recognize & celebrate any of this growth in public.

These are all leadership skills and CEO skills.

Everything listed above? These are also the skills that we need in leaders and CEOs.

• Empathy. Patience.
  Parenting expands your ability to understand other people, to weather the storm, to attend to internal and external emotional hurricanes, and it asks you to cultivate patience like none other.

• Clarity. Definition. Boundaries. Saying No.
  Parenting asks you to say no at least a million times. The reason it’s so hard sometimes is because it asks us to develop top-notch skills in setting boundaries, rules, and regulations for an entire family system and beyond.

• Flexibility and Adaptability.
  Nothing ever goes according to plan. That’s basically the job description of a CEO: make a plan, communicate it, and then herd all of these cats into the same direction towards the same goal—oh, just kidding, all the container ships in the world stopped working. GAME TIME: WHATCHA GONNA DO?

• Resilience and Stamina.
  Parenting asks you to steel yourself, be resilient, flexible, adaptable, clear, boundaried, and to dig into the depths of your abilities beyond what you thought possible. Parenting is more challenging than a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Jack Kornfield even said that you couldn’t hire a live-in Zen master that’s better than just trying to deal with kids. No joke.

Parenting teaches you to say no, to quit, to pivot, to resource yourself more fully, to persevere, and it demands that you create solutions in the times when you don't have the luxury of quitting or stopping. You have to learn on the job, every day, and you probably feel like you don’t know what you’re doing half the time.

“So, kids. You could not hire a live-in Zen master that was better, I tell you.” — Jack Kornfield

Parenting is mostly invisible, so this growth goes unrecognized or celebrated in public.

In Western cultures, most of parenting is made invisible. And in many cultures, mothers and caretakers are in the “private” sphere, more bound to the home, and then isolated from one another.

As a result, this type of skill-building is often invisible and unrecognized. That's why here Startup Parent, we want to remind you of all of these newly-acquired skills. Your journey in parenting is building you into the next-level leader our world needs.

We believe that parenting is an unrecognized leadership incubator for what the world needs next. Parenting is so much more than taking care of the kids in front of you. It's also building you into a next-level leader. It’s giving you the skills you'll need—the skills we all need—to be incredible leaders for the rest of our lives.

Over to you: What skills has parenting taught you? What life lessons, spiritual teachings, wisdom, or business savvy have you gained through all of this?

I'd love to hear what skills you're gaining in parenting.

Leave a comment below.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

"Tell me, what has parenting changed about the way you work?" I asked Jay Acunzo, dad to a 2-year-old and 4-year-old and the co-founder of Creator Kitchen.

He laughed. "The real question is, what hasn't changed?"

"For those of us that are hard chargers, people who like to take life on at a run, parenting is something else entirely,” he said.

We talked abo…

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Children are endless entropy.

Marie Kondo admits to giving up on tidying up now that she has three kids. See!? B…

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• The studio is very close to my house.

• In fact, it is only two blocks away.

• I even have a year-long membership there.

• Pre-paid, local, easy classes.

• They have cl…

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A parent races over while the rest of us adults hover around awkwardly, nervously anticipating the fallout. His face is red and angry. He looks equally mad and surprised, which makes sense—I too would be both furious and bewildered if my face was used as a brake against a nasty fall. But what happens next to the child is all too common.

“You’re okay,” the adult says. “Stand up, you’re okay, you’re okay.”

Even with affection and love, I see grown-ups head straight to their kiddos, pick them up, hold them, hug them, and then murmur into their ears, “you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.”

What do we mean when we rush to say “it’s okay” to our kids?

What is disconcerting about this phrase is that the kid may quite literally not be okay. They are bleeding, they are angry, they are hurt, and they are a whole swirl of emotions.

Yet in this bizarre contradiction, we tell the kid they are feeling the opposite of what’s actually going on. We don’t say “gosh, that looks like it hurts,” or “ow, that seems incredibly painful.” They might feel okay in the future, and things will likely get better, but the experience right at this exact moment? Pain, hurt, embarrassment, surprise, discomfort, frustration, or annoyance are some of the possible feelings.

It made me wonder why we’re using this phrase—“you’re okay”—with each other. In part, it feels soothing and safe, the warm arms of a parent holding you, letting you cry, and telling you that things are going to be alright. On the other hand, it seems as though it’s the parents that are uncomfortable, hurrying their kids along towards “better,” forgetting to sit with the emotions at present. Are we helping our kids or are we dismissing their lived experienced?

Why do caregivers so often use this phrase “you’re okay” as a knee jerk response?

Curious about why parents so often use this knee jerk “You’re okay” parental reaction, I reached out to clinical psychologist and emotional fitness expert Dr. Emily Anhalt to ask her perspective. She explained that both scenarios are likely possible, and it has to do with the relationship we have to our own feelings, as well as the relationship we have to the child.

According to Dr. Anhalt, in parenting psychology, attachment and attunement are ideas about the connective quality of the relationship between the kid and the adult. When someone is attuned to you, they understand and sense what’s going on, and can feel what it’s like to be in your skin. It’s a quality of emotional empathy where we connect to the person in front of us. 

An important part of attunement less talked about is that we also need to pay attention to what is going on inside of us—as the parent—in these moments. Recognizing and being more aware of what feelings we are having in the present moment will help us see both sets of feelings as distinct, instead of conflating our feelings with that of the child. Perhaps we are scared, but they are not scared. Perhaps we are not worried, but they are very worried.

“Sometimes it can be helpful to tell kids ‘you're okay’ as a reassurance that you've assessed the situation and they're safe,” Dr. Anhalt said, “although I also agree that when used too much it can invalidate their experience.”

“There can be a sense that as parents we are supposed to make tough emotions go away for our kids, but we don’t have to do that,” Dr. Anhalt explained. It’s more important to be with them, right there in that space, than try to “fix” what’s going on. One of the hardest things to do as a human being is be present with our own emotions, and as parents, we have double the job: to be there with our own experience, and to support and be there with our children as they go through the world, too.

“If you notice that you always race past the ‘feelings’ space with your kids, or you always want to make everything ‘okay' right away, that’s an important piece of feedback for yourself,” Dr. Anhalt said. “It might be a sign that you yourself weren’t given space to feel your feelings when you were younger. Were you allowed to feel sad or scared as a kid?” If you weren’t, then this might be brand-new for you, and the first step might be learning to become more comfortable with our own emotions.

Sometimes it’s actually us that’s uncomfortable—because for some reason or another, we’re not used to being around other people’s big emotions.

Sometimes when we aren’t uncomfortable with others’ emotions, it’s actually our own emotions about the situation that we’re uncomfortable with. Put in plain language, sometimes when other people are hurting or in pain (or happy!), it can be hard to be around. There are so many reasons why it can be hard to be around other people’s feelings, and yes, therapy can be important to figuring out the root causes. But before that, it can be helpful to get curious and ask, “When was I allowed to feel this feeling? What did I learn about this feeling or situation growing up?”

So at the playground, when the kid is screaming “I’m in pain,” our job as parents is to assess the situation, and to be there for the kid through the experience. Sometimes that might mean reassuring them that everything is okay, but often, it may mean spending time with them as they feel their feelings and process what’s happened.

And if we find ourselves tempted to reduce their emotional outburst, to “fix” them, to tell them to skip past what they’re feeling and go directly to “okay,” then that likely means there is work we must do to heal our own inner child.

So what do you say to a kid who just fell? Start by giving words to possible feelings.

So what do you say to a kid who has just fallen and is running towards you? Start by narrating their experience. “Oh goodness, you just took a big fall, didn’t you!” “That looks pretty painful, I bet it hurts right there on your knee and on your head. Does it hurt anywhere else?”

We’re making a best guess at what they might be feeling. “If you don’t know what their experience is, you can give words to these big feelings they may be experiencing and then ask if it’s true for them,” Dr. Anhalt said. For example, “I think you might be feeling hurt and angry, is that right? Is that true for you?”

Listen to what the kiddo says and what they say they need, too. Having a big feeling is a big deal, and humans need other people around to help us process and make sense of these emotions. As caregivers, part of our job is teaching our kids about their feelings and emotions, and helping them with the language to understand and describe the way they feel.

Of course, it is hard to see our children in pain. All I want to do is scoop my kids up and protect them when they are hurt! But if we race past the feelings of the moment and ignore what’s going on in the “right now”—the scraped knee—we might be teaching our kids to ignore the signals and sounds of their own bodies. Pain is not the enemy, and feelings are not meant to be erased. Therefore, it’s important, although certainly hard at times, to listen to our feelings and hear what they have to say. 

The next time my kid falls down, I hope I ask him how he’s feeling and what the experience was like for him. I also hope that I listen to him.

While it may seem easier to try and erase the pain with a cacophony of “You’re fine, you’re fine, it’s okay,” it’s not always the right phrase. Sometimes we need to be comforted, and sometimes we need to know that even when things are rough, we’re safe around our people.

Just as you do not wish to have your feelings trivialized, the same goes for our children. Being seen, validated, and supported by others can do wonders.

It’s okay to not be okay, too.

— Sarah Peck
CEO & Founder
Startup Parent

I had a hard day, I fell down, and right now I’m not okay. I will be—but right now, I need a good cry, a long shower, and then to sleep. We’ll try again tomorrow.

A FUTURE OF WORK TO BELIEVE IN

• At Startup Parent, we believe that parenting shouldn’t be at odds with work—and the insights from your parenting journey propels you as a leader that this world needs. We disrupt the myths of parenting to tell true stories of motherhood, fatherhood, and parenting today.

• The Startup Parent Podcast is an award-winning podcast ranked in the top 1% of podcasts globally. Join us as we interview parents about what the future of work, life, and leadership look like. Click here to add the show to your player.

• Are you already a fan of the podcast? Become a paid subscriber and get access to our exclusive bonus podcast, Ask Sarah, a show made just for our backers.

• If you're a working mom looking for a community that understands you, apply to join The Wise Women's Council, our leadership incubator for entrepreneurs, executives, and managers who are also moms. The program runs annually and we open for applications twice per year. Click here to apply.

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