I remember a night, already getting dark, when I pulled up to get my daughter from daycare. She was so happy to see me – and I was…tired. Exhausted, honestly. I had just spent a full day working with other people’s children, connecting with other people’s problems – and I stared at my own daughter, smiling joyfully at me, and started to bawl.

If I were honest, I had no desire at all to play with her. I just wish she would fall asleep so I could hold her sweet warmth peacefully – without any more demands on my energy. 

I went home, and still needed to cook dinner (while the child needed my attention), and do bath time (which the child didn’t want to do and then didn’t ever want to stop doing), and then get in pajamas (the child preferred nudity), and then go to bed (our nightly gauntlet that … well, sucked).

My husband was there, and a total equal partner in this. But he was tired, too. Also carrying the weight of a different but equally exhausting world. We were… not at our best. 

Burnout is not something that stays at work. The exhaustion may stem from work, but it bleeds into all areas. It robs us of the small joys that come from the lives we had always wanted, but aren’t able to fully live. It takes some of our humanity along with our patience and creativity and umph. 

At least, that’s what it did to me. 

And the worst part? I knew I was smack in the middle of burnout, but I had no idea – at all – how to get out of it, beyond quitting my job. Which was not an option this go-around.

Funny thing about adulthood and family. You gotta pay bills. And unless you’ve got a slam dunk talent or a trust fund (neither of which belong to me), then your best bet is a paycheck.

So, since quitting wasn’t an option – given student loans, and responsibilities, and appreciating the coziness of a roof over my head – I was stuck. For a while. 

Burnout is not for the weak.

When things are so bad, you’ll look for light wherever you can find it. And that’s what I started to do. 

Love of learning is my top character strength. This would have shocked my 6th grade math teacher, and most of my undergraduate professors, to be sure. But I digress.

I naturally try to understand WHY, about most things. So that question- WHY, followed by his brothers (where, when, who, what, how) – turned out to be the light for me. 

WHY did I feel so terrible? WHY was I numb and disconnected from my own, beloved family? WHY did I feel so discouraged about my work? WHY did nothing seem to be getting any better?

I started digging. I read all the superficial stuff on depression, and mom guilt, and burnout, and the patriarchy (which, I mean – is usually to blame these days, I guess), and getting organized, and self-care, and parenting. 

It all felt really generic. I’d heard it all before. Good advice, sure – go to bed early, keep a gratitude journal, get exercise, don’t take things too seriously. Gee, thanks. Now all of my problems are solved.

Burnout’s cynicism may have influenced my response, but regardless, I found the top layer of self-help and advice to be full of fluff and one step adjacent from completely useless.

I may or may not have written in a gratitude journal: “I’m grateful I don’t have to keep writing in this gratitude journal.”

I’m not suggesting I had the best attitude. Petulance is a trait I’ve honed since toddlerhood. 

I kept digging. I started asking questions I actually wanted to know the answers to – like, WHY does self-help suck so much? WHERE does depression actually come from, and HOW do we know it’s actually depression? WHO gets to say? 

And more questions – like WHY do we parent the way we do? And WHO made up the rules? WHERE did they come from?

And – WHY do we work the way we do? And WHAT’s different about work today than decades ago? And WHERE do the rules come from? HOW did we start to follow them?

I found my light – in fact, a whole damn spotlight I used to dig a tunnel so deep that the students I was mentoring at the time called it a meerkat burrow system because it was no longer one path, but an intersecting and unwieldy maze of connections I was making to all kinds of seemingly unrelated topics. 

Two things happened during this excavation:

1. Everything came tumbling right down. All that I had been taught about the foundations of our practice, and my marriage to science as Truth, and my belief in the “right” way to parent and support child development. Which was especially startling given that I was a child development expert. All of it collapsed. 
2. And – I dug myself right out of burnout.

You may be wondering – Katie, how can you lose everything you believed in, and also walk away from burnout? 

Life is so weird, friend. But it seems like it’s a common story – new is born when old dies. In fact, new requires the death of old, it seems. 

I needed a new way of viewing it all, but I couldn’t get that until the old way burned itself out. 

In my mind, I got really, really lucky. What I didn’t realize at the time is I was putting into practice the very thing that researchers say prevents (and cures) burnout – engagement. 

I talked about engagement the other day – it refers to feeling energized, being connected to those we’re working with, and feeling a sense of competence and productivity.

My personal plunge into learning energized and inspired me in ways I never expected. I was learning things that completely re-shaped how I viewed everything, and I felt I now had better frameworks to connect with and help people. 

Bizarrely, as I realized how much we actually don’t know, and fully appreciated that science is not Truth, but rather Process, I felt more competent and knowledgeable. And being on fire and excited lent itself naturally to productivity.

I haven’t stopped since, and I haven’t hit burnout again. I did ultimately quit my job, but not because I hated my work anymore – but because I knew I could not do the work I knew I  needed to do without going out on my own. 

I’m still seeing families – AND I’m connected to my own. And not because I’ve mixed the perfect cocktail of self-help advice of sleep and nutrition and gratitude and journaling and mediation and exercise and 24,589 other tips we should be doing. I’m sure blue light is in there somewhere. 

Those things are obviously helpful – but I am a person who values helping others. And as long as I was doing work that led me to question how well I was actually doing that – I was going to be mis-aligned and chronically trying too hard. 

Friend, our whole child development and parenting industry needs a refresh. We have been handed a bag of goods, developed with the very best of intentions. And, because we believe in the bag of goods we’ve been handed, we’re in an assembly line of people handing down the same bag of goods, maybe with some of our own ingredients thrown in. But the bag itself is woven from outdated and unproven ideas – and I’m afraid it’s perpetuating systemic problems. 

It’s a really big deal.

But instead of feeling desperate over it – I feel really, really excited. Because I think if we can begin discovering where things have gone wrong, we can begin to course-correct.

As early childhood specialists, we are at high-risk of burnout because we care so, so deeply about others. We believe in the goodness, dignity and inherent value in every single human being on the face of the Earth. 

And that’s why I have the most faith in us – we may have been handed a well-intentioned bag of goods, but we are the creative ones who can do something new and better with that bag.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in learning  more about, I invite you to sign up for my Friday notes. It’ll be the best way to keep in the loop on what’s happening next.