Single Parenting With A Plan

Single parenting can feel like you are carrying a whole household on your back and getting judged at the same time. We wanted to cut through the noise and talk about what actually helps, so we brought on Pat Hankin, author of The Field Guide for Single Parents: practical tips to gain control of your life. Pat combines lived experience with 40 plus years in financial services and a front row seat to an enormous parenting community, and she does not sugarcoat the reality: resources are often scarce, shame is everywhere, and “standard advice” frequently ignores context. 

We dig into the big pillars Pat organizes her work around: money, time, relationships, and fun. You will hear why common personal finance rules like “never go into debt” can be harmful for single moms and single dads dealing with peaks and valleys, job shifts, childcare gaps, and the high stakes need for reliable transportation. We also talk about budgeting in plain language, tracking what you spend without judgment, and making tradeoffs with your kids that reduce guilt and build resilience. Pat even challenges the pressure cooker expectations around vacations and offers a more realistic way to create memories without blowing up your budget. 

Then we move into time management for single parents, including how to “create time” by doing less, cutting low value tasks, and pulling kids into age appropriate responsibilities. From there, we expand the idea of a support system beyond close friends and family into “friendlies” and everyday allies, plus practical tips for partnering with teachers and advocating for learning differences without walking into meetings already on defense. We close by reclaiming fun as essential, not optional, and share simple routines that protect your mental health. 

If this resonates, subscribe for more conversations like this, share the episode with a parent who needs it.

You can find Pat HERE

https://pathankin.com

Transcript

Why Single Parenting Deserves Respect

SPEAKER_00 0:00

As single parents, people should take pride in the fact that they have to be creative, innovative, resourceful, collaborative. If you haven't had to try to negotiate with anybody, your toddler will teach you soon enough. And these are all incredible skills, not only that'll help you, it'll help your children, and it'll make you very desirable as an employee.

Mary 0:23

For centuries, the phrase shrinking violet was used to diminish women, to suggest we were meant to be small and meek. But in nature, violets are anything but weak. They're resilient, beautiful, and essential to the ecosystem. Hi, I'm Mary Rothwell, licensed therapist, and each week I sit down with women who remind us that being compared to a violet isn't an insult. It's a testament to strength, endurance, and the power of taking up space and living by your true nature. If you're ready to stop shrinking and start thriving, you're in the right place. Hey Violets, welcome to the show. I'm a Gen Xer. Believe it or not, I had one close friend growing up whose parents divorced. One. I remember when I learned of it, I didn't even know truly what it meant. In my child's mind, it was so far outside of my own realm of possibility, and I had no idea how my friend felt or even what to say to her. When I became a high school counselor, I started to recognize how common divorce, single parenting, and blended families were, and I had a ringside seat to the way those issues played out in the lives of students in my care. It was rare that I didn't have a parent actively try to mitigate the impact of marital issues on their kids. If anything, I knew of many parents who struggled to stay together, quote, for the kids, while those same kids would tell me how it felt for them to be in a living situation impacted by arguing and fighting, or almost worse, the frigid disconnection of a relationship that no longer had any type of intimacy. More than once I had a kid express the wish that their parents would just divorce so that the tension wouldn't be a constant state of existence. When working with adults who themselves are navigating relationship issues and separation, the guilt and sense of failure for those who are parents are woven into many of their decisions and indeed can create a barrier to the forward momentum of reassembling the pieces of their lives as a single parent and creating a stable foundation for their kids to move forward to. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 34% of kids in America live in a single parent household. 80 to 85% of those households, not surprisingly, are led by single moms. In the black and African American population, that percentage is 63%, and it is as low as 16% in the case of Asian parents. Resources for those navigating life as a single parent seem surprisingly scant, but today's guest is actively working to change that. Pat Hankin is the author of The Field Guide for Single Parents. She's a business professional and longtime voice in a parenting community of nearly half a million. Pat blends lived experience with practical expertise in finance, time management, and support systems to offer clear, actionable advice for solo parents navigating real life challenges. Welcome to No Shrinking Violets, Pat. Oh, thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here. And great intro. I'll take it. Thank you. Thank you.

Pat’s Lightbulb Moment And The Void

Mary 3:30

Okay, so knowing that you have listened to some of my episodes, I know that you start by my asking guests to tell me flashbulb moments. And those are things that stand out. When you look back over your life, it's like, oh, that was a thing that inspired what I do now, or that kind of informed this part of my life. So when you think about this what you decided to do when you decided to write this book and this work that you do with parents, do you can you think of moments from your life that maybe inspired you to hit that part of sort of the trail of life?

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Well, the the biggest impact was that I I was a single parent um almost from the get-go, and that um when the pandemic hit was coincided with when my daughter went off to university. And my business was winding down, as many pandemic businesses did. And for the first time in quarter century, I actually had time to breathe. Uh I I loved it, forced an activity, but that kind of doesn't last long for a person who's always been working or and raising a child. And I started poking around online and I found this 470,000-person community. I said, Oh, that's interesting. I've not had any time to look at social media my whole life. I'm gonna read this, and it uh defied everything that I had heard about social media. I found a community of people that were very authentic. Uh it because it's anonymous, people weren't having to put on some kind of curated image. There were people in this community, mostly women, because it is, like you said, 80% women, 20% men, all different kinds, families, wherever they were in the country, and for all different reasons. There was no one stereotype. So you have what we call in research is a representative sample of what's going on here. And I thought, well, I kept reading these things, like oh, oh, I know the answer to that. Oh, I gotta help. I can help, I can do that. I'm thinking, but you know, I don't know where to enter into this conversation. And so I emailed the mod moderators and I said, Look, I had professional online moderation experience. How would you like me to come help you? Never heard back from them. Not being a shrinking violet, I went and did it anyway. And what I did is first I I would police the community to make sure they were adhering to the rules, which is no soliciting and uh no no asking people out on dates, keep the creeps out. I would like to happily tell you there were very, very few incidences of of that. So that wasn't enough for me to do. And then I sort of tiptoed in and started answering questions. And two things came to me. One is that the feedback was was a hundred percent positive. I don't, I don't think I ever got a down vote in the three years I did this. It was it was welcome to have information from the other side. The other thing was that people didn't have the most basic information out there in terms of money, in terms of managing time, in terms of building a support team. And one person wrote, How do I read all this stuff about being a single parent? And being the person that I am, acquired data, I went and looked, and I was shocked. There was nothing. There was some celebrity memoirs, there were people talking about recovering from narcissistic abusive relationships, that was a common theme, but there was nothing that was fact-based and provided generally useful information to people. And since I was answering all these questions all the time, anyway, over and over, I decided to put it together along with some research and give people a book that they could use throughout their life. So that was my light bulb moment, was that one question.

Mary 7:49

No, I think that's great. And, you know, practical. I'm getting the sense you're a very practical person. Yes, that's my nickname, practical pack.

Redefining “Single Parent” Without Stereotypes

Mary 7:58

Okay. So here's what we kind of dipped our toe in before we hit record. And this is what I want to try to dissect a little bit. That when we say single parent, I would guess that everyone listening has a slightly different idea what that means. Because we could have a single parent because we have a young girl get pregnant, or we could have a single parent because of divorce, or we could have a single parent because a partner dies. I mean, there's so many ways to end up in that situation. Some people make the choice to be a single parent, and that may be through adoption, or that may be through a surrogate. So there isn't any one sort of profile of a single parent, which I would think would make it a little bit difficult to say, I'm gonna write a book.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

It is, and everybody out there attaches, because I did some some research into what were people, what what adjectives did they attach to single parenting? And everyone had a different viewpoint, you know, sad sack woman working a menial job in a motel kind of comes to mind. Um, always women, what happens to the guys? I mean, sometimes you have co-parenting and they're both maintaining separate households, and the guys get completely underrepresented and ignored in this and this topic. Um and so it what it came down to is what common issues does everyone or most people have, because not everybody, there might be very wealthy people that don't have the financial constraints. So to write the book, I had to target a particular image in my mind, and that is primarily the middle class people who have had a household, now split the household, they split the finances. There's people who became solo parents not knowing what it was really gonna cost financially. There are people who become widowed, but there are common themes, and that is a emotional theme that's common is a sense of loss. Nobody grows up saying, I'm gonna be a, I want to be a single parent. So there's a there's a loss of expectations and lifestyle or whatever. And being able to put that aside and work with someone like yourself on that is a good thing, but you also need actionable steps to start shoring yourself up. And the two most common things that single parents suffer from is internal vulnerability and external stresses. From there is where I I started to organize the book around that using four main topics that I could see in the community, which would be money, time, how to make more when you don't have any. That was fun. Relationships, that's your support system, the people around you, all the different people in your life, your kids, and and my favorite topic, which was having fun.

Mary 11:08

That's not something we would often think about with this. So let's let's explore each of them.

Money Advice With Real World Context

Mary 11:14

So the first one, which I think is uh opposite of fun, and anybody that's heard my um episodes where I talk to financial people, it's like money stresses me out. So let's start with money, because to me that's opposite of the fun part of the book. But so I know you've said something like conventional financial advice doesn't really work for single parents. What do you mean by that? And what do you feel like there's that anyone in any single parenting situation might have in common or might need to know?

SPEAKER_00 11:44

Sorry, the conventional financial advice for single parents doesn't work because it lacks context. My my favorite one is well, don't go into debt. And as a financial person, you'll be shocked to tell me it's like, I get it, you'll have to go into debt. You your lifestyle will have peaks and valleys, you'll have employed years, unemployed years, you'll have kids with high needs, then lesser needs, you'll have a job that requires you to commute a long distance, maybe not. To be able to say, don't go into debt, it really hamstrings people when and when they're forced to go borrow money to get through a certain period, it makes them feel terrible. And I'm here to kick that to the curb. Uh, I've been in financial services for over 40 years. And the last uh 10 years, I was there helping financial companies make their language more accessible to people. I think they do it to seem impressive. The fact is, people, it's all arithmetic. There's no high finance here. It is add, subtract, multiply, and divide. And uh, you know, an example of this will be a second example would be the issue around transportation. When everybody will say, no, go buy a good used car for cash. Well, if that poor sad used car breaks down, you can't get to work, you can't get your kids to school, you start getting tagged as unreliable, your stress levels start ratcheting up. How? If you can't afford to buy a car, a new car for cash, look into leasing. Now, I'm not talking about a giant SUV or a muscle car. I'm saying, you know, your basic transportation. And then if you don't have substitute transportation, then you're gonna have to do that if there's not a second car, if you don't live with a transit line or something like that. There's where I say go lease a car, and then somebody will say, Well, then you don't build equity in a car. Nobody builds equity in a car. It is a depreciating asset. So look at your budget, step back. Here's the context. You've got either a repair bill or you've got a car payment. Your budget's not gonna change. So I will, I'm an iconoclast. I can hear every financial advisor in the world who's never really thought more than 10 seconds about this, like scream. This is really our world, and we have to live within it, and it'll change in a year, five years, 10 years, wherever. So I am I am of the belief, and there's the probably the one that drives me nuts is this latte thing. Yeah, you're spending too much money, cut out your coffees. I really don't care about your lattes. If you gave me your budget, I wouldn't care about your lattes. I care about your goals. And I care about the big three, which is money, vacations, and education. I've had people come tell me that they buy one of those sad use cars, but they're taking their family to Disney World.

Mary 14:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:58

So those are your choices, but understand your choices and don't let somebody else tell you what works and what doesn't work.

Mary 15:04

Well, I think we have an instinct about what we need sometimes. And so we may really be trying to do what you say, like, oh, I can't go into debt. And so there's that additional stress. There's one of those external stressors, right? That we're buying into this idea of what we hear somebody say, or we have this fear. But what I love that I heard you say is things will change. So just because you're here now, it can feel like, oh my God, when is this gonna end? But it will end. And so I think having that belief that I need to do what I need to do now. And I also want to say this isn't licensed to like say woohoo, and pull out the credit card and start, you know, going, oh, she said the Pat, practical Pat said. Yes, you know, so I think it's finding that middle ground and trusting your instinct that if there's something that is hugely stressful, and that thing is transportation or worrying that I'm not going to be able to get to work, or there's this loop, or I have bald tires and winter is coming in my state of Pennsylvania. You know, those are practical things that I think to trust your own gut and to decide here's what I have to do for some peace of mind.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Right.

Budgets Tradeoffs And Guilt Proof Choices

SPEAKER_00 16:19

It's being planful as opposed to looking at your budget as a static item. And uh let's talk about the word budget and what that does for people. And I've I've interviewed people who have uh tens of millions of dollars in the bank, women who got it out of uh a divorce. So and we and I actually talk about one of these, the you know, it's like, well, if I've got money in my checking account, I'm just gonna spend it. Shame on me that I had that attitude. Well, first of all, I'm not gonna say shame. I'm gonna say that was a patidoo between you and whoever was putting the money in there. That that's pro that's not an issue. Um, but for you, the first thing you can do is write what we call purple sheets. And this is a Massachusetts terminology. And you write down everything you spent. I go to this with my my daughter's a young adult, and I say, okay, let's just write down. I don't don't don't show me it, just write it down. Here's the categories. You I trust, trust me, whatever you write down, I've seen worse. And so there's no judgment here. And now let's talk about what you're taking home. And if you're spending more than you're taking home, then we're gonna move some things around. Most people view a budget as an impingement on their personal freedom. That's a short trip to the poorhouse. This is your agency, these are your decisions, and you have the ability to control it. And um, I like the mantra, I can do hard things.

Mary 17:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:59

You've had some guests on the show who've done some pretty hard things.

Mary 18:02

Yes, for sure. So speaking of hard things, sometimes hard decisions, this idea of you know, the guilt of when you have children and you want to provide. And I mean, we can talk about a situation where maybe there was a divorce, and so now there's quite a different situation financially, and because people don't always pay child support. So, but if we're talking about that, and you know, I know from working with teenagers, there is that pressure to have things that other people have or be able to do things. So, how does someone navigate when we're talking about financial decisions? How do you sort of walk that line of allowing your kid? And here where I think we're getting into a little bit of fun, letting your kid have that fun, but also they obviously recognize there's a change that you are stressed about money. How do you suggest people might navigate that?

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Well, it's gonna depend on the age of the children, for sure. And there's probably another party involved, and you know, it's it's an ongoing dialogue about what's available and what the choices are. Yeah, you can have that fancy Xbox or whatever it is, but we're not going out to dinner for the next year. You know, so this is this is very hard at any age to understand, but you you can relate it to it. You know, I'm lucky I was born before the age of overconsumption.

Mary 19:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:38

I was born and dealt uh in a middle class family where everything was always tight, and um you know, so I had certain skills. I recognized that that's you know, completely got supplanted with, you know, China ink and cheap stuff and overconsumption and the dopamine hits. Being mindful of this is half the battle. And there are ways to talk about the trade-offs as you go along, and this this conversation never ends, right? You're having a conversation with yourself, with your children, and if there's a co-parent involved with them. And you know, keeping the emotion out of it and being pretty cold about it, you know, practical pet says is okay. You can you can do that. And the the biggest example I can put, we talk about the three biggest items in your budget, include vacation. And for some reason, this became you gotta take your kids to Disney World. Um, Disney was actually one of my clients for many years. I had no compunction to ever want to go to Disney World once I had a child, but you know, I understand the siren song of It's a Small World. It is 10% of the average family's budget in the year that you go. And it's probably even higher now since I've since I've looked. And if you ask a 10-year-old what he remembers about going to Disney World when he's seven, I asked one the other day. He said he remembered the the pool. And if we can pull ourselves back and say, I'm gonna save that giant vacation for when they're really gonna remember it, like when they're teenagers and they parkop, you're saving that on yourself, your kids, because the the memories aren't gonna be there.

Mary 21:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

And it's appealing because you don't have to plan anything and it's stressful, and you know, you they it's contained. You stay in the park, it's even better. You don't have to rent a car. But there are ways in terms of vacation. By the time my daughter went to college, we had been to 47 of the 50 states. And we did that all on my my greatly reduced salary uh in the days that you know we were in the high need parenting. And we started off by camping in our backyard and doing concentric circles, easing out. If you're not a person who's used to planning all these things, it's a great way to get your travel chops going is starting with your local parks. And kids similar to not remembering what they did at Disney World when they were 10, kids, you know, they don't do well with change. And you can talk about this. They like routine, they like the sameness, you know, young children. Throwing people into big changes, you know, like let's go hike the national parks when you're 15 and we've not done anything else before. Probably not a good idea. And the idea that you can slowly build those travel muscles, both for yourself and your family, it becomes a uh a growth experience over time.

Mary 22:47

Yeah, I think that's a great idea. And don't feel that urge that you have to do the thing like Disney. And I also love that you talk about choice, that if we do this thing, you want this thing, here's the value of it, and here is what it means for other things that you want. Because too often we do want to make our kids' lives comfortable. And then when they have to earn their own money, they realize, oh, like I don't have enough to keep doing these things. And so, you know, we really do a disservice when we try to make everything smooth and we try to give them everything they want. And I agree with you about my childhood. It was there wasn't anything like we did one trip of school shopping for clothing at the beginning of the year, that was it. And so there wasn't an option to have uncontrolled spending or to see something and be like, oh, I want that thing. And in the next five minutes, you have it because you ordered it from Amazon. So, you know, I think yeah, there's that's a big difference now.

Creating Time When You Have None

Mary 23:51

So the other thing that is a finite resource is time. Ah, my favorite. Yeah. So when you are truly the single parent and you're doing all the things, how does that work? What kind of advice or guidelines do you provide around that topic?

SPEAKER_00 24:10

The first thing I say is um, then we talk about how to create time when you have none, which sounds like a physical metaphysical topic, right? Uh, and this is actually gonna go along with what we just talked about in terms of you know trading off your decisions in your budget, is that you're probably doing a lot of things that are low value. And you can can you name a particular low value uh activity that you found? I just scrolling on my phone as well. Yes, for sure. Even I get yeah, yeah. And going out to eat is another low value activity. It takes you know hours to go do something like that, and it's not really the best in terms of nutrition or anything else. However, for getting cakeout once a week is probably sanity saving. So being able to uh there's a topic where it is just do less. Now, before you start laughing, you just gotta stop doing things. And you know, in and similar to the wanting to smooth things over for our kids, we all oversurface our kids. There's no question about it. We're all doing too much from them. So bring them in. Even a three-year-old can pick up their toy, right? Even somebody can put away the remote controls, hang up the towels, and as in, and it's never too late to start this. And I've had people talk to me whose kids are young adults, and I've said, well, you know, just stop doing it, see what happens. And this relates to my work as a as a management consultant. Uh, we'd go in, and big thing was uh right-sizing an organization and trying to cut the fat out and whatever they want to call it at that point. Process engineering was the word then. But what we would do is we'd track what people spent their time on. And I remember one particular one was this this uh department, all they did was issue reports right to management in all these big banks. And I said, okay, let's just start cutting out one report at a time and see who screams. And after in the end, I think we ended went from like 300 reports to one.

Mary 26:24

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

All those people got to go do something more interesting in the company, but that's we can apply that to our lives, you know, stop doing something and see who screams, or they can do it themselves. And there is in the book uh several pages of things that you know are developmentally age appropriate that you can expect your kids to do. You can either pick some of these up or not, or you can feel good about the ones you haven't doing already.

Mary 26:53

Yeah, one and I can tell you that I've worked with a lot of parents who do these things for their kids because it eases their own guilt. This idea that I my mar if if it's a divorce, or if they are maybe a single parent from when their kid was born and they're looking around, seeing all the things they're unable to do compared to other people, and there's this sense of guilt. And so to make up for that, they will do all these things. And what I try to help them see is you're not helping. Like that's what might make you feel good in the short term, but long term, that is actually damaging because there are, you know, to go back to what you said, hard things happen. Like we need to do hard things sometimes. And if there is that sense of, I have to make up for this, it's like, well, that's your life. Like that's what happened. And the more you can really be maybe even transparent, if your kids are old enough to have the conversation, like you don't need to hand them all the stressors, but I think for them to recognize that choices have a consequence. And here are you always have a choice. I think that's empowering.

SPEAKER_00 28:06

It the the what I think the the most recent two groups of parents have gotten wrong is that it's a competition and you have to push your kids as much as possible. And I lived in a I raised my daughter in a pretty uh diverse community, it's an in-town neighborhood in Boston, and it had it was a city of 100,000, so it was pretty diverse, and there was a very high income component to it. And the the amount of stress is if we don't do this, they're not gonna get to the right schools or this. I can tell you, without exception, well, with one exception, all of their kids ended up struggling. This was a very profound lesson to look at. As single parents, people should take pride in the fact that they have to be creative, innovative, resourceful, collaborative. If you haven't had to try to negotiate with anybody, your toddler will teach you soon enough. And these are all incredible skills, not only that it'll help you, it'll help your children, it'll make you very desirable as an employee. Um, the irony is somebody ever tried, somebody did try and label me a helicopter parent. And I thought, you're kidding, when's all this hyper focusing supposed to happen? I work a 60-hour week job, I have no support, I'm doing this all myself. Let's let's think about that one. So go ahead, push back. Don't be a shrinking violet. There was my daughter's dyslexia as a family gift. I'm the only one that didn't have it. Uh, so I'm used to being everybody's clipping service for everything in my family. And you go in for your IEPs, and I knew my rights. By the way, people know your rights when it comes to this stuff. One thing that George Bush did right was No Child Left Behind. Um, just know it. You don't have to have an antagonistic conversation with a teacher. They are on your team, they make you feel better, they have eyes on your kid, but they probably don't know as much as you do about certain things. Then you bring your knowledge as knowledge base together and you work together. And at the by the end of middle school, my daughter was scoring all A's. So I want to kick her off the IEP, which would, you know, dyslexics are incredibly inefficient readers, is the big is the big thing. And I remember sitting in the meeting and I said, You're kicking her off the IEP. I said, Why? They said, Well, you know, you can't stack the deck, Pat. Uh, what what deck am I stacking? You think she outgrew dyslexia? Sorry, I was a little sassy. I yeah, yeah, we'll we'll keep it, you know. The fact is, my daughter didn't want to go to special classes anymore, but I just said, yeah, okay. Yeah, that's your choice.

Mary 30:55

Yeah. So knowing your kid, advocating for your kid, um, and time auditing. You know, I think there's thinking about what is important and what, you know, what do you need to do? And really, I think if we do look back over our day, we do find those things. Now, I'm gonna disagree about the going out to eat because it's one of my favorite things. But when you have kids, when you have kids, you're you know, it's also more expensive. Typically, you're right, you have to be very careful with nutrients.

SPEAKER_00 31:24

It's it's I don't say cut it out completely. I actually talk about ways to cook just twice a day twice a week and solve the whole thing. Yeah, um, I'm an active cook, somebody might loathe it, and they'll they'll go out to eat or bring in takeout. I cannot stand vacuuming. I hire in that job. I cannot. It is, you know, every I say hire out your worst chore. I have no guilt about getting a housekeeper. May not be forever, right? But this is a lot of work to keep up. And it's what your goal is. My goal was to have a chaos free home. I focused on activities. My daughter played hockey. I don't know if you're big on that in central Pennsylvania, but it is requires vast amounts of time and money. It's it's pretty amazing. I think, really? There's not an athletic gene anywhere in my family. Where'd this come from? So, you know, but there's, you know, you kind of go with the flow, things change, they go with it. Now, when we talk about time, the people in your life, the most unlikely people in your life,

Building A Support System That Works

SPEAKER_00 32:32

give you time.

Mary 32:32

So, yes, let's talk about relationships and people. And when you say, what are the what's a support system that has maybe people you wouldn't think of? What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00 32:43

Uh, my favorite one is the guy. I did not park, I did not drive to work frequently because I live in Boston. We actually have a public transportation system, and it costs you $60 a day to park in town because we have no land, right? But there are parking lots and they they they're they're stacked. So you give the guy your car, and then when you come out, you have to wait for him to unstack it and bring it out. I would rarely drive into work, but if I did, or I got that call that the your daughter's in the nurse's office. And and what I did is I had a very good relationship with the car stacker. When I dropped the car off in the morning, I'd slip them a five. You can be sure my car was parked front and center. So if I had to leave, I was out of there. So treat those people well. I mean, I I respected the guy's hustle. He it was a few bucks, and it made my life much easier. Um, babysitters, I used graduate students from one of our universities here in education, and they did homework. I don't like doing homework, right? I've already done the fifth grade, I don't want to do it again. So my daughter is much happier doing homework with her than with me, anyway. So these being able to double up on your resources. The uh the fellow who delivers your post, he's got eyes out. He's he's looking to see what's going on in the neighborhood. He'll he'll tell you if he sees something. There's the you know, guys in the local storage down in the village, they would keep eyes out. Your um nurses and doctors. Now they don't have enough time for anything. But the nurse hotline is always good to call, right? You don't might get have to wait, you know, place a call and wait for a call back. But being able to use these these health professionals that aren't, you know, the penultimate, only a doctor can answer this question is a good way to triage your problem.

Mary 34:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:45

So be creative. Exactly. Treat people well in your life, they're part of your team. You're and I really have to talk about teachers. And I don't want to hear that you went in there and insulted a teacher because your kid wasn't performing. It's a team effort, and what are you going to get if you make someone feel defensive? And you know, some teachers are better than others, there's no question. Um, but being able to work collaboratively with them, they're they're waiting for parents to get upset and in the high dungeon with them. So it's so common these days. Realizing when it might be your issue, there was one woman in the community that had her child in a private school. Um, I think it was a religious private school, and she had to go in for a parent-teacher meeting, and she was feeling very nervous about this. She was gonna be, she felt she was gonna get blamed. And the we went back and forth in the conversation, and it turned out she had gone to this school. I like why repeat it, but okay, she didn't have a good experience there. And I said, it sounds to me like there's a learning difference at play here. And particularly boys where they're more common. And maybe you go in and you listen and you take notes, and the chances are if it's a a private school, they don't have the facilities to do any kind of intervention or testing. Take the information, go to your public school special ed department, and sit down with them and talk to them about it and see in other words, acquired data.

Mary 36:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

And being able to know, you know, that it is if they're not, they can be a jerk, this teachers or whatever, but they got information for you that you can take or not take is a choice.

Mary 36:37

Yeah, and having worked in public school for nearly 20 years, I know that sometimes it's intimidating to go in and talk to a teacher, or if your kid is the one in class that's creating maybe some trouble or they're struggling, there is that embarrassment. And so people often would come in with that defense already in place. But yes, I can tell you that when you approach saying, hey, here's the situation, first of all, they heard it all before and they probably already figured it out. Yeah. Um, and so I think you're right going in there with the idea that this is a partnership and you have information, you know, that they may benefit from knowing. And if there is something happening, it's gonna help them have a context for it. And you need to know really what is happening in that classroom. When do these behaviors occur? Because sometimes you're gonna be able to have input and help that. And sometimes they will be able to observe things for you that will help you understand what the issue is. So yeah, I think that the context of that often is that parents feel they failed if their child is struggling, and that's just not the case. And you know, you're that teacher is with them for six, six, seven hours a day. So yes, they are your advocate, they're your partner. They can be, they can be.

SPEAKER_00 38:02

Um what I don't really advocate as a single parent, and this is where we craft something special, is going in with the fact that you're a single parent because of the prejudices and stereotypes attached to it. Oh, broken home. I still hear that. Like broken home. It's therefore X, Y, and Z when that might be sidestepping what really is a learning disability, yeah. Or, you know, a neurodivergence or something like that. So um recognize that this is out there. Um and the first, the first objection, the first objective should be to to listen. And it's not about you, it's about helping your child. And I think if you keep saying that to yourself, take a lot of the stress off of it. It's about helping your child. There are lots of ways to get help, and it is a process. They're not gonna find out tomorrow if they have dyslexia. I knew it because three siblings and two parents with it, you know. I can I I know what it how it presents, right? Yeah. So um it's it is a great resource if you take advantage of it.

Mary 39:13

Yeah, and and I will say not every teacher is perfect, and not every teacher may always make the best choices. Um, but I think, you know, that is the person that can help you to navigate what is happening with education.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

I will tell you a funny story is I went to hear uh one of her kindergarten teacher uh he's now retired and he has a band, and I went to hear him play in, you know, hadn't seen the guy in 20 years. And I and I'm sitting in the audience and he sees me and he points at me in the middle of the show, Charlotte's mom. So they will remember you.

Mary 39:53

Yes, and you hope it's for a good reason. Yes, yeah.

Fun On A Budget That Kids Remember

Mary 39:57

Okay, so let's hit the final topic, which is fun. So I know that some of this stuff you're saying, there is a way to sort of build in fun. You know, if you're gonna cook, if you're gonna prepare meals ahead of time, which I strongly recommend, you know, teach your child, give them the kid's knife and let the say, you know, can you cut these peppers up or whatever it is? And no, it doesn't have to be perfect. You know, my mom was always, I'm left-handed and my sister's left-handed. My mom wouldn't want us in the kitchen because we did things backwards. So that didn't help. But I think, you know, being able to get them involved and make it a fun thing so it's not a chore. And you're again, you're teaching them a life lesson. But how are ways that you suggest to build fun in when people already feel like I don't have the time, I don't have the money, how do I do this?

SPEAKER_00 40:51

Well, luckily, you know, uh necessity is the mother of invention. Uh, birthday parties is a perfect example. I allocated $100 for a birthday party and I'd invite the whole class. And so that was quite a challenge. That was our challenge. And we'd start, my daughter had a late fall birthday. We'd start in the summer and we'd pick the theme and we'd start to source all the materials. We had this tiny backyard, and then we moved to the local park. It was so creative that she now considers birthdays a national holiday. So she still does this. And without spending a lot of money, it was, you know, it was a way, and the kids just went crazy, you know, to go to a a corn maze in in the fall. And just to this day, they remember those parties versus the where one where somebody rented out a restaurant, which it's kind of nice if you don't have time, but if you don't have the money, there's a a way to do it. And uh my daughter still loves event planning.

Mary 41:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:56

It it's it it can it is something you can do together. You can give them sections of the list. Um, you you can go online now and go on how to plan a birthday party for a hundred dollars, you know, and you can Pinterest, right? You can that all Pinterest. I used I did it off the uh those original bulletin boards. Remember those? You know, and there were a lot of people who had the same challenge of a birthday party and how to afford it. And that's a huge thing you can do. The the vacation planning, everybody gets a role, everybody invite in other people, other parents, other adults who like your kid. I call them friendlies. They can they can they want to be involved because it was fun. And the uh the big thing we did is I was really busy, everybody's really busy, but I I firmly believe in creating a space and making it inviolate, right? I will not spend a lot of time in the beauty parlor or the salon or whatever, but Sundays I would not do work. We'd do our chores to reset for the week, right? The laundry and whatever else, and then afternoon we'd go out. And if it was nice weather, which might happen half the year here in New England, we'd go hiking or walking. That's or a picnic or the beach or something like that. That is not a lot of money, that is fun. Yeah, and you can talk about its mental health impact, and particularly when you have a hyperactive kid, it's really great. Get them tired out. And this is any age, whether it's teenagers, they can bring their friends or whatever else, bring food, everybody'll love it. And if the weather was bad, we'd go to a museum and and you ever hear um of Atlas Obscura? This, yeah, all these oddball things you can go visit. If you if you if you need a list, you can get it from them and you can start working through it, you know. And these are things that will be. Far more memorable than sitting around playing Xbox. Yeah, so there's a lot of ways you can bond and go and be together and break the trajectory of stress.

Mary 44:13

And I also want to say if your kid grumbles initially, don't let that stop you. Good. You know, because they may secretly be like, oh, this could be fun, but that's not what most other people are doing. Most other people are scrolling on their phone, or like you said, Xbox, or doing the thing that everybody else thinks you should be doing. And so this is now, especially in this society, it's a little different to do the things you're talking about. But I can tell you, like you mentioned, nature, and I just had my first book come out, and it's about nature and how we can use it to, you know, find out the kind of life that will fulfill us. And there is nothing like nature to help kids calm down. It calms anxiety. ADHD, when they're outside, they're just experiencing it. And I also just saw an article. I didn't read the article, I didn't have time yet, but it was the headline was basically that sitting quietly is one of the best things we can do for our brains. Well, kids now never sit quietly because they put your phone there. So these are actually all things. If it if you feel unsure or like they're gonna hate it, it's like, but you know, you're the parent, do the best thing for your kid. And if you, you know, stick with it and sort of just keep going in spite of maybe some grumbles, I think it'll work out.

SPEAKER_00 45:34

So it's absolutely true. And we give you lots of ways to do it if you're not used to it. We got ways for you to ease

Book Resources Libraries And Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_00 45:41

into it.

Mary 45:41

Yeah. So, Pat, tell us again the name of your book.

SPEAKER_00 45:44

Oh, sure. The name of the book is The Field Guide for Single Parents: practical tips to gain control of your life. It does sound wonderful. I love that you call it a field guide. Goes with your nature. It's in 10% of the libraries at this point. It recently hit bestseller status on Amazon. You can get it there. Um, if you can't or don't want to pay the money to get it on um off of Amazon, ask your library to order it. And it's uh should have you should go to the library often. They've become more the third spaces in our life these days. You can borrow everything, you can even get free passes to museums. But I like the idea. And if you get it, the book was designed to be written in, has wide margins, textured paper, but um, I don't think the library would want you to do that. But you can look by it, see if it's something that's useful to you. And not every chapter will work every year. It's meant to be dipped in and out of as the need arises. It's a reference book.

Mary 46:46

Yeah, and I like that that you can, if there's one thing that's top of mind, like if you're really struggling with the money, it's like, well, just focus on that and pull what out of that what you need. Or if you sort of got things like pretty good, but you're like, I don't know how to build fun in. Like, so I really like that that people can pull out what they need. So you also have a website.

SPEAKER_00 47:06

I do, and you can pull down, there's some downloads going up the next set, I think in the next few weeks. It's pathankin.com. Okay. And you can actually email me through there. It's a monitored website. And if I can't answer you, I'll tell you where to find it. The back of the book has 133 notes and citations. So if you want to read further on any of these topics, uh, you can you can use that. I would think it would go out of date frequently because of the changes in our culture, but it's it's been holding pretty true. The the cost of living increases might be out of date at this point, but but you know, it is it's meant to be fun and a message of hope for all the people who are managing this journey. And as I said, it's not necessarily just the person in one household, it's both households. It's any culture, it's any socioeconomic route that one small thing. That's what just take one small thing at a time, abandon perfection, acquire data, give yourself a break, and everybody else too.

Mary 48:15

I love that. What a great summing up! Thank you so much for being here. I'm gonna link your book and your website in my show notes. And I I this was a great conversation. Thank you so much. It is so much fun. Thank you. And I want to thank everyone for listening. I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this episode. You can use the link in the show notes to text me, or you can email me at nsvpodcast at gmail.com. And until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.