Amanda Diekman on Supporting Kids Going Through Burnout

Debbie:
Hey Amanda, welcome back to the podcast.

Amanda Diekman:
Thank you. I’m really looking forward to talking to you.

Debbie:
I am too. I am too. I was so excited to see this on my calendar today. I’m excited to talk about your new book, which is so relevant and my listeners are going to be super psyched to hear about. But I kind of want to do a little catch-up because last time you were on the show was to talk about your book, Low Demand Parenting, and specifically that approach to parenting, especially for kids with a PDA profile and just kids who might be kind of shutting down a lot. So I’m just kind of curious to know since that book’s come out, like what has the ongoing conversation been in that space? Cause the parenting space is wild, right? And there’s a lot of criticism or feedback, I should say, about different ways of doing this. So yeah, can you talk to us a little bit about how that book has been received and continues to be?

Amanda Diekman:
Absolutely. It’s been three years, I think, since it came out. And I agree with you that the landscape has changed a lot. Interestingly, in my little world, I don’t spend a ton of time touching into dominant parenting culture for a couple of reasons. I get whiplash every time I do it. It’s dysregulating for my nervous system. And I feel so sad. I get huge waves of grief for the kids who are experiencing this style of parenting for whom it doesn’t work. Because maybe there are many who it does work for, but I see all the ones that are on the painful side of we tried this for years and years and years, and it only made things worse until we got to our breaking point. And then we found you. And so that caveat aside, I have seen, you know, when I first started talking about low demand, which wasn’t a concept that was new to me. It existed prior to my book, but no one had really fleshed it out as a method. It was really just like a catchphrase for ask less of your kids, maybe. And I really felt like that was doing a disservice to the method and to the kids who needed this style of parenting because it’s actually an incredibly involved, incredibly attuned, highly collaborative style of parenting. And so really fleshing it out into the book was my way of contributing to the conversation. But what I’ve seen is that that conversation has grown massively in the last three years. That at first no one was talking about low demand. And that was my whole goal is I was like, I want to get people to kind of come over and talk about my thing. And now I see it everywhere. Just the other day, in my personal family life, I was looking into a new therapy program. And I saw that right on their website, they said that they were a low-demand approach to therapy. And I was like, never in my wildest 2022 dreams did I think that I would encounter this term in the wild. So that feels really thrilling to me. That’s really all I wanted to do was to bring credibility and to bring nuance and support to people who really wanted to try out. And then now I feel like we’ve got people who are just total ninjas at this style, like deeply in the practice. And that feels very exciting.

Debbie:
Yeah, that’s really cool. Yeah. I think, you know, you were definitely a trailblazer in this space in terms of just getting the word out there and getting people familiar with the concept. And I will just invite listeners to obviously check out Amanda’s Low Demand Parenting book, but also I’ll have a link in the show notes page to our last conversation about it. It was really fascinating. It was one of those conversations, I mean, I’ve talked to a lot of people, as you know, but it stuck with me. Like it was one of those conversations where it fundamentally kind of changed how I just think about things with my own kid who has a strong desire for autonomy. So I appreciate that. So we’ll have a link to that. And

Amanda Diekman:
I have heard from people from your podcast, again in my more personal world, like college friends and colleagues of my husband, they’ll say, I heard you on Tilt Parenting. And then they understand our family situation better too. So I really appreciate the broad reach of your podcast for helping people who wouldn’t otherwise be asking questions about PDA or trying to understand the PDA parenting experience are tuned in and are cluing in and that feels really exciting.

Debbie:
Yeah, that is really cool. Yeah, it’s been, you know, we could go on and on about just how things have changed since we’ve been doing this work. And I think about the first episode I did on PDA was probably like seven years ago. And it was at a time when no one was talking. I think it was the first episode that discussed PDA for a US-based podcast. And it’s just kind of wild how much things have changed. It’s very exciting. And that’s why I’m super excited about your new book, which we’ll get into because it’s about burnout in kids. And you know, it’s something we’ve been exploring here and there on the show. It’s something I hear more and more from parents that they are navigating burnout in their kids. So let’s start there. You’re, I’ll name the book and then why don’t you tell us about it? It’s called, hold on, I actually want to have the subtitle because there is a subtitle in it. Yeah. Let me say that again. So it’s called The Parents Handbook for Kids in Burnout, A Low Demand Approach to Healing and Thriving. Beautiful cover, by the way. And yeah, tell us about your why. Like how did you know, okay, this is gonna be the next thing I need to get out into the world.

Amanda Diekman:
Yeah. Well, if Low Demand Parenting, the book, is like, it’s kind of a quick read. You could sit down over a weekend to get through it cover to cover, and that’s really the intention of the book. It wants to meet you where you are and take you on a very quick journey from one place to another. And it can really speak to parents across a wide spectrum of reasons that they arrive at this parenting approach. What I found was that there was a subset of those parents, or maybe just a different set of parents, who have so many more questions after they read that. They’re like, okay, you’re speaking my language. This is my story, but what about? And so in my courses, I began having a whole section called the whatabouts. And so then there’s what about school? What about medication? What about therapy? What about aggression? What about siblings? And I’m teaching that and I’m teaching that, and I’m realizing that some of the parents that I’m speaking to are in so much distress, they are so impacted on an hourly basis by the dysregulation of their kid that they kind of need a whole different language and a whole different approach. Not only, when we’re in that level of distress, and I’ve done a lot of research about the impact of parenting on the parents, and I have a whole thread of my work that is really addressing trauma and the fact that our ordinary daily parenting experiences can lead to cumulative textbook complex PTSD. So then really thinking about, okay, if these are traumatized parents who are dealing with a whole other level of dysregulation in their kid, then they need bite-sized pieces of information that directly address what just happened an hour ago, and they’re not getting that good advice anywhere. What I’m seeing on the internet is frankly terrible advice for kids who are in what I consider childhood burnout. And we can talk about defining terms. But for kids in burnout, they need a radical period of healing that involves people not only just dropping demands, but changing their overall lifestyle to such a degree that there’s no way that the outside world isn’t gonna look at that and say, what the heck is going on? And I find it helpful to compare, like, let’s say your kid had another pretty catastrophic world-changing illness, like childhood leukemia. No one is going to expect that you go through that and your family is unchanged. No one is going to expect that you don’t need intensive support, that your kids’ siblings aren’t impacted, the schooling wouldn’t be impacted, that your whole community wouldn’t be impacted by that. One kid suffering to that degree changes dozens of people. And that’s, I think, the best metaphor really for understanding the impact of burnout. So this book is my attempt to really see and speak to those parents in a language that they can understand about the problems that are keeping them up at night and devastating their family systems. Because I really do believe that healing is possible. In fact, I’ve seen it over and over and over again in my own family, multiple times, but more importantly in a wide range of family types, and that there are particular strategies that are useful and essential really at particular times. And that was information I felt driven to get into people’s hands so that they can begin to respond to their kids in these powerful ways.

Debbie:
Yeah. I want to just check in on one of the things that came up as you were answering that was, you know, when talking about the way it’s viewed versus if a child had an early childhood disease or something like that. And it just made me wonder what have you found in terms of the perception of burnout in legitimacy. I mean, obviously, I’m in this space, right? I know it’s a real thing. You know it’s a real thing. Many parents listening to this are living it. So we know that it’s real. But is it something that you’ve found there’s still pushback to saying this is a real thing? Is there a desire by medical professionals and therapists to try to like slot these into other clear diagnostic buckets?

Amanda Diekman:
Yeah, I think that’s one of the critiques. That’s not the right word. It’s a perception, it’s a misperception that a lot of parents experience. And so I do speak to that in the book, especially around anxiety and depression. Those are the two clearest buckets that kids want to get slotted into by the system. And most kids in burnout do have degrees of anxiety and depression that are acting on them, that are a part of the profile. But when we miss burnout as the bigger narrative, then that will lead therapists and parents to use strategies that are just not burnout attuned. So it’s kind of like burnout is the biggest definition. And everything for the season that you’re in burnout, everything else has to be filtered through that. And in that way, missing it is doing the kids a disservice because it’s skipping over the biggest thing that’s happening in their neurobiology, in their brain, and in their life right now. And I don’t know whether professionals are gonna push back or just need the information so that they can do better to show up for kids. I tend to assume that people just need to know. And once they know, they’re going to shift and act accordingly.

Debbie:
Yeah. Just one thing to add to what you just shared. I’ve spoken with Jodie Clark about burnout as well as Dr. Megan Anna Neff. And I can’t remember which conversation it came up in, but we were talking about that anxiety, depression versus burnout. And you lay it out really clearly in your book and kind of, it was a really helpful way for me to kind of see and understand how they’re differentiated and what how it might present differently. But one of the things that I remember was struck by from one of those previous conversations was that medicating for depression, for example, which depression may be going on, but if it’s actually depression caused by the burnout, it could get a kid feeling good enough to put themselves back in the situation that perpetuates the burnout. And it really just struck me.

Amanda Diekman:
For sure. And the knee-jerk reactions that we have therapeutically around both anxiety and depression really don’t work well within the burnout framework. For depression, it’s generally an opposite action knee-jerk response. So my body says I need to go get in bed. So that means I need to go move because you can’t really trust what the depression is telling you to do. That’s exactly the opposite of what kids need in burnout. Burnout comes from doing too much for too long. It comes from missing those internal signals that tell us, ooh, this is too much. I probably need to vocalize that. I probably need to stop sooner. And so it’s essential that kids listen to their body signals and express those to the people around them. But if the people around them are saying, no, no, no, that can’t be right. You can’t listen to that. You need to. Then they’re gaslighting themselves, which is a really difficult dynamic for a lot of neurodivergent kids in the first place. And then for anxiety, it’s typically to push to the edge of your comfort zone and then beyond. And the idea is that that’s what expands it. But again, that can be really dangerous for kids in burnout. If they go beyond their comfort zone, the impact could be weeks or months of regression, moving all the way back to the beginning of the burnout cycle when they’d already made a ton of progress. It’s just not worth it. That capacity has to expand in a different way while they’re in the burnout season. And so both of those end up really backfiring for the kids. And I’ve seen so many kids that have been treated in those two frameworks for a really long time and it just prolongs the burnout. It gives them years and years and years of burnout when in a most attuned, most simple scenario, you might be able to move all the way through it in a year to a year and a half.

Debbie:
Okay, so that was really helpful to talk a little bit about anxiety and depression versus burnout. So what are we actually looking for? How does it present in kids and teens? And as part of that, what are some signs that parents might completely get wrong or misinterpret?

Amanda Diekman:
Yeah, thanks for mentioning kids and teens. This is for sure across the childhood lifespan and into young adults. Many young adults who are still living at home and are still getting a lot of primary caretaking from their parents are in burnout, or there’s many reasons that that might happen, but one of them is burnout. And so I always want to include that because those parents are already so vulnerable and to be also left out of this conversation is like a second wound. So yeah, I’ve seen kids in burnout from as young as four to mid 20s to 30s still getting constant round the clock caregiving from their parents. So all of those fit in my conception of childhood burnout. Really, the point is that this book is to the parent, the caregiver. And they’re still in a primary parent-child relationship to the person, whether they’re an adult or not. So childhood burnout has three primary markers that tell us, ooh, okay, this cluster of symptoms equals burnout. The first one is pervasive exhaustion, and exhaustion in young kids doesn’t always look like slowing down. For teenagers and young adults, it almost always will come with some degree of sleepiness, lethargy, difficulty moving their bodies. But for young kids, it can be that counterintuitive movement constantly, the inability to slow down. It can come with reckless behavior, aggression, but also sometimes extreme silliness and talkativeness. And that doesn’t look like exhaustion, but it actually is. The kid is so depleted in their energy tank that they don’t have the ability to even modulate how much they’re putting out into the world. And so that can be a really big cry for help that gets missed and mislabeled. When it’s in the burnout umbrella, it will usually last for a season and then come with some kind of a crash that feels like it comes out of nowhere for families. And the idea that things come out of nowhere is a big burnout indicator in and of itself. So if any of the things I’m saying happened to you and they came out of nowhere, that might be a sign that you’re in burnout. The second one is a loss of skills. For kids, loss of skills could look like they used to be able to bathe fairly independently and now they’re experiencing extreme difficulty with that. Sleep and eating are almost always impacted by burnout. So restricted intake of food. And we have diagnoses and labels for all of these specific symptoms, but it’s really putting them together that’s a part of the burnout picture. So again, if you’re kind of like, well, yeah, we’ve got an ARFID diagnosis and we’re working with a sleep specialist and we’ve got this therapy, and we’ve got, like, okay, it’s really the cluster and the combination and the patterning that makes a burnout. The last one is an extreme sensitivity. So what we’ll see is that, and this can be hard if your kid is already wired for hypersensitivity, like maybe you’ve got an autistic kid, then it can be difficult to really tease this out. For some kids, they go from kind of what we might consider like middle of the bell curve sensitivity, and then they suddenly go to like, I can’t stand that light, or you’re being too loud, you’re chewing too loud, school is too loud. But for many kids, they were already sensitive and it just goes to that extreme degree where they can no longer tolerate. Like for my kid, just the feeling of his sheets on his body was just so extremely difficult to manage. And that once burnout is resolved has gone away. So it’s new sensitivities popping up and also the level of reactivity to those sensitivities that constitutes burnout. And we put those three things together for kids. What we’re really looking at is a kid who is crying out for help. So in the early stages of burnout, kids are typically expressing this to their parents. They’re saying, I don’t want to go to soccer. I don’t like the sound of the coach’s voice when he yells at me. It’s too muddy. They’re telling you. And parents, look at what we’re handed, we’re told, no, you got to make them go. You know, they made a commitment to their team. And so that’s what early burnout looks like for most families is kids are saying, I can’t do it. Please let me quit. Please let me stop. And as parents, because of what we’re told to do, we push them and we push them, we push them. And what constitutes a full burnout in this understanding is when that child goes from saying, please let me stop so they no longer can do it. And this looks really scary to parents. So this is when the kids stop communicating typically and resort to some other method to share how much distress they’re in. So it could be a kid who’s only banging on the walls and no longer talking to their parent, a kid who doesn’t leave their room, a kid who, especially in teens and young adults, is moving into disordered eating, self-harm, extremely risky behaviors. They’re no longer saying it, they’re showing it. And that is kind of the move into full burnout. And from there, in my work, once you go into full burnout, it is very difficult to move out of it very quickly. It is a very long, slow healing trajectory. So I’m really passionate about meeting kids and families in that early phase because I do believe that if you listen when your kids are first telling you, hey, this is too much, this is too loud, I’m too tired, I can’t do it, that you can shift the whole trajectory. And I’ve met so many parents, and I’m one of them, who would do anything to go back to our earlier selves and say, listen to them, change now. It’s not too late. And it really devastates me to think that parents in that situation are being told, no, you guys gotta keep going. There’s no way to stop. Because the truth is there is a way to stop. And that is when they can no longer function anymore. And then you have to stop.

Debbie:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s that kind of double edged sword that parents don’t know what they don’t know. And so and then when you find out, it’s like I would have given anything to have access to this information earlier, but we didn’t. And so they don’t even know what to be looking fort. Therefore, yeah, it’s tricky. Which is why the more conversations like this we can have, the better. And hopefully people listening to this will recognize it in someone else and say, hey, you should check this out. This might be what’s going on. Cause I get that pre-burnout stage seems really critical. I would love it if you could explain, you know, the why for burnout. Is it just kind of a buildup of multiple overload, nervous system overload over years? Is there anything you can share with us about, you know, what you’ve learned about why it happens?

Amanda Diekman:
Yeah. Well the truth is that the research doesn’t exist in this area. So everything that I’m sharing is an attempt to pull the best information we have from other places and extrapolate it here. So I fully reserve the right to look back on this conversation in 10 years because we’ve had so much wonderful research and be like, huh, I was wrong. Amazing. But in the absence of that, the reasoning is as specific and unique as each kid’s brain, body, and nervous system. And this is really important to me. I want to think systemically and in terms of patterns, but it always comes down to the unique individual because basically burnout is where this person’s body and brain system has determined that the level of stress that they’re experiencing on an hour-to-hour day-to-day basis has gone on for too long. And so burnout is like a hyperprotective mode for that person’s body. It is their attempt to heal what is broken. And so while it feels like a catastrophic failure from the outside, it is actually an incredibly helpful practice that the body has built in. There is logic here, there is wisdom here. Our bodies are ancient, our bodies have knowledge that we as a society have not caught up to. So the fact that burnout exists tells us that the nervous system was built with an off switch or a pause switch. And it has. So we have language for this. There’s a particular trio of systems in the nervous system, or more in the body, that measure stress and they control many different aspects of our bodily existence, digestion and brain chemicals. And when those three systems kind of come together and agree, hey, this is too much, there is a point where their fluidity and plasticity and ability to respond becomes fragmented. And so it’s like that’s intended to be on this really dynamic spectrum. And in burnout, it goes into fairly extreme positions of like on and off, black and white. And that is protective. Once the burnout healing comes forward, all that gray area gets filled back in and all of those systems begin responding in adaptive ways again, but they need a period of hibernation in order to heal. So why is this kid’s body felt like life was too stressful for too long and they couldn’t maintain it anymore. And in that way it’s really interweaved with everything else. Like that’s going to be as particular as your kids’ diagnoses and whether or not the world is built to suit them or not. So, like, of course, neurodivergent kids are gonna be much more likely to go into burnout because they’re facing a world that is misattuned to them. Kids with physical disabilities or with chronic digestion challenges, kids whose parents don’t know that they have an allergy. All of those things are stressors for the body. And so they’re all going to go into that really complex formula that is the burnout decision-making diagram for that body. So it all counts, it all matters. And what I find is that families peel that onion back. And in the end, they realize that their kid had a dozen different sources of stress going on in their life pre-burnout. And many of them you didn’t see until burnout.

Debbie:
Okay. All right, so in your book, you talk about three phases of burnout. After the pre-burnout, which we discussed earlier, you’ve got phase one, which is screens all day. You have phase two, which is curious but no capacity. And then phase three is the recovery stage where we start to really heal. So could you walk us through those a little bit, please?

Amanda Diekman:
Totally. Yeah. I give them kind of cheeky names because it’s really what they are. They could have fancier names, but come on, like phase one, I call screens all day. Every once in a while I’ll meet a kid who is not using screens all day. It’s like Legos all day, or there was one kid who would just stand and look out their window. But it is some sort of deeply restorative, highly patterned, very simple activity that takes them through their days. And that is that hard reset. That kid is not able to do the things anymore. So whereas they might have been going to school, at this point, most kids are unable to go to school. Some kids continue to go, but their teachers notice that they are not taking in any information. They’re typically completely zoned out in the classroom. And their ability to respond to the present moment is so impaired that they’re probably getting in fights all day. It’s really difficult. Some kids in phase one also go completely nocturnal, so they begin staying up all night and sleeping all day. It makes perfect sense if you think about it. Night is dark, it’s quiet, nobody else is awake, so they’re not asking anything of you. If you wanted to escape life, go to the night. That is where escape happens. And lots of other full reset kind of things happen. Extremely restricted eating, down to a couple of foods. Kids are using comfort items that maybe they haven’t used in a long time. Teenagers might get back into things that they were interested in when they were much younger. So it does feel for a lot of kids like a regression. Maybe they were sleeping independently, but now they come back into your room and are wanting you to tuck them in and stay with them until they fall asleep. They require a level of caretaking that is difficult to miss. It is so intensive. And that season lasts six months typically. It can be shorter. Again, the simpler the reason that they went, like the fewer contributing stressors, the easier it is to figure out what they are and change them. But the more complex, and I’ll say teenagers and young adults almost always have the most complex cases, the longer it takes. So I don’t want someone whose kid has been in phase one for two years to feel like you’re an outlier. You’re not. That is not unusual, especially in a more complex situation. And if we think about the simple idea that burnout is too much for too long, it’s been a long time for a teenager. It’s probably been too much since they started school. That is typically the timeline that parents trace it back to, and sometimes even younger than that. So then phase two is the one that confuses parents the most. In phase one, you typically have to let go of all the things that you used to insist on and adapt to the child in front of you in some form. And then just when you’re like, I can’t believe we’ve done this for this long, we can’t do this one day longer, things get worse. When they come to and they’re like, Amanda, low demand is not working. This is a failure. Because what awakens first is not their flexibility and their adaptability and their creativity. What awakens first is typically a curiosity or a desire. And that is not coupled with the ability to handle that curiosity. So a story from us is that my kid started watching BMX riders on his YouTube and then suddenly wanted to be a BMX rider. And that was a very potent, passionate curiosity, but he had no ability to understand that not only did we not own a BMX bike, we didn’t know anything about it, he didn’t have access to a track. And so we had daily meltdowns over the fact that he wasn’t already a BMX rider. It doesn’t actually make a lot of sense. And a lot of kids in phase two don’t make a lot of sense to their parents. Parents are baffled by the things that they see in this phase. And what’s really exciting to go on the healing side is when you fully accept that no matter what, phase two is going to be a bunch of failures. You’re going to try it and you’re going to get it wrong. They’re going to want to do something and it’s not going to meet their expectations. They’re going to want something and then you get it for them and then they hate it. That is the way it is going to be. Then you can sort of sink into like, but look at what’s awakening. Like look at all these interests that are coming back. Look at all this energy back in your body. Look how much you want to go to the park. Like, yes, once we go there, it’s gonna go terribly, but you want to. And that is, in phase one, you don’t want to do anything. So we’re accumulating information about our kid. We’re also beginning to really learn how to intersect with the outside world because a lot of their curiosities do take them outside of their little bubble. And so again, for a lot of families, this might be the first time that their kid is unmasking in public. Maybe they’ve been really masked, really neurotypical presenting. And now the kid you’re bringing out in the world is like anything but that. So it helps with our people-pleasing as parents. It helps us to really get on board with the neurodiversity paradigm or with the radical accommodation or whatever. So there’s a lot that’s happening in phase two, even though nothing works. Literally nothing will work for the entirety of phase two. When things start to work, you’re like, okay, we want to go to the park. In order to go to the park, we need to bring this thing, this thing, this thing. We need to go at this time. We need to go to that park. We need to have this friend there. And then you do all of that and it goes well. You’re in phase three. So phase three is when you know what to do and you do it and it starts to work. But all of that learning happened in phase two. So I just really want to honor the parents in phase two. It is a hard place to be. And it is also a really sacred place to be because you would not get to the good, juicy, beautiful healing without all of the repetitions of getting it wrong and learning, getting it wrong and learning. By phase three, the kid begins to take some of the lead. So they’re starting to say, yeah, I want to tell my teacher that I can’t do the homework today, but I don’t know how to tell them. And so you might still be scripting for them, you might still be taking some parts of the process, but they are beginning to own their own healing journey. What’s essential in phase three is that, like you described with medicating for burnout, we don’t want to then push them really quickly into environments that they’re not ready for or take away the supports that have enabled them. So you don’t just like suddenly start going to whatever park and you still have your bag, you have your supports, you have your strategies, and those last typically beyond burnout. Part of what families discover is that we aren’t going to do life in the typical way. It requires something different. And that’s an ongoing reality. In fact, phase three just kind of blurs into the rest of life. You’ve fully handed the mantle of your daily life and thriving is in your hands now. But I’m not going anywhere. I’m always here. And that is the dance of the end of burnout is that the parent is no longer like in phase one ensuring their daily survival. And by the end of the burnout cycle, you’re not doing that to the same degree. But for most of us, we have also not returned to our old role or what we thought our role was going to be. There has been a fundamental and vital transformation inside of us as the parent. And we know things now that we can’t unknow and we would never sacrifice what we’ve built through the burnout season in the name of traditional parenting.

Debbie:
Yeah. Right. So are there any specific ways to talk with kids about their burnout? Like is it just, I mean, as you’re talking about this, I’m imagining it’s just ongoing transparency and that this is what’s going on. But are there any kind of best practices or ways that you guide parents to talk with their kids about what’s happening?

Amanda Diekman:
Yeah. Kids typically gravitate toward the word burnout pretty quickly because it isn’t stigmatized and it just, it’s a good word. It’s like, yeah, that’s what this feels like. I’m just burnt out. And I do feel like among youth culture and kid culture, there’s a pretty early adoption of this idea. I think kids want us adults to wake up to the idea that there’s burnout on a massive scale here. The level of burnout I’m talking about is unmissable, but a lot of kids are experiencing lower levels of this and really feel strongly that the adults aren’t listening to them. And so my kids and other kids that I’ve worked with are kind of quick to understand the idea of burnout. What I love to weave in there is the metaphor of a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. That’s why there’s a butterfly on the front cover of the book. The most potent metaphor is the part of the transformation process when the caterpillar goes into the chrysalis and dissolves into goo. Literally, the full DNA structure of this creature has to reform so that it can turn into something else. And that is phase one. And that’s the hardest part for kids to identify with is that like I used to play football and now I can hardly get out of bed. Who am I? What’s happened to me? And so giving them this understanding of like, you’re in the goo phase. You don’t know yet what your butterfly is gonna look like. And you know, maybe some kids will cringe at you for using this language, but I find that they secretly understand it. And then phase two is that like busting out, like the new body has formed inside of this little bitty space. But still those wings don’t just like miraculously take you into the sky. Like you have to bust out of that little safe world that you were in and then learn how to flap these wings and then figure out where you want to go next. And all of that is phase two. And then phase three is like really learning to become a citizen of the sky. You’re flying around, you’re seeing things from a new vantage point. You can always come back and land here on the branch, but you belong to the world now. And we’re here to help you figure out where you want to go with your new wings and your new body. And that works. It’s not a hundred percent. Nothing ever is.

Debbie:
I love the metaphor though. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. I like that very much. Makes total sense. So I know we’re running long, but I’d love if we could kind of end with a question about what parents need, because you wrote this book for parents who are navigating this, and that’s who you work with. And it is a very difficult journey if your child is struggling with burnout. And so what have you found that parents need most in order to survive this season?

Amanda Diekman:
Yeah, parents need language so that they can begin to speak their truth to safe people. Parents desperately need to be believed. I find that when parents come to me, they’re telling me only the few things that they feel safe enough to say. And the reality is always much worse and much harder than what they’re letting on. So for professionals listening, those are like little balloons, like, are you safe enough to handle this? You know, my kid hasn’t showered in six months. Like, that’s just the beginner. There’s much more behind that. And so, can you receive that truth without judgment or shock or trying to change it or fix it? Just let that be true. The next thing that parents really need is community of understanding, having people to turn to who are going through something similar when, especially in the early phases, you are typically trapped in your house or you are locked into constant school IEPs and renegotiations. Your life is consumed by parenting this one kid. Even when you have more than one, one kid takes up all the oxygen that there possibly is. And of course they do because they’re suffering that badly. So finding people who get it, who are like, yeah, I’m there right now or I’ve lived it. And I get it. The last thing, and probably the thing that I offer the most, is hope. It feels so hopeless. And the things that we have to do are really radical and countercultural. And so there’s real fear of like, how do I know this is gonna work? Everybody, all the professionals are telling me to do the opposite. And you’re saying I just keep bringing them the snacks and letting them watch YouTube, like this is crazy. And so part of what I am here to offer is the wisdom of having walked with hundreds, probably more, of families through this cycle. And there’s nuance and particularity, and it’s a big book for a reason because every kid is so specific. But the overall trajectory is real. The healing is real, the methods work, and most of all the attunement to your kid is what works. So listening to them above all else is the best advice that I could possibly give. And that in and of itself is really radical, but that’s where the healing starts and ends and is entirely.

Debbie:
Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you for that. And yeah, I just want to say I had a chance to read the book and it is incredibly thorough. And I love the way that you organize it. You kind of described it as a what to expect and kind of choose your own adventure, not a book to sit down, like you said, and kind of read cover to cover, although you might, but it’s so full of resources and information and strategies. So I think whatever phase or stage a parent is in navigating this, they’re gonna be able to find some insight that’s going to really support them. So the book again is called The Parents Handbook for Kids in Burnout, a Low Demand Approach to Healing and Thriving. And where would you like listeners to connect with you?

Amanda Diekman:
I love hearing from listeners that they heard us here. You know, we do all of this and then it’s like, is anyone gonna listen? So if you’re connecting with this, I love hearing from you on social media is the easiest way to get in touch with me. And I’m called Low Demand Amanda in most of the places. So you could send me a message and share your story. A lot of the wisdom that was gained from this book came from people sharing their stories with me on social media. And I feel really honored to get to witness all the vast complexity of our experiences because so many people tell me what they’re going through. So I would love to hear that. And if you want to go deeper, you know, a lot of people need a lot more support in this season and there’s very few places to turn. So there are more resources for that on my website. And another thing I tried to do in the book is always point you to reliable, great resources. So the book is full of learn more here or turn to this. So you can get a lot of next steps there.

Debbie:
Yeah, wonderful. Well, thank you. Congratulations, as I was reading it, I’m like, wow, you worked so hard on this. You went deep. And thank you for your service and congratulations and thank you again for everything you shared today.

Amanda Diekman:
Thank you.