How Parents Can Get Alone Time - The New York Times

Parents need time alone, but how do I explain that to my tween?

One of the best days of 2020 for me was in December when I got a root canal. I got to be horizontal in the dentist’s chair without the ability to doomscroll or anyone asking me for fruit snacks. Afterward, since I’d already told my family and colleagues I’d be gone a while, I wandered around downtown Manhattan, bought a $6 latte, browsed used books on the sidewalk and listened to a grown-up podcast as I drove home.

It was glorious.

For one, I was out of the house after eleventy months in lockdown. But I was also free, like when I was a kid and could stop to stare at the sky on the way home from school. As an only child, exploring the world by myself was my default state — and one in which I was comfortable. In my 20s, I was “Lady No-Kids” following a goose just to see where we ended up.

Of course I traded in that blissful, unstructured solitude to have a family, and I would do it again a million times over. But I thought once my babies became big kids, I’d get back some autonomy. I did not expect a pandemic to rob us all of time apart, nor did I realize older kids, adolescents especially, can hang onto their parents just as tight as toddlers.

I tried to keep my frustration at bay while we hunkered down. But my children’s keen senses detected my need to get away from them — probably because I ended up shouting things like, “I need to get away from you!” — and they didn’t like it.

At 6, my younger daughter was forgiving. If mom left to eat sushi or cry in the car (or both), she could watch tween Netflix shows her sister had gotten her into and all was well. But my 11-year-old would skulk away when I hit my breaking point, curl up on her bed with headphones and glare if I looked in on her.

“It can be harder or more jarring for a kid to hear that you need alone time when it’s reactionary to something that’s happening,” Dr. Hina J. Talib, an associate professor of pediatrics and an adolescent medicine specialist at Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, N.Y., pointed out. “They pick up on that. Adolescents especially are ‘authenticity detectors.’”

Kids her age are more apt to blame themselves, not the situation, if the people around them are anxious or unhappy, she continued. My daughter may have thought I was mad and frustrated because of her and not because of the thing that happened at work or whatever my husband did or didn’t do, or just the pandemic of it all.

And yet, none of that makes it any less vital for me to carve out time to run very slowly around the block. I want my kids to value the concept of independence, too. So I asked a few experts for help. Here are three things I learned.

1. It’s time to teach kids about self-care. Discussing alone time is an opportunity to teach kids about good mental health. “Do not suggest that this is a strange thing for a person to need to do,” said Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist who writes The Times’ Adolescence column. “Say, ‘When I’m with you I really want to be able to focus on you, so I need to do some mental housekeeping and I do that on my own. That way I can be much more present when we’re together.’”

If you are asking for alone time in the reactionary way, Dr. Talib said, you can be specific about what you’re stressed about — a change at work or feeling overwhelmed by tasks at home — and be clear that that’s why you need time to clear your mind on your own. There’s also a difference between being alone and being lonely, she said, and that nuance is worth talking about with kids.

2. Alone time should be part of your family’s routine. Remember those godforsaken color-coded charts from the early Covid days? All the family dinners? “We talked about family routines” when the pandemic started, Dr. Talib said. “Why didn’t we talk about creating a routine of alone time?” Her kids, who are just 3 and 5, know she goes outside every day “to stare at a tree in the backyard.” She’s meditating, and they know not to interrupt “tree time” — and that it doesn’t last very long.

Lizzie Assa, the founder of The Workspace for Children, a website and Instagram account that helps parents teach kids to play on their own, has made sure her three kids, who are now 14, 11, and 8, have “quiet time” every day since they were toddlers. She said it took work, but the payoff is worth it. “Kids learn that they need downtime and they need alone time,” said Ms. Assa, who is a neighbor of mine in Maplewood, N.J. “Even today when they’re having a hard time or getting moody, I don’t have to say, ‘You need to get away from us,’” she said. “They say, ‘I’m going to my room.’”

If instituting daily quiet time feels like a nonstarter in your house, you can try other ways of building downtime into your kids’ schedules. Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, a frequent Times contributor and clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the George Washington University School of Medicine, suggested I simply ask my daughter what she needs for self-care. You can do this with an 11-year-old, Dr. Lakshmin reminded me: “Ask, ‘What do you feel like you need? Do you want to read a book? Take a bath?’ Help them brainstorm too.”

3. It’s OK for your kids to be upset. If you don’t want to spend every waking hour with your children,“it’s developmentally appropriate for them to be insulted,” Dr. Lakshmin reminded me. “That’s normal. Your job as a parent is to help them understand that it’s OK to feel sad.” She went even further to say that sitting with that discomfort teaches kids that they can take care of themselves even if it makes someone else unhappy temporarily.

Dr. Damour put it even more plainly: “People deserve privacy, full stop.” Plus, she reminded me that I’m heading full throttle into the teen years, when my daughter will likely become “allergic” to me. I might as well appreciate her wanting to stay close while I still can.

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How Parents Can Get Alone Time - The New York Times
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