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Professional Bio

Are you a high-achieving, ambitious professional working mother, feeling trapped in the whirlwind of your demanding career and family responsibilities? Overwhelmed by stress, busyness, and societal expectations? Drained of energy and struggling to find balance while silently battling guilt and unfulfillment?

Welcome to a transformative journey a certified lifestyle medicine physician, experienced yoga and meditation teacher, and a mother of three. In this immersive podcast, she provides a path to authenticity, purpose, and vitality. Through tailored coaching programs, Dr. Libby Schanzmeyer equips you with the tools and strategies to regain balance and create a life aligned with your true self.

Our listeners, our clients, are high-achieving professional working mothers who have successfully transformed their lives with life design. They’ve overcome stress, found peace within their careers and personal lives, and are thriving.

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Podcast Episode Transcript

Today we’re discussing the tired mom trend. And actually it’s more like a tired mom era. But there’s a lot of implications with this and we’re gonna dive into it from the perspective of emotional labor and kin keeping.

Have you ever heard of emotional labor and kin keeping? Well, there’s a story about these two fish that are swimming along. They’re kind of younger fish. They don’t really know all that much in the world. And they’re swimming along and this older fish goes by and goes, how’s the water fellas? And the two fish look at each other and they’re like, what is water? And the whole little thing is that they don’t know what water is because they live in it. It’s like the air we breathe. We don’t notice it because it is

There all the time. And I think that’s why it has taken such a long time to recognize kin keeping and emotional labor because it’s something that is just present in most all moms’ lives. And there’s like an expectation of it in our culture to do this work. And I think we want to do it to an extent when we have.

Energy and resources and support, it’s actually pretty fun. But there’s a level in our culture at this point where it’s expected, but diminished, like housework or women that aren’t earning a paid income are looked at differently.

And I’m saying this from the perspective of being a physician. And there’s a lot of, you know, if you’re a physician and you decide to cut back your hours, go part time, just quit altogether. There’s a big, um, a lot of times we get pushback for doing that because you’re wasting education and time and all this. And so that’s my angle on that view. and I’ve heard people say very strong opinions that, you know, women shouldn’t.

Waste a spot because they all quit and things like that. And in that, it’s implied that their other work with their family, with their kids, whatever it is they’re deciding to do is less valuable. And I don’t agree with that. It’s not less valuable, it’s just as valuable.

Basically the water that we’re swimming in is our emotional labor and kin keeping. As far as working moms with families and trying to maintain a job and family and home and all the things, our water is this kin keeping and emotional labor.

Join us today as we talk about some statistics and stories about these invisible work of kin keeping and emotional labor.

It’s this weight of these jobs that are carried by most all of us women, and it’s hidden in plain sight.

A few years ago, I read this book by Annabel Crabb called The Wife Drought. And it was so amazing because it didn’t it’s one of those things you ever hear something and you’re like, yes, that’s true. And it’s not something you didn’t know, like you sort of knew, but you didn’t have the words to say it. And that’s what I felt like this book was. It was like a truth that I knew in my bones.

Bones, but I didn’t have the words or language or thoughts to articulate it. And I read this book and I was like, wow, she nailed it. This book, The Wife Drought, is about how women went into the workforce.

And there’s a drought of support people. And women were that, and then they go to work, but no one supports them. So the book is looking at that and looking at some really interesting statistics. We’re gonna dive into that today.

A lot of this work of this invisible labor and kin keeping is it’s expected subtly, but it’s expected it is diminished culturally because it is not held in high regard, it’s not rewarded financially. So it’s diminished and it’s also exploited.

If you’re like me and have felt very stressed and to the point of being burnt out of losing interest in things and just being easily angered and things like that, if that is something you’ve experienced, it may be because of this whole cosmos of energy that goes into…

Maintaining a home and taking care of kids and doing all these little things, kin keeping, doing all these little things that, doing all these little things that keep the family running that people don’t recognize is done.

And I really, I couldn’t figure out why I felt so bad and so overwhelmed and so stressed at work and home because I wanted to do a good job at both places, but I just didn’t feel like I could catch up. And I couldn’t figure out why, because if you look around at the house, it didn’t seem like that much. It’s always a lot, but it’s just like, it felt, my exhaustion felt out of proportion with what I could see on the material plane, like of what I could see on my daily job.

Like to do things, right?

And Hmm? Understanding, kin keeping, and emotional labor has been 10 out of 10 validating. It makes so much sense and has helped so much soften my perspective and given me self-compassion and compassion for so many working moms too. Moms in general, all moms, because we all are doing this.

Okay, so when we’re talking about kin keeping and emotional labor, what is this? I’ll tell you for the Wikipedia definition of emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their personas during interactions with customers, coworkers, clients, and managers, like an upset customer, toddler, or spouse.

Oh, that’s me. Wikipedia’s definition of emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their persona during interactions with customers, coworkers, clients, and managers. So this could be like an upset toddler, kid, a customer.

A spouse, someone who is emotionally dysregulated or upset, helping them calm down, helping patch things up between people, those are examples of emotional labor. There’s also work as far, and…

Now, kin keeping is similar, it gets a lot of overlap, but kin keeping is also about women keeping their families together, and because women typically are the ones that’ll stay in touch and reach out and call people and send holiday cards and plan birthday parties and family reunions, things that keep the family together, that’s a lot of the kin keeping. And to me,

The overlap happens on like a birthday party because there’s kin keeping, because your family comes, we send out invitations, we include the community, but there’s also emotional labor of planning a party, well just plain labor too, running to the store to pick up balloons and planning a party, but then there’s some emotional labor involved too of the politics, who’s coming to the party, who’s invited, who’s not invited, what family members, and you know, that’s part of the emotional labor too. So there’s…

Layers and nuances of these things that we’re doing. And it adds to all our thinking going on all the time in the background. So no wonder that we’re exhausted and tired.

So the, kinkeeping was originally defined or talked about in 1985. There was an article written, see,

A sociologist named Carolyn Rosenthal wrote an article in 1985 about kin keeping. And she said, kin keeping is the act of maintaining and strengthening families. It is a form of emotional labor done out of a sense of obligation and because of emotional attachment. So there’s, there’s two parts. There’s an obligation.

And there’s also emotional attachment. So it’s something that we enjoy. We wanna be attached with our family.

And it’s so subtle and expected. You know, I remember as a kid one time seeing,

This work is so

Another aspect of work is this emotional labor is managing. There’s been times in my life I’ve just felt like I’m so tired of managing things. And part of that is, you know, the kids will do a task like unloading the dishwasher or helping clean the kitchen. But then it comes back to, well, ask mom if you’re done. And my goal is to raise.

Men, because I have poi children, young men, children, raise men that don’t come to me and ask what can I do? They look around and they recognize what needs to be done. So instead of, you know, cleaning the kitchen and then saying, oh, what else do I need to do? And me saying, well, put that spoon up and then dry those dishes. I’m trying to raise them so that they’ll look around and see what needs to be done and do it.

Because that’s part of the emotional labor that we do with managing people that are fully competent of looking at a countertop and removing items that should not be there. But it’s just draining, it takes our energy to say, micromanage these small little tasks. So that’s another part of the emotional labor.

And like I said about the attachment part, that’s huge because we want this connection with our family. We want grandparents to see the kids baseball games. And so we’re facilitating these things or trying to get the family together for a reunion or whatever the gathering is. Holidays are huge.

Holidays are such a big expenditure of energy. And we love it and we’re attached to our families and we show our love this way. But there’s also this expenditure of energy to plan the meals and cook the food and send the invitations and divvy out who’s gonna make what for the family. There’s a lot of energy that goes into that and a lot of love. Like that’s how we show our love too of including people for the holidays and cooking for people.

So it is a part of our attachment with our family too. And it is still work.

We also want it to be well done, you know, because we want our kids to be successful. We have this, you know, inner drive to make sure that our kids’ wellbeing is taken care of. And part of that is connection with their family. And part of it is celebrating them, you know, for birthday parties and things like that. So we have a vested interest in making sure these things go well, and we want them to. It’s really, I think as mothers,

We want to celebrate our kids for their birthdays. You know, little things. And whatever the situation is, holidays, we want to enjoy our family at the holidays. So we have a distinct interest in doing it. We want to do it. And at the same time, it’s not really validated or acknowledged. And I think that’s the part where it can get a little discouraging sometimes because we’re going and going and going and…

Maybe you want to sit down and rest, and it’s not understood why you need rest. And I think that’s the part where it gets a little bit frustrating. You’re like, I’ve been doing stuff all day, you know? Which you have, but now you have a word for it of the emotional labor and kin keeping.

In this book, The Wife Drought, Annabel Crabb talks about a lot of different things. She highlights numerous invisible tasks that women do. And she talks about several studies that are really fascinating that I want to share with you here.

One of the things that she acknowledges is that not having a wife in a traditional sense, and she uses the wife, I think she even defines it, but she talks about a wife being a person that supports the family and keeps the home, something like that. She defines wife as the typical kind of traditional Western culture idea of a housewife.

And but she was saying women that don’t have a wife in the, you know, opposite sex marriages are at a disadvantage because they don’t have anyone for this huge support role versus other couples that have the traditional wife in the home who is supporting

Husband so he can stay at work longer, not think about the kids all day long while he’s trying to work and has to plan a birthday party and rent a place for the party and buy balloons and get his work done. You know, there’s someone doing all these jobs.

And the husband, you know, dad in this traditional home has a huge advantage because he can concentrate on his career. He doesn’t have a burden of doing two jobs basically at one time. And he’s typically rewarded by our culture versus women who are not.

And she looked at this study, these are kind of old studies, but they’re not that old. She looked at one from 2011. So that was about 10 years ago, a little 12 years ago. And they looked at families with children under 15 and it’s had 60% of the couples had fathers working full time. This is hetero.

I’ll call it, do 60% of opposite sex couples had a father working full time with a mother that worked part time or not at all, 60% with the father. And then only 3% had a full time working mom where the dad stayed at home or only worked part time. That’s a huge, huge difference, 60% versus 3%.

Another interesting thesis by Terrence Fitzsimmons. Another interesting thesis was written by Terrence Fitzsimmons. And he looked at CEOs, he looked at I think 60 of them. So there’s like 30 men and 30 women, they were all CEOs.

And I think it said 98% of the males had a stay-at-home wife versus three, I think it said versus two out of the 30 women CEOs and those two men they did work from home but they were working from home. They didn’t have any of the 30 women CEOs. None had a stay-at-home husband.

That would fulfill these roles as about 98% of the other CEOs that were men. So this support is a huge advantage for the male CEO versus a huge disadvantage for the female CEO in that there’s a person dedicated to one person’s career versus the other.

Who’s splitting their time between their career and managing a house and managing a family.

Let’s see.

Here’s one other survey for you. This will surprise you. They said, oh, well, it probably won’t actually. This says, talks about the time, it’s a time use survey, right? Of, it’s a time use survey here.

And they looked at this in 92, 97, 2006.

Comparing men and women working and the time spent in household tasks.

And what they found

Men regardless of whether they were working or not working or whatever they were doing, did about 15 to 20 hours of housework in a week.

And then women, if they’re not working, if they are not employed outside of the home, they do a lot more. They do about 42 hours of housework per week.

and women without a paid job, so doing, working from home or being a stay at home mom, did an average of 42 hours a week. So they did a lot more versus women who worked a full-time job, did 25 hours a week of housework, which women with a full-time job did on average, 25 hours a week, which is still five or 10 more hours than a full-time working man.

And this is the interesting part that men, when couples got divorced, men worked an average of 10 hours more. You would expect that because they’re in the house by themselves and men, it would add, this is the interesting part, when there were divorces in couples, men worked on average 10 hours more a week. That’s not that shocking because then they have to maintain their own household. Here’s the thing that is crazy.

That women that got divorced worked six hours less a week. So, full-time working moms got divorced and had six hours less work a week. So come on guys, help us out a little bit here. It’s like, are you kidding me? That’s true, this is true.

And here’s another interesting one in Australia that women, when they started working outside of the home, here’s another one interesting finding from Australia is that when women were working outside of the home for every 1% higher level of income they earned.

They would work 17 minutes less. And so as the income goes up, the housework goes down. That seems pretty intuitively obvious.

And this is some work by Janine Baxter and Belinda Hewitt.

So here’s another interesting one. That, you know, they earn more, they work less. Until women started earning over 66% of the household income, so they became the more of the primary income earner, their housework started going up. So there was this, if you graph it, it’s like a parabola or smiley face, the little curve down and then back up of housework. So as their income goes up,

They’re working less and less and less to a certain point, and then their income goes up and they working more again at the house, doing more housework per week.

So this whole unspoken workload with very minimal support really impacts our career trajectory and our wellbeing. Like this causes a lot of stress and overwhelm and anxiety in our lives. And you know, most women I know, you know, say over the past 10 years, which isn’t a huge population,

But this hasn’t been an ongoing conversation. It is more now, but mostly in the past, women have been medicated. Here’s an antidepressant. Here’s something you feel overwhelmed and anxious. Something’s wrong with you. Well, no, something is wrong with our culture where women are having this reaction of being stressed and anxious. I don’t think that it’s the same. I don’t think this consistent reaction is due to an individual problem. It’s a systemic failure for women and families and men. I mean men are affected, are involved. And when mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. And kids feel it, husbands feel it, wives feel it. Everyone in the home feels this. And so until we can change it or acknowledge it at least and validate it, that goes a long way.

So here’s the thing, continuing down this path is a path to burnout, it’s a path to chronic stress, it’s a path to feeling underappreciated, not even like yourself anymore.

There’s a huge, it feels like a loss of control and a loss of choice, which is actually traumatizing. And I mean it with a small t, but small t trauma is still chronic and it’s still a lack of choice, lack of autonomy that is injures our soul.

And impact our physical and emotional health so much.

And it impacts our physical, emotional, spiritual, mental well-being so much. And then that has huge implications on our career and family.

And this is, I’m talking about professional high achieving women here and all women really, but we have worked so hard to achieve this career, to achieve these things that we have wanted. It is time to be able to enjoy them to a certain extent.

We have worked so hard to achieve these things, you know, gone to medical school, gone to law school, gone to college, graduate degrees, all these things, master’s degrees. We’ve worked so hard and it’s heartbreaking to see these women that have worked so hard and aren’t able to enjoy it, not that everything has to be wonderful 100% of the time, but a little bit of the time. Maybe.

Over 50% would be great. And I don’t think we’re there yet. I don’t think we are there to where most women are enjoying their high achieving ambitious careers over 50% of the time. I would love to know, leave a comment, tell me what percent of the time you’re enjoying your career and the achievements that you’ve made along with your family and home life.

Is that good over 50% of the time? If it is, I am celebrating that. For me at a certain point in my life, it wasn’t. Now I think I’m probably over 50%, but for a while it wasn’t, definitely.

You know, not too long ago, I watched that movie nine to five with Dolly Parton and who else Jane Fonda? Who’s the other one? Dolly Parton? Jane Fonda, oh and Lily Tomlinson and Do you it came out in 1980? And their beef with their boss is they wanted flexible work schedule and equal pay basically the same things we’re needing wanting now and

That was 40 years ago? Isn’t that crazy? I can’t believe things haven’t changed more. But I think that there’s picking up momentum and I think we’re in the right direction now.

This time it is time to change for real though.

So we are the leaders at this time for a shift in our culture. And it’s a shift away from this go, go mentality of a career that takes over your life and drives you and a family that takes over your life and drives you. It’s a shift from them driving you to you having the power and not a power

Over, like not a power where you can beat everybody up like Superman, but a quiet power, like a huge waterfall or nature, a quiet power where we are sure of ourselves, certain of ourselves, and we know what our choices are, and we have the power to make our choices and stand by them.

And this comes with changing work environments, changing home environments. There’s a lot of things, but it first starts with each of us individually. First, knowing that we have choices and knowing that emotional labor and kin keeping really is work and it’s a lot, it can be really heavy, you know, trying to do all these things. And so once we’re aware of it and we can see it, we can…

The minimum start appreciating how much work goes into things. You know, another thing, I was talking to someone at my old hospital about one of the doctors that left and they were like, yeah, she’s just tired and she has a baby. And I’m just like, they were kind of frustrated by that. I’m like, are you serious? Of course she’s tired. You know, we have to…

Give space to women to be mothers and acknowledge that they’re mothers. I’m at there’s a big hesitation for me in this because.

If it’s not done well, it could be fairly destructive and set us back to where we don’t have options. But to me, the best option would be to support mothers with families that have different options for work, that have more flexible work, that have support with childcare. There’s all kinds of things we could do.

To support working women like this.

And anytime I do, anytime I do serious coaching with my clients, we start out with awareness, that’s the first thing. So I think that’s a huge step, just knowing what kin keeping is, what emotional labor is, and starting to recognize it is an amazing first step.

You know, the more we’re aware of it, the more inevitable the change is.

It is clear that we need some kind of change.

And you know, mentoring systems and community are two huge things that would also be helpful. When I got out of training, I didn’t know any women. I knew women who were pathologists, but I didn’t know any that had a full time job and kids. I didn’t know any and I still don’t know many that do. And I think mentoring would have been huge for me.

And also a sense of community. There’s some groups online that are helpful. Join Living True by Design community. That’s another community that is welcoming you. But a community is so helpful because then you hear what other people are going through and it normalizes your experience. We can feel so isolated and when we feel alone, again, that’s pretty traumatic. That’s again a little T, but these things add up.

To be really chronically painful.

So come over to the Facebook group, Living True By Design. I would love to hear if you’ve had experience with kin keeping and emotional labor and what your experience has been. If you have been.

Are you one of the moms that’s in the tired mom trend where we joke about drinking coffee to wake up and drinking wine to go to sleep? I’m not recommending that. But it’s kind of like a cultural meme even. It’s so normalized. So I would love to hear your experience of this and work together with ourselves, with our communities, with our Facebook group community. And

begin to take steps to a different way of being in this system.

We can design our own lives to be sustainable, fulfilling, and meaningful.

Well, with all that work, we definitely need to have some of our friends around.

I invite you to come by for our episode next week. And we are going to be talking about a secret ingredient to friendship.

I invite you to come to the episode next week where we will be unveiling a friendship building secret.

Something that people don’t really talk about. And it’s a huge secret that will really support building meaningful and lasting connections with our friends.

That’s it for today. And remember,

To show up, focus and shine as you live true by design.