Hi, I'm Rina Ninean and this is Ask Lisa, the Psychology of Parenting Podcast.

It's a podcast to help parents better understand their kids. Dr. Lisa DeMore, a psychologist with three

decades of experience, and the author of three New York Times best-selling parenting

books takes your questions. Both of us are moms ourselves, and we're eager to hear from you.

So send us your questions to Ask Lisa at Dr.LisaDemore.com. And you can join our community by

following us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The handle is Ask Lisa Podcast. And also subscribe to our

brand new YouTube channel, Ask Lisa Podcast. Episode 151. How do I find balance in 2024?

Ah, we made it to 2024, Lisa. We did. Last year was a big year. A lot happened. I am glad to be starting fresh again. Yeah. I love the new year because you get to start fresh and rethink things. And I also always love our New Year's podcast, the first one that we put out in the top of the year, because we focus a lot on the parents and what they might need. Yeah. No, I think caring for kids involves caring for the

adults around them. And so taking time to reflect on how we take good care of ourselves

goes a long way towards all the good things that happened in family life. It took me a long

time to understand the

importance of that. So I want to kick it off with you. We decided not to do a letter in this

episode, but instead to sort of focus on how do you get your family to thrive and yourself to

thrive? How do you need to rethink the new year? So I guess I want to start off and ask you, Lisa,

what do you think we should be focusing on? I'm really glad to be talking this through because I think let's actually start with what not to focus on.

Because I think there's such a heavy, you know, New Year's resolution, making oneself better in 400 ways, that I actually want to try to pull people's attention away from that. And one of the

things, Rina, I've been thinking about a lot is the term optimization. I think there's a really

heavy push in the media around us to try to optimize ourselves or optimize our children.

And what I mean by that is to try to, you know,

use every moment as effectively as possible to be the best possible version of who we can be

and who our kids can be. And this is well-meaning. There's nothing ill-intentioned in this.

I think that New Year's Resolution time can be prime time for thinking about optimization.

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