Burnout Isn't the Crash. It's Refusing to Take the Cape Off.
This is a conversation I'd been waiting to have since the day I met my guest. Dr. Nicole Monteiro is a licensed psychologist with twenty years of experience, a professor, a speaker, an author — and most importantly for this episode, a mom of two girls. We talked about something every parent needs to hear before the school year gets into full swing: our own stress, and what it's actually doing to our children, even when we think we're holding everything together.
Stop Trying to Be Liked
I told Nicole about a moment in my own house — after years of being the more negotiable parent, more willing to hear my kids out and find a compromise, I finally got firm about the dishes with my eighteen and nineteen-year-olds. My daughter didn't love it, but the dishes got done. I asked Nicole why it's so hard for some of us to hold that line while other parents seem to do it effortlessly.
Her answer was direct: “It's being stop trying to be liked. That's not your role as a parent.” We bend our boundaries, she explained, when we don't like the backlash — the guilt, the tantrums, whatever pushback comes. The parents who hold boundaries most consistently, like her husband, simply aren't tuned into a child's reaction the same way. “Whatever your attitude is or how you feel about it, it's inconsequential,” she said of his approach. “That's what I find — the ones that are more willing to negotiate, we keep moving the goalposts.” Her advice for the parent who knows they're the soft one: get firm within yourself about what the boundary is and why, and don't be overly emotional about the reaction. They'll be okay.
Can Kids Feel Our Stress Without a Word Being Said?
I told Nicole what I see constantly at my learning center: a child walks in for an assessment, visibly anxious, and sometimes the parent is calm — that's just the child's own nerves. But sometimes I look at the parent and they're just as anxious, just as stressed, and that's a different thing entirely. I asked her: can children actually absorb a parent's stress without a single word being spoken?
“Absolutely,” she said. “Anxiety is not really what's spoken, it's what's felt.” Kids pick it up through facial expressions, body language, rate of speech — and if a child is already a little vulnerable to anxiety, they become masters at scanning their environment for whether it's safe. Sometimes, she said, the biggest danger is a parent feeling like their child's performance is a direct reflection of them as a parent. That pressure gets absorbed, even when it's never spoken aloud — and it starts young. She pointed to the viral videos from pandemic homeschooling, parents losing their patience over simple math problems, as an example of exactly this kind of transferred pressure. Her advice for the parent who catches herself feeling embarrassed by a child's academic performance: separate behavior that's genuinely destructive from a child simply not being where you hoped. “A lot of smart kids are anxious,” she said, “and what you're doing is setting up a dangerous connection in their mind between their performance and their self-worth.”
What Burnout Actually Is
I used to think burnout meant the crash — the day you finally can't function. Nicole reframed it for me entirely. She compared it to a trainer loading weights onto your shoulders during a plank: for thirty seconds, it builds endurance. But burnout is carrying those same thirty or forty pounds into every single activity you do, so everything feels less joyful, more arduous, more difficult. For parents, that weight is often unspoken expectations, old hurts from our own childhoods, guilt we're carrying and don't name.
She was candid about her own experience. Her health told the story before she did — her A1C climbed to prediabetic levels, her weight crept up fifteen pounds from stress eating and skipped meals eaten in the car. The moment it clicked for her was one ordinary night, sitting on the bed with her youngest, crying and not knowing why. “I was pulled in so many directions,” she told me. “Trying to please too many people. That's what it was.” The distinction she draws between tired and burnt out is simple but useful: being tired gets better with a good night's sleep. Burnout doesn't respond to any of the usual fixes — sleep, a nighttime routine, none of it moves the needle, because by that point it's mental as much as physical. It can mimic depression: the numbness, the loss of enthusiasm, the sense that nothing you do gets you back on track.
Recovery Starts With Being Okay Disappointing People
I asked Nicole what she'd tell the mom who's running on empty right now: where do you even start? “You have to take time for yourself each and every day, even if it's five minutes,” she said — her showers became her haven, lavender steamers and all, door locked, no interruptions. But underneath the small daily practices, she said the real shift is a mindset one: being okay with disappointing people. “We're so hell-bent on not disappointing people, and then we're overcommitting,” she said. “I have to take off that mental pressure to try to be so good and perfect for everybody.”
What Anxiety Looks Like in a Young Child
Since most of the families listening have elementary-age kids, I asked Nicole what anxiety actually looks like at that age, because it rarely sounds like I'm nervous. “It's usually behavioral or physical,” she said — irritability, avoiding things, tummy aches, headaches, trouble sleeping. Kids aren't putting two and two together and naming the feeling; you'll see it in what they try to avoid, or in a reaction that's out of proportion to what's actually happening.
That matched exactly what I see at my center — kids who ask to use the private bathroom constantly during a test, or suddenly develop a stomachache the day of an assessment. And it's not only the loud, acting-out kids who carry anxiety. Quiet, agreeable children can be carrying just as much, and because they don't cause problems, it's easier for adults to miss. Nicole's advice there: build one-on-one time, show your own vulnerability, apologize when you overreact, let your child see that you don't have it all figured out either. Kids think we're superwoman. They're looking for proof that we're not.
One Thing You Can Do Tonight
I asked Nicole for one thing a parent could actually do tonight to lower the anxiety temperature in their home. Her answer: return to what grounds you. Eat dinner together and have a non-academic conversation — no grades, no issues, just something fun, maybe a family game. “Anxiety is literally taking you into the future,” she said. “You take that temperature down by being in the present.” Her family has a standing Thursday takeout night, something small and reliable that everyone looks forward to — the kind of routine that becomes an anchor, the thing your family comes back to no matter what else is happening that week.
Right before we recorded, I told Nicole about a moment with my nineteen-year-old son in the car — he could feel my stress without me saying a word, just from how tightly I was gripping the wheel. He told me, mommy, if this is hard for you, imagine how hard it is for me. I said, you're right, and I need a moment to get myself together. Our kids feel more than we say out loud, and the more settled we get, the more settled they get too. You can't pour from an empty cup. Take care of yourself first — it's not selfish, it's the most direct way to take care of them.
Listen Now
You can catch this full episode of Raising Scholars wherever you listen to podcasts:
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Raising Scholars helps parents of elementary school kids build confident, independent learners without nightly battles. New full-length episodes every Tuesday and Sunday Reset episodes every Sunday.
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Connect with Dr. Nicole Monteiro:https://www.drnicolemonteiro.com