Go Take a Bath!: A Powerful Self-Care Approach to Extraordinary Parenting

What if you could reduce your parenting stress AND nurture your child's emotional development at the same time? Conventional wisdom teaches us to put our children’s needs above our own. Our worth as parents is often judged by how much we sacrifice for the good of our children rather than how happy and well-adjusted they are. In Go Take a Bath!, licensed psychotherapist and parenting coach Robin Kevles-Necowitz suggests that we invert this modern-day standard. She advises us to make parents, not children, our top priority, in much the same way that flight attendants instruct us to put on our own oxygen masks before assisting others. The typical “kids-first” approach is not only destructive for parents and marriages, she says, but also damages our children emotionally by setting them up for a lifetime of anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, and low self-esteem. But by placing our needs above our children’s, we offer a living example of what a balanced, healthy, full adult life looks like. Kevles-Necowitz proposes a powerful self-care model, which fosters a happier home and the blossoming of independent, self-sufficient, confident children. The idea is to indulge our need to relax, have fun, eat well, and enjoy our whole lives—not just our parenting side. This new paradigm requires that we sit back, refrain from trying to “fix” everything, and allow our children to manage more of the day-to-day dramas that arise. As a result, they learn life skills, and we get to enjoy parenting more. Of course, this approach generates new anxieties that we must learn to manage. For that, Kevles-Necowitz recommends that you Go Take a Bath!