Auditing Time and Sanity for Grandparents Raising Grandchildren

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What is the actual hourly rate of your sanity?

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Today, for our 100th episode milestone, we aren't just talking about the heart, we're auditing the ledger of the mission. If you feel like you're drowning in laundry and paperwork, it's not a character flaw, it's a system failure. Systems expert Pat Hankin joins me to explain how to move from reactive firefighting to to proactive system building.

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It's time to stop just surviving the storm and start managing the infrastructure.

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Welcome to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren Nurturing Through Adversity. In this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of Grandparents Raising Grandchildren as we navigate the complexities of of legal, financial and emotional support. I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society. Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of childrearing for children who have experienced trauma and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of kinship care.

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We'll discuss how we can change the course of history by rewriting our grandchildren's future, all within a supportive community that understands the unique joys and struggles. This podcast was made especially for you.

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Welcome to a community where your voice is heard, your experiences are valued, and your journey is honored.

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I sat in the quiet of my kitchen this morning, staring at a stack of school forms, medical bills and court dates.

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I realized that while I've spent the last four years healing my grandchildren's hearts, I've been drowning in the logistics of their lives. I felt like a failing CEO, one who was so busy walking the factory floor of daily needs that I forgot to look at the ledger of my own energy. Pat Hankin reminded me today that my memory isn't failing, it's just over text. This conversation changed how I look at my desk, my day, and my permission to finally let the low level tasks go. Pat Hankin has spent years in the trenches with over 470,000 parents, and her book, the Field Guide for Single Parents is exactly what it sounds like, a practical map for a solo journey. But whether you're a single grandparent or part of a partnership, the solo mental load we carry in kinship care is real.

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Pat is here to help us apply fact based parenting and professional systems thinking to our second cradle reality. Welcome to the show, Pat. Hi Laura. Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to have you in your work. You advocate for fact based parenting, but for those of us in the 2.7 million, our facts often feel like fires. We're trying to put out legal battles, trauma triggers and just the sheer exhaustion of starting over in our 60s and 70s. How do we begin to apply a professional system to a situation that feels entirely governed by emotion and emergency? Yeah, it is a lot. First of all, I'm going to acknowledge that and I'm going to acknowledge a lot of the triggers that happen with these emotions. And specifically what I heard from the 470,000 people that were in that community I moderated. And it's important to bring them in because my situation is going to be very different from your situation and different from another person. Bringing in the fact based and teasing out universal themes is really critical to make it applicable to everyone because there are universal themes. The book I wrote is for single parents. We've talked, you and I, about grandparents second time round parenting.

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The situation is very similar in that a feeling can come up that I didn't sign up for this. And what that does is it comes in and it really creates this subconscious resistance to what needs to get done going forward. So our goal is to help work and chip away at that resistance that we don't really always aware of. Right. That's why it's subconscious. Right. So I chose in this point, when I did my own research on doing this book and bringing in these voices, I chose to go to the research and say let's talk about what really works for single parents.

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What advice out there for overwhelmed people is there that's just not applicable. And there's my background's in financial services. There is a whole lot of information out there, these conventional wisdoms that's just wrong for overwhelmed parents and caregivers. And it's really important that we look at these things that might be tried and true measures but see if they work for our subsegment. So it's important to go down and look at the facts and then overlay a filter on it. Is will it work for those of us that have all these items that you just talked about? So there's the finance of time. So we love the way you put that. How do we audit a kinship household's daily routine to find and fix our energy leaks? Oh, that's. That's a lovely way to put it. There's. First of all, it's really important both in time management and in financial management that you know the value of your time. And when I say that is what is what do you get paid at the end of the day on an hourly basis. And you. The end. We provide all sorts of proxies for Figuring that out. If you went back to work, what would you get paid? If you were to learn a new skill, what would that cost you in terms of time? But understanding the value of your time is really important for you to decide where to spend your time. So it is an economic number, which is how much you bring in, how many hours you spend doing it, what's the cost to earning that money?

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And you can do it on a hypothetical basis, and we talk about that, and we'll give you a very cute little matrix to do that, very simple.

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And then you can decide where you're going to spend your time. And the most important thing we do in systems redesign is we get rid of low level tasks. And what do we call low level tasks are those that are not worth our time. And there's considerations you can make. Well, I don't have any more time to save time. I don't have enough cash to pay someone else. And we do talk about why in the end this will save you both in terms of time management and financial management. And a perfect example of how this is different from everyone is laundry. Everybody has to do laundry, right? We all like clean clothes. I can do my laundry. I had two machines and a setup for line drying here. And I can do it when I want to take a stretch break from work. I can go down there and throw something in. It's very simple. It gives me a lot of satisfaction to accomplish something. 15 minutes.

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My daughter, when she's in college, had a very different calculus. She had to haul the clothes down. She's in New Orleans. She had to haul the clothes down the road in the heat and sit there for three hours to make sure no one took her clothes.

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And then change the washer and dryers and stick the credit card and coins in or whatever they're doing down there and then walk back. And we figured out the total cost of that time was exactly equal to a laundry service, pickup and drop off. Because she could spend those, and she could spend those three hours working more hours at her job at a lab and earning them money to pay for that pickup service. So she ended up with a net positive.

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Some very good, some, some tasks are like that. And there's tasks from driving people versus putting them in a ride share. And there's all sorts of day to day activities that we do that might be better off outsourcing. So even for a grandparent that's raising grandchildren, going out to get a job part time might be less stressful than spending all that time at home doing all that work yourself, not getting childcare help, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Sometimes it, you know, the number is different for everyone. Their tasks are different. But there is a way to quantify it. And then very simple. And then say, you know, let me do this. Should I have my groceries delivered versus picking them up? The calculus for me says I should have a grocery delivery service, which is common here. Actually. I live in the country. It's not too many of them, but in the area. But I like going to the grocery store. Yeah. And call me crazy, I like picking out the ingredients because. Gets you out of the house. Yeah, gets me away. Kind of a loner. So, you know, there's the enjoyment factor that you have to put in it. I hate vacuuming with a passion. Right. So I will hire someone to come in and vacuum. Am I happier with the cat?

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Yeah. So every, you know, those are very, very micro examples. But you can, you can take that all the way up to doing your taxes, what we were talking about. Very timely, you know, and I'm sure. You have a system for figuring all of that in your book. Yes, there is a, there's a very simple chart and it'll say, well, I don't work out of the house. How do I figure out what I bring in? Right. I said, well, there's a hypothetical. If you did go back to work, what would you earn? And I give an example of the median income in America for that. And that at least won't give you a clue on what we talk. The next thing is a, prior to prioritizing your tasks, I think people, everything takes on equal priority, you know, equal level of urgency. It's very, very hard not to feel overwhelmed. So be able to put things in order of priority. And it's okay to procrastinate on things that are low priority.

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It's, it's fine. I'm giving you permission. Procrastinate. And now before you start laughing at me. I'm not, I'm really listening. It's going to be, I'm going to tell you to do less.

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Uh huh. I have understood that there is a certain portion of my day that I spend getting all these other things done, including work for the podcast. And then when the kids come home, I'm totally theirs. So that's one of the ways that I've reorganized my time and I have a lot to learn. I talk about the work that we do as grandparents is so important and, and we really are the CEOs of our infrastructure, recognizing our importance and giving Ourselves. The credit for being in that position is really important for all of us to do. And being CEOs, it's important for us to move from reactive firefighting to proactive system building if we want to run these companies successfully and if we want to have positive results.

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It is so true. You've described every company that I've gone in and done a redesign for. Yeah. So this is an important part of it are our infrastructures of both time and money. The solo mentality.

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How do we manage the decision making load even when we aren't doing it entirely alone? Well, first of all, don't let everybody off the hook. It's so common, particularly for women to say, oh, never mind, I'll do it because I know how to do it.

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I have a lot of experience that second time around. Guilty.

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Definitely guilty. So a CEO doesn't do it themselves. They delegate. And you have all sorts of people in your life that are on your staff and it starts with your kids. I call it recruiting the troops. There is in the book, there are pages and pages of developmentally appropriate tasks and you can decide that kids can do. I don't know when letting kids off the hooks, this thing started. I had no idea. It was just not in the cards for us. There are just certain things I wouldn't do because my focus was getting out of the house in the morning, getting her to school. And you know, this was, we all would focus on that. So my daughter's tasks were not morning tasks to get us out of the house. Right. Let's. Let's just pick the big picture. But in the afternoon she had her tasks.

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On weekends, Saturdays she had her tasks. And on Sunday we took the day off.

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And primarily because we'd go out and do something, usually with another family. It was really important for me to create community with it. I have a tool that I just came across. I never met these people. I don't take affiliates, so I mention any of these tools.

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I don't do affiliates with anything. Is this, have you seen this deck? It's called Fair play. I have not. So I, I looked it up, somebody mentioned it in the community, so I had to go buy it, of course.

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And it, what it's got in here is a deck of cards which everybody loves card games. And it's got. There must be like 300 of these or 200 of them that are tasks around. Going out on caregiving.

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Oh, fun. And you play them and then you decide which ones are important, which ones are not relevant, at least for now. As things change and who's going to do it. Make it a game, kids. It's a game of work when they think it's a game. Feeding the dogs. Feeding the dog. And I guess this was on Reese Witherspoon's podcast or something, but there are probably a lot of them here that. That aren't sufficient. You know, we could write up new cards of ours to do, but the most important, I use this now when I try to explain what's different for a single parent. It's really hard for people to understand how it's different for you. I say, okay, say take this one that you do. Take this one that you're. Both those. Put them all together. Yeah, right. That's what you have to do. I don't have to say anything else. The visual speaks, right, brain people, you can get this, but you can modify it at home. I think I'm big on modifying advice.

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Is it expensive? I don't know what expensive is. I don't remember what I paid for it. You know, I'm in my 60s. I don't remember it so much. I'll do my research and yeah, it's on. It's on Amazon. I just got it up on Amazon. Yeah, but that kind of gamifying things is always good. I agree. But I will say there's something called the Dunningkruger effect, and most people are not familiar with it. It's one of the 34 subconscious biases that we have, which means we're not aware of it, where we all overestimate our contribution and to. To a relationship or to, you know, a work task or something, we all think we do more than the other person. So I think this is really good for getting that on. That kind of bias aside, and sitting down and saying, well, I do this, I do that, and I think it's really good that you weight the tasks. Going to a job 9 to 5 is not the same as feeding the dog, but it might feel that way to a younger person. So letting kids fail another one. Oh, yeah, that's been a tough one for me, but a good one to learn.

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A lot of times we do when we put a system in place, then we do a test period, and we see what the result is. We as parents tend to catastrophize the future, and it's actually egged on by the constant media screaming in our ears and the feeling that if you're not the best, then you're not anything. Making mistakes is something everybody should feel great about because that's how we learn. I always remember every test question I ever got wrong. I mean, why is that? It sticks with you. Everybody's got a different family, right? So what you're talking about is great because it's a system that overrides whatever your background is. And we do have, we do have certain mantras in this and guiding principles of doing an overwhelming job like y'. All.

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And one is that you gotta abandon perfection number one. And if you get caught up in the perfection raising of your children, you're just playing a fool's game because nobody's perfect, right?

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Nobody. And the other one is to go easy on yourself and for that matter, go easy on everybody else. Because it's just, it's. We're all trying. You have to Listen to episode 98 with Anthony Szilard who talks about our perspective and judgment of other people. It's fascinating.

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A lot of times it's to make ourselves feel better. Yes. And. Well, and I won't get into that today, but listen to that episode. I will. I just wrote it down. It's great. The third thing is to.

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And this goes to your fact based question. The third principle is to acquire data, get fact based information. There is in the Internet. I see this all the time and it infuriates me right when they tell people, don't go out and buy a new car with an expensive car loan because it's up to $700 a month and it's going to increase your insurance. Well, this is true. But while you are buying a car which is a depreciating asset, and anybody in finance will tell you you rent depreciating assets and you buy appreciating assets. Car being a depreciating asset. I think that's pretty universal. Correct. It doesn't grow in value the more you use it. No. House mostly increases in value.

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But there are other reasons to own a house. I actually currently rent a house. Most people, the way the economics are here in New England right now, it's all local. But if you got a car payment problem and you are a single parent or a parent without backup transportation, getting a used car is probably not the solution if you're trying to be reliable.

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Right. Because car's not reliable. So you look at renting it. The other term for that is leasing. If it's a way to get you into a car. Now that assumes you're not going for a muscle car or a giant SUV or. Let's be practical, folks.

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Sadly, that's my name. Practical Pat. Yeah.

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But there, I'm just saying there's a lot of scary, it's a lot of advice out there for people that you have to apply to your own situation. You know, sometimes it can be motivating to have you look forward to, to. I won't get into the finer points of investing and how I modify that. That's there. The more important thing is that you feel financially comfortable by having an emergency fund and that you know that you're saving for your own, your own life as well, and that will in turn help your kids. The other principle we talk about beyond data is that you achieve these changes through small steps.

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And I don't know if your other guests have talked about that. A lot can get done a little at a time. And if you only have 15 minutes to do something, well, let's say you look up the phone number for the doctor and you put it by your computer and the next day maybe you come back and place a call and expect a call back and that try and solve the challenge all at once. But to break it into tiny steps. Great advice. I like that. Well, I was going to ask you about in the field guide framework, identifying the top three critical needs for our sanctuaries to run smoothly. Did we answer that question in the previous statement that you made?

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I would add, you have to have a system that one where you know what you need. You have to have a strong sense of why you need something so that you don't feel it's imposed on you. So do you give us a way of figuring that out? Yeah. So we talk about lying on the picnic table and fantasizing, I can do that. I had surgery a couple years ago and, you know, I was restricted to what I could do. So I was sitting in a chair in my driveway. That's about all I could get to. And I had a, you know, hip replacement. Right. Something a lot of people can relate to.

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And I was just sitting there and I couldn't do anything. And I ended up just watching the birds and thinking of the fifth chapter, the this topic in the book. It does, you know, forced boredom is good.

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I'm going to refer to another episode, the one that is just prior to yours. Episode 99 is from a grandmother that is actually adding her dreams back into this system that has been working. And I think that's an essential part of it. I mean, we don't want to forget with all of these factual, systematic needs that we have, that that dreaming has to be part of it, that our passions have to be part of it. So I'm sure you write about that and it's been added into your book. Yeah. And it changes over time. And the advice I give on that is when you're putting your tasks down for the day and after auditing your tasks that you have, I would say audit what you do. And I have found at the age of 60, I figured this out.

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Laura. I always say we're always learning, always growing until the day they put. And we're going to, we're going to. Talk about this in terms of a system in a bit, but that I can I audit. I started writing down, I did a time and motion study on myself.

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All right. What do I spend my time doing? And I figured out that I can do five tasks a day that might feel appalling. Right. Five care tasks a day other than my work.

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And I think it's, it's shocking to me that that was my limit and it wasn't an energy thing, it was a mental space thing. Okay. All right. Well, I also don't have a child at home and she's graduated. Right. It was probably before I audited myself, it was probably a different calculus.

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But the, but that is telling you that that's, you shouldn't over schedule yourself because it's just a, it's going to fail. Right. Now some days I can really, the nature of the task, I can get 10. Other days it might be three.

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So understanding. So maybe we should write that down every day.

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Three or five. Whatever we decide, say these are the tasks I get done. Everything else, you prioritized them because, you. Know, give yourself a schedule what's going to get done. Failure is an option.

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Yeah. I'm sure if you don't fill out that form for school, they'll come after you. I wouldn't make it, you know, your default scenario, but just, you know, take away the, the anxiety of not getting it right. I have great quotes from Star Trek.

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I love Star Trek. Good. Okay. And there's a quote, right? So Next Generation had this one and I think Data was in a situation, you know, the robot, where he doesn't, it didn't work out and he's all sad. I don't know, can robots be sad? Captain Picard comes in and he says sometimes you can do everything right. You can have all your systems in place and things still go wrong. And he says that's not failure, that's being human.

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So maybe we should allot a day. Like maybe only so many of our days should be productive in a week. And then and you're gonna find someday. I was off. Here's the extra list. Exactly. The actual organizer I used for that was this. And I don't again, this is not a promotion. It's something called the bullet journal. And somebody gave it to me and I thought, oh great, another system to learn. Like I needed another system. I think my daughter was about 10 and come lockdown I finally had time. I opened this thing up and it's basically a blank book. And it. And I like the way the book felt, I liked the way the paper felt. I like the way, you know, I write with pencil.

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I don't like because I do a lot of erasing. And the instructions took me about 10 minutes to read. And that was it. And it was for the first time that I could outsource what we call our reproductive memory. Your ability to remember everything and be able to just have it there so I could consult it. And I no longer had to spend the brain power during the day figuring out what I should do next. That's a huge thing and two reasons. One is after the age of about 20, our reproductive memory starts to decrease the recall. This is fact based stuff. But our analytical brain, where we can figure out the results of things and the relationships between things we do, it starts to increase. That's why we're so wise when we get older. And that's why it's important not to keep your whole lives in your head. Right. Because then it's got no prioritization. You can't remember it, things fall through the cracks, you start talking badly to yourself. So it's having an organizer that you can actually outsource. We talked about outsourcing things. Yeah, good CEO delegates. I delegate my tasks, the remembering of my tasks to my, to my journal. Good advice as well. Yes, I journal a lot more than I ever did. And why do you think that is? Putting my thoughts on paper does something for me internally. And I don't know if maybe it's the safety of knowing that there is a place where all that is being put and that I don't have to rely on my memory because my memory never was great, even when I was young and it's worse now. So if I have, if I just have it written down, there's something that makes me feel better about life. You feel like it's contained. That's my feeling, that's my goal, my why. I want to feel like I have a contained chaos free life. And that actually speaks to the value of routines. All of this is great stuff.

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Well tell our listeners before I ask you a few other questions before we go where they can find your book. The field guide for single parents. The field guide for single parents. And you can put in the word grandparents for that because it's really for any overwhelmed parent. I agree. I would agree absolutely. That's why you're on Kim Show. It can be found on Amazon.com I have recommended to people they also can go to their. If they don't want to spend the money. This is not a profit making thing for me. They can go to their library and request their library order it.

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10% of the libraries in the country have already ordered it and it came out in the publisher's weekly review. And there is no other book like this. There's no fact based book. You can find books about experiences and memoirs but there's no fact based book or a book based on this kind of sample size of people.

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You hear that listeners? That needs to be in every library in this country and if it isn't in yours, go down there and ask for it. Yeah. And I had one library tell somebody in North Carolina that it's too new and I have no idea.

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They just probably didn't want to deal with it or they didn't like the topic. You know, you get a lot of kind of weird biases but 10% of the libraries have said so. You might find it in your system. If not, if you ask them to order it, you can order it through your bookstore too. Is it on Kindle? It is on Kindle. It is a large book because it covers many developmental ages, a lot of topics. It's reference book and the book is meant to be by your bedside and dipped into and out of whenever you need it. Because I know somebody. Yeah, it's a reference book. How well you subscribe to a Kindle in a reference book is up to you. I have found most people go for the printed version mainly because it's meant. It's. I took a year designing the interior. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I really wanted it to be accessible to all ways that people think and read. It has wide margins, it has sans serif font, short paragraphs. It's meant to be done in 15 minute increments so you don't get overwhelmed. And it's meant to be written in.

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I write in my books. Yeah. I highlight mine and make notes all over em. I don't think the library would take to prime leave to that.

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Yeah, yeah, there's. There's some books that are out of print. That I taught a money money management class for young adults. And just like we talk about auditing your time so you can see where you can do less, we talk in the finance section about auditing, how you spend your money. We have an expression in business.

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You can't manage what you don't measure. So if you haven't measured and then figure out how you spend your money, put it in two columns. What's absolutely necessary and what's optional. A streaming service might be necessary, but not. But four others might be optional. It might be that, you know, groceries and food is necessary, but eating out is optional. Except once a week, you really might want to just take a break and get takeout. So once you've put those into columns and to measure it, then you can decide how to move categories around because you know what it's spent for. Yeah.

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Yeah, I'm looking forward to reading it. Oh, good.

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Let me know what you think. I will. Well, I ask all of my interviewees now three standard questions that will be going into my book that I'm publishing at the end of this year. I ask you a systematic question, a taboo question, and a policy question.

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From our bird's eye view of 470,000 families, what do you think is the single biggest efficiency leak in our government systems that's actively draining the energy of grandparent caregivers today? The fragmented nature of the social system.

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We talk in the book a lot about universal income, and we actually had it for a bit over the pandemic. The lack of will to solve that problem is a big problem. And I think you're better off working at a local level or state level than you would be on a federal level. And there has been a push, for instance, in New York. Know if you're familiar with their system, they actually created a portal to all their programs. And I think that there's no reason that you have to keep inputting the same information over and over again on a different form. I experienced trying to get information out of Texas when we got the kids. We got the kids out of Texas through the Child Protective Services and moved them to Montana.

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Every single day. I had to get on the phone, give the same information, and talk to a different person every single time for six months before we got the medical help that we needed for them. I mean, my granddaughter needed seven teeth pulled when we got her. And because of the fact that she had to be put under in order to do that work, we couldn't do the work on her because it was thousands of dollars that we did not. Have and was not covered by anything. No. We could have gotten help to get her teeth fixed from grants, but because she had to be put to sleep, we didn't qualify for them. It's ridiculous how inefficient the system was down there. I'm not as familiar with New York. I'm becoming more familiar with some states through other listeners and other grandparents that I speak with. I think your stories and other people's stories of these things is really important for your local legislature to hear. And I have a friend.

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Friend who's also a client who was trying to get a bill through. Is a conservation bill for. For animals. Like no private ownership of big cats, you know, is legal. And to be able to ban that. And you know, when was the last time those guys in Washington ever agreed on anything?

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Don't get me going. Yeah, yeah. So it was a concerted multi year effort. It did take time to talk to these people. I think there was some lobbyist involved or whatever they raised the money for. And this is being able to get those people to move.

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They did it. They did it. And you can do that more successfully on a local level and then work your way up.

00:34:35.070 --> 00:34:56.750
There's no question about it. But you just need one. You need one sponsor. I'd say two from both sides of the aisle. I don't know in Louisiana how that would work. You have a very different civil system, but, you know, you still have congressmen and local representatives and legislatures and getting people on there to sponsor that. Nobody wants to spend money.

00:34:57.150 --> 00:35:15.409
But if you do the economic trade off, I'm sure you've seen what it costs to put kids in our foster care system versus kinship care. You can't even compare the difference in the cost to take care of a child in the foster care system versus what we're providing for them.

00:35:15.570 --> 00:35:33.260
So it does not make sense that we aren't subsidized more to do the jobs that we're doing. I don't know. Were you aware that in 2018 that the states were all given$2 million to fix their aggregation systems, you know, their portals for all the different programs available?

00:35:33.900 --> 00:35:37.740
I'd start by asking your congressman how that went. Okay.

00:35:37.900 --> 00:35:44.860
All right. I just wrote it down. And I have a few connections down here through family members that I'm going. To, you know, they.

00:35:45.099 --> 00:36:14.909
You're here in Massachusetts, where I live, I have a representative, I'm on her mailing list, which is important that everybody gets on their representatives mailing list and she puts out, are you Having problems with student loans? Are you having problems with this program or that program? These are the hours you can come in. You don't necessarily talk to her. You talk to her staff. And the in person visits make quite an impression. So does phone calling, phone banking. Those are the two most effective things I found.

00:36:14.909 --> 00:36:45.920
I'm not a political person by nature. I just think I don't like my taxpayer money being being wasted on ridiculous work. That's not helping anybody. I'm an efficiency person. On the federal level. There are two excellent models of online portals that work so they shouldn't have to go reinvent the wheel. One is Medicare and the other one is Social Security. And our friends at AARP are always on their backs about those too. They could add yours. So there's your advocate. If they get the will.

00:36:47.829 --> 00:37:46.409
Okay, taboo question for the day. How do we break the silence around the cognitive load that we carry? We discussed this a little bit earlier. Why is admitting that we're overwhelmed by the paperwork of care, not the child so important for our long term survival? Is the problem admitting it to yourself or to peers or people at the school pickup or where is the problem? Can you define it more? I think it's personal. I do. I'm gonna let the listeners. I'm definitely gonna pose this question to the listeners because I'd like to hear everyone's feedback on this question. You make a very good point. I can answer that question for myself, but I can't answer it for everyone. Totally understand that one. Paperwork. I just have a huge aversion for paperwork. And for instance, we don't get any help financially here. We did in Montana.

00:37:48.969 --> 00:38:07.449
The little bit of financial help that we got in Montana could be applied in our life down here, but it doesn't. So I just don't want to deal with paperwork. I guess it's not critical enough for me to fill out the paperwork.

00:38:07.920 --> 00:38:11.759
I'd like to have the other listeners answer that question, but for me it's personal.

00:38:12.000 --> 00:38:18.960
You know, when it comes to admitting to yourself that you're overwhelmed, I don't know, there's probably some lessons back there we all got.

00:38:19.440 --> 00:39:21.519
You should be able to shoulder bigger burdens. This goes back to the systemic plan that we talked about in the beginning, which is to recruit the troops, outsource low value tasks, but maybe temporarily hiring someone in to do it, getting a caseworker from the town that might feel too exposed. But you could say, I need help doing this and you don't have to say much else. It's a lot for anyone. I think anybody meeting your situation would say, yeah, I would have the same trouble. For me, my time is already stretched to the max. Time is really valuable for me. There are a couple of online mega sources that you can try. Have you heard of 21 1? It might be more of the problem, but you could just explain the problem and see if they come up with something. Yeah. So anyone that hasn't heard about 211 before? 211 is like a 911 line. Works like 911. Yeah. It's not an emergency.

00:39:21.679 --> 00:39:36.090
Yeah, I know that I was referred to it because in the state of Montana, my major resource was the University of Montana, that they were the ones that got me more answers than any other government agency.

00:39:36.409 --> 00:39:47.289
And so because there are those answers really aren't there, on a government level, 211 works in your area specifically. And you know, getting. There are people.

00:39:47.929 --> 00:40:27.500
So there. The Council on Aging is another resource that's underutilized. It's federally funded. It's local, so it's administered locally. You know, you kind of grimaced. I don't know what you're like. But they have a. I didn't. I didn't find. I didn't find much help there. But that was Montana. It could be different. I mean, it's different in every county because it's a county based program. Yeah, yeah. It's funny, when you get out of Massachusetts, Massachusetts, everything's town based. And then you get out west and everything's county based, county based. So in our Council on Aging here. And your listeners are all over the United States, I take it. Yes. So they may have good ones in Europe as well.

00:40:28.159 --> 00:40:31.840
Okay, great. That they have better organizations.

00:40:32.079 --> 00:40:35.119
Yeah, The Council on Aging, for those who don't know.

00:40:35.759 --> 00:41:08.570
Every town or governmental entity, that local governmental entity, like a county you might have gets a Council on Aging. It's federally funded with dollars, and they have all sorts of programs. The ones here are. I think they all basically have a van to take people to medical appointments. They have lists of vetted contractors. So I needed someone to come and help. When I had my hip replaced, I couldn't get up and downstairs. You know, the whole bit. Brutal surgery, everybody forgets about it. It's like childbirth and they can't remember it ever happened.

00:41:10.329 --> 00:41:13.929
But I needed someone. No one was going to come do this for me.

00:41:14.170 --> 00:41:24.769
So this place, they had a list, a vetted list of people who would come and help me. And if you said, I need someone to help me with paperwork, they might have one there. I Don't know.

00:41:25.409 --> 00:41:40.170
Yeah, I have found that it's the other thing that they have vans, they take you to medical appointments. There might be respite suggestions. It's all local. I know a lot of people have stopped driving. This is really incredible. Critical. They take you.

00:41:40.170 --> 00:41:47.570
There's a van here that takes you shopping once a week. Some of the stuff that you can take advantage of with just another set of hands for something.

00:41:47.920 --> 00:41:54.639
Yes, great advice. Now you say, would you refer people to 211? 211, yes.

00:41:54.880 --> 00:42:07.440
Because it's staffed by volunteers. Understand you may not get the best person and they're not helpful. And I would say you thank this unhelpful person for their time. You hang up and you call back again later.

00:42:09.840 --> 00:42:17.210
Some of the advice they would have is they weren't thinking through the person on the other end or whatever.

00:42:17.929 --> 00:42:21.210
It's free, you know, it's, it's, it's acquiring data.

00:42:21.449 --> 00:42:25.050
That's part of our mantra here. Right. It's getting facts.

00:42:25.529 --> 00:43:35.590
You know, a service minded person such as yourself, I'm sure you can relate that not everybody's going to know everything about everything. But it's awfully nice they're there. Yeah. And they've got the database. So why not access the database? It was actually two, one one that helped us get the, the free legal advice when we had to go to court to get custody of the children because we didn't have the money to do it. And we got free legal counsel on how to walk in ourselves and represent ourselves in court. Right. And that was, that was$15,000 we saved. That's a great story. And for things that are less critical than what you're talking about about walking into court, all these normal domestic things are now all on these cheapy online legal sites like nodalo.com or legal zoom and Consumer Reports, which is a great resource for information. Fact based testing, actually went through and tested all these sites and said they're just as good as going into a$400 an hour attorney. Now they also have attorneys that you can talk to if you have a question about a form or something.

00:43:35.750 --> 00:43:57.389
I've used it for things like when people borrow money. Right. Well, they gotta sign a note for me. But I don't want to pay a lawyer to come up with the note. So I'll just download it. Even better, make them download it. You know, just mark it up for what you want. Well, that's a good endorsement coming from you. Because I did want to speak with an attorney because I didn't trust those other resources out there.

00:43:57.389 --> 00:44:51.230
But you're saying that Consumer Reports has said that most of these, these two. Companies, you know, they went through the forms. Louisiana is the only one you can't get there, can't get on the GP online free legal sites because you, you have a different civil code. Did not know that yet. No, I do not. You have a different civil code, the Napoleonic Code. Still. You have that same criminal code, but you have a different civil code. That's a little different. But the rest of them, you can download one of these forms and you can go to Consumer Reports and look up online legal advice and see what they say. I mean, there are lots of things out there that are helpful. Well, last question for today. And you've been a wealth of information. If you were the COO of the Department of Health and Human Services, that'd be a fun job.

00:44:51.869 --> 00:45:14.009
What is the one policy move you would make tomorrow to reduce the invisible overhead for kinship families? Well, that's an easy one because we've sort of touched on it already. Right. It's getting the information in a frictionless way, to use your phrase, to people that they're not inputting the same information over and over again into different forms for different agencies.

00:45:15.130 --> 00:45:30.150
I think the current secretary, I think he's thinking about his legacy at this point. He's gotta be his legacy to fix this problem. That would save a tremendous amount of money. It would be a win.

00:45:31.110 --> 00:45:41.829
Right. To not only 3 million grandparents, but to everybody. Yeah. And you can, you can quantify that number, which helps emotionally.

00:45:41.829 --> 00:47:03.539
I think there is a lack of understanding about what this involves and who the people are. I think getting some sort of sensitizing to that of the COO is helpful. And pointing out that these portals and these programs already exist for two others that work perfectly well. So this won't be starting from scratch. You can go hire one of those former management companies that I used to work for, the accounting firms and put this in place. And it's a long term job. It's not something that's done overnight. But if you hit a crisis, you can, you know, run the wires on top of the streets to get the power up after an outage. Right. So it is one of the things that I think I've heard you talk about being overwhelmed by it. The questions you're being asked, the people at the other end that don't have aren't working in the same for the same critical outcome. I think getting people on the same page and put a portal that's pretty simple. I can't believe this information you're being offered is that different, right? Why couldn't you just upload the EPIC files, medical files to, you know, you have to do it because of hipaa. But you know, why couldn't you just upload that instead of having type it in or asking your poor overworked doctor to type it in?

00:47:03.619 --> 00:48:22.880
Because that tends to happen, you know, all the demographic information, I'm sure you put that into 15 different places and this can apply at your local level with your schools as well. Yeah. It used to drive me crazy that I'd get the same thing sent to me over and over again with the same information. I choose to be positive and think that someone is going to figure out that this and the statistics vary from 2.7 as you said. AARP says it's 3.3 million people that are being underserved and under recognized. I would like to think that someone will realize that that will be a improvement to for our mental health. So I have a question for that. Well, other people's mental health is kind of this amorphous thing everybody talks about, but I think when you get down to the numbers, everybody can realize the value. Right. During the pandemic, did you have the kids? No. No. Okay. I was wondering if any of your listeners could write them in if they had the kids, did they get the pandemic subsidy money that went out? It was basically universal income for people with children. We will reach out to the listeners and ask them that question. Well, thanks Pat. It's been a delight. Yeah. If talking about systems and finances can be a delight, this was one of them.

00:48:23.920 --> 00:49:14.989
Well, I hope you all realize that and I, and I hope one day y' all get a Reddit sub. A subreddit community. Are you familiar with Reddit? I am. I have not used it. Well, it's actually a pretty decent. It's as I don't particularly like social media, but as for creating community, it's. You gotta get someone to moderate it, which is, you know, you set your rules and you make sure people don't violate it. In the single parent community, I actually started as an enforcer. I kept the creeps out and I left any posts that asked for money, right, that was mine. And then I started answering it and then I started realizing I knew more and more that I could provide value. Then I started to see themes and then that's what led to this four year project to write the field guide for single parents. I'll look into that. Well, it's been a delight to talk to you, Lara. Take care. You as well. Thank you. Bye.

00:49:15.389 --> 00:49:44.759
I'd like you to step into the reflection room with me. Pat challenged us today to look at our subconscious resistance to our new roles. Ask yourself, am I doing every single chore because I have to or because I'm afraid to admit I need help? Is there one low level task? The laundry, the groceries, the yard that you can delegate to a service, a neighbor or a grandchild this week to buy back one hour of your soul?

00:49:45.320 --> 00:50:14.960
We cannot lead a mission if we're too exhausted to see the map. I've been wrestling with the tension between my visionary as a leader and my personal reality. To be quite honest. Well, Brad Hoffman is a man who doesn't just understand that tension. He lives it as a pastor and author who specializes in spiritual formation and leadership strategy. He's also a grandparent, raising his own grandchildren. Next week, join us.

00:50:15.279 --> 00:50:22.239
He's here to help us bridge the gap between visionary leadership and the raw, everyday work of nurturing a family.

00:50:23.849 --> 00:50:46.329
We're 2.7 million strong. Still nurturing, and still here. We're moving mountains, relocating lives, and seeing again when the world has looked away. You are the CEO of a rescue mission, and your heart is the most important asset on the balance sheet. Please keep nurturing, keep leading, and I'll see you in the next boardroom.