What happens when you’ve spent so long supporting your child’s nervous system that you’ve forgotten how to support your own?
Finding Capacity When Your Child’s Burnout Becomes Your Burnout.
When you’re homeschooling a neurodivergent child in burnout, parenting can become all-consuming. Your world gets smaller. Your own needs become quieter. You may even feel trapped. Even the suggestion to “practice self-care” can feel impossible when your child needs you every moment of the day.
In this episode, we’re asking a different question.
How do we stay connected to ourselves when life doesn’t leave much room for us?
This conversation with Katy Jo Murdock closes our three-part podcast series on capacity by exploring the small, realistic ways parents can care for themselves while continuing to care for their children.
Katy Jo, a member of our Day in the Life community and mother of four, shares her family’s homeschooling journey, her son’s burnout, her own burnout, and the gradual shift from trying to homeschool “the right way” to trusting both her child and herself and how she rediscovered joy along the way.
Instead of offering another list of things parents “should” be doing, this conversation explores how tiny moments of regulation can help us remain connected to ourselves during the hardest seasons of parenting.
In This Episode We Discuss:
What happens when your child’s burnout becomes your burnout
Parents often recognize the signs of burnout in their children long before they recognize them in themselves. We talk about how caring for children with high support needs, autistic burnout, school refusal, or PDA can slowly diminish our own capacity and why that’s a normal response, not a personal failure.
Why capacity changes every day
Capacity isn’t something we either have or don’t have.
It changes with stress, sleep, sensory demands, grief, illness, and the countless invisible factors that shape our nervous systems. Learning to recognize today’s capacity instead of yesterday’s expectations can change the way we parent ourselves and our children.
Joy isn’t a luxury
Katy Jo shares why reconnecting with joy, creativity, and our own interests isn’t selfish—it helps us remain emotionally available for the people we love.
Expectations rooted in fear
One of the most powerful parts of our conversation explores the expectations we carry for ourselves and our children.
Are they grounded in what’s true today?
Or are they rooted in fear about what might happen if we let go?
Learning to notice the difference can transform the way we homeschool and parent.
Trusting ourselves
Many parents spend years educating themselves through books, podcasts, conferences, and social media.
These resources are an important first step.
Eventually, though, the work becomes trusting ourselves enough to apply what we’ve learned within the unique context of our own family.
You’ll Walk Away With
- A different perspective on parent burnout and nervous system capacity
- Practical ideas for “microdosing” regulation throughout the day
- Encouragement if you’re supporting a child through autistic burnout, school refusal, or demand avoidance
- Permission to adjust expectations based on today’s reality
- Hope that tiny moments matter more than perfect routines
This is Part 3 of our Capacity Series:
- Part 1 – Not Everything Is a Discipline Problem with Sunita Kapahi Theiss
- Part 2 – Mothering Ourselves in the Homeschool Years with Missy Willis
- Part 3 – Microdosing Our Regulation with Katy Murdock
Continue the Conversation
This conversation originally took place during one of our live Day in the Life community gatherings.
Inside Day in the Life, we spend an entire month exploring one topic together through weekly Zoom gatherings, guest conversations, coaching, and everyday discussions inside Marco Polo. Rather than simply collecting information, families have the opportunity to process it in relationship and integrate it into daily life.
If you’ve been listening and thinking, “These are my people,” we’d love to welcome you.
Meet Katy Jo
Katy Jo is a life coach for moms of neurodivergent kids, and she knows this world from the inside out.
As a mom of four, including biological and adoptive children living with ADHD, anxiety, autism, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and multiple learning differences, she has lived the beautiful, exhausting reality these families navigate every day. Katy Jo built a career as an entrepreneur and coach before life called her in a different direction: walking alongside one of her own children through burnout.
Now she’s back, with a sharpened focus and a deeper well of understanding, coaching moms of neurodivergent kids asynchronously — meeting them where they are, on their schedule, in the margins of their already full lives. Today she’s here to talk about something that rarely makes the to-do list: you. And the small, sustainable ways you can care for yourself while showing up for your kids..
Kelly
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The 90-Minute School Day™ podcast aims to support all homeschooling families with a focus on neurodiverse families, with learning differences and unique learning styles. Be featured on the podcast by sharing your story, struggle or asking your question here. Or leave your recording by clicking the mic below.
