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Welcome to the Stress Nanny, the podcast where we take the overwhelm out of parenting and help kids and parents build calm, confidence, and connection.
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I'm your host, Lindsay Miller, kids' mindfulness coach and cheerleader for busy families everywhere.
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Each week we'll explore simple tools, uplifting stories, and practical strategies to help your child learn emotional regulation, resilience, and self-confidence, while giving you a little more peace of mind too.
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I'm so glad you're here.
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My guest today is Craig Matson.
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He's an organizational researcher who serves as a professor of communication at Calvin University.
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He's written several books and numerous essays, often exploring the communicational complexities of organizational life.
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When he's not writing and reading and podcasting, he's enjoying the natural world, hiking, running, and playing driveway pickleball.
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Craig lives with his right wife Rhoda in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and their four adult children live and study and work across the Midwest.
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Craig, thanks so much for joining me today.
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I'm looking forward to this conversation.
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Me too.
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I love the connection between our two projects, and I'm excited to see what overlap emerges and what I can learn too.
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Yeah.
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Well, and as we were talking offline before we hit record, we were exploring the different ways that like family life is complex because we rely heavily on digital tools to connect with our kids.
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If we've got adult kids, we are relying even more heavily on that.
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But if we have kids at home, you know, if we're traveling, if there are other things going on, there's changes in practice that we need to communicate, we are really utilizing a variety of modes of communication to stay connected throughout the day.
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Before we go deeper, Craig, can you help our audience get acquainted with the idea of a mode of communication?
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Yes, I would be so happy to.
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So I think of a mode as an approach.
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We could use a couple of different words.
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We could talk about it as a posture.
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I use that in my book quite a bit.
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It's a posture towards something.
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But basically, it's a style or an approach to something.
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So if you're thinking about something that your adult child, like they've made a decision recently, I have four kids, they're all young adults, so I'm thinking about this a lot.
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If they've made a decision recently, yeah, your relationship with them, your approach to them is going to be quite a lot different than it was when they were 10.
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And so we're always thinking about modes and we're always having to like switch our modes, switch our approaches based on the ever-changing context of just being a person and being a parent.
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Yeah.
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Let's go even deeper into that and talk through the modes that you've come up with in your research.
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And again, for our listeners, we're we're translating this organizational and business research that Craig has done around communication, and we're translating it into family life.
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So initially, we're just going to go through what his research entails, and then we're going to make the connection into everyday family moments.
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Okay, let's do it.
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So as I talked with Gen Z and millennial working professionals about the intensities of the pressures of life and work in the early 2020s, they don't seem much less pressurized today, but let's just say in the early 2020s, we were feeling a lot of things.
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I noticed that they took six different approaches to these pressures.
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And I have a lens for the way I look at things because I study communication.
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I noticed that they often used communication as a way to approach just surviving and coping and dealing with all those pressures.
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So what are those modes or those ways of coping?
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The first was some people really like to send things.
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So if you have a lot of stuff coming at you and you're feeling a lot of pressure, maybe you should write a 950-word email and send it out, right?
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So that I'm making fun of, but a lot of people do use the mode of sending stuff as a way to deal with it.
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You do, apparently.
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I have like I'm the soccer team manager for my daughter's soccer team, and some of those emails I send, they are anyway.
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Yep, go ahead.
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I do not know how you could be a soccer team coordinator without sending a lot of stuff.
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So that's something we've got to explore further, Lindsay.
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But yeah, so another mode would be we need to talk.
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So let's have a face-to-face or screen-to-screen conversation, but it needs to be more or less a one-on-one.
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Like, let's get into this, you and me, let's figure this out.
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And so that might be with a manager in my research participants' case, or it might be with a coworker.
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But for us as parents, it might be like, I don't know what to do with, you know, my kid right now.
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I guess we need to take a walk and we need to talk this thing out, or take a drive and have some windshield time.
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A third mode would be meaning.
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So, meaning things is what I called it.
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And this is a little bit of a meta idea, but it has to do with like, what's the point?
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Why, why are we doing this?
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What's the purpose here?
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What are our goals?
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And what is the meaningfulness or lack of meaningfulness in this particular kind of work?
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I did have research participants who very this sort of surprised me, you know, despite all the pressures and intensities, or maybe because of them, they would sort of pull back and say, Yeah, why why am I doing this?
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It also happened to be in the middle of the great resignation when a lot of people were asking those very questions.
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I didn't notice that at first, but gradually it really came through.
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But I think as parents, too, sometimes we set up a rule, like, okay, no screens at the table, which sounds like a great rule, by the way, or, you know, no snacks in the back of the minivan or whatever.
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And at a certain point, your kids mature into the question of why is that a rule and how does that make sense?
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And so, in that, that's a good mode.
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It can be a little hard when you're the parent, but it's a good mode, and it helps you to sort of step back and ask some vital questions about, yeah, like what is happening here and what's all this about.
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All right, you still still good here?
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Yeah, I'm loving this.
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Yeah, these are great examples.
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All right, cool.
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So the fourth mode would be this is this maybe the strangest one, but it's when you don't say anything.
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I just called it the uh the tacit mode, the unspoken mode.
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And this is when you know things, maybe as a professional or maybe as a parent, and you're not exactly sure how to talk about it, but you just know it's the case.
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Sometimes I noticed that people would retreat to that mode when the pressure became intense.
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They're like, I know this is true, or I know this is how you do this, or I know this is what's best in this situation, even if I can't defend it or I can't explain it.
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And I think this mode is super important as a parent, too.
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I mean, just down to simple things like how to ride a bike.
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Like, it is really hard to explain to a kid how to ride a bike.
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You just have to kind of do it and run along beside him and say, oh, pedal a little faster and that'll help.
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So that's like stuff you can't talk about exactly.
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You just have to kind of know it and do it.
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And then the fifth mode could be called signaling things.
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And this is sort of a less is more mode approach to stress.
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I saw a lot of people doing this where you don't say outright what's frustrating you, you kind of indicate it, you you signal it.
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So in the lives of working professionals, this might be something like quiet quitting, where you're sort of letting your boss know that you're not happy or you're not totally invested, but you're also not like sending them an email and saying that.
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And you know, kids, of course, have lots of ways of signaling this.
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And some of those come through in our digital interactions with our children, hence all the kerfluffles about punctuation, like, dad, don't use periods like that.
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That is you're yelling at me or something like that.
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So I'm like, oh, that's signaling something I wasn't intending to signal.
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And then the last mode, phew, we're finally there, is advocacy.
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So this is when you're trying to convince somebody of something or persuade them.
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Sometimes it's yourself that you're trying to persuade, but that's a super important mode in the workplace.
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And I think as far as parenting goes, I'll something I wish I had done better as a parent would be to be a little bit more intentional about helping my children to be advocates for something that they care about, might be just advocating for themselves.
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So those are the approaches and the postures that I noticed among people.
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And I'm super interested to hear what's resonating with you or where we should go next.
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Yeah, no, I love that.
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Thank you for going through each of those.
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You know, as I'm sit listening, I'm thinking of it both from like a standpoint of family communication, like parent to child, but then also the effectual skills kids need in order to make their way in the world and having these be things we teach our children.
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So, like having the relational skill set that entails all of these, but then also being able to communicate about it in a way that allows our kids to cultivate this full range of modes of communication.
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Yeah.
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Because one of the things you said that really struck me was the idea that like communication is a small but shareable zone of action where we have important choices to make.
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Am I quoting that right?
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Yeah.
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And so in that way, like parenting is full of those, right?
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A small but shareable zone of action where we have important choices to make.
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And being able to switch, you know, around from all of these different modes and utilize them effectively or as effectively as we can, right?
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We're one of the things I love is that you're like, we're not gonna get it right most of the time.
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And also we're all overwhelmed.
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So, like we're just starting the baseline, that's a starting place.
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You've got it.
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But one of the things that like I'm curious about from your perspective as both a parent and a professional is like you talk a lot about how like knowing your default mode is important, right?
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So, how as we're kind of going through all of these, what are some of the signals like that a parent might be able to tune into if they're looking at parent-child conversation or parent-child interaction, what would they maybe use as bearings to figure out where their default is?
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Yeah.
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Oh, that's superb.
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Okay, so let me try this out with you and see if this works.
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So pay attention to what makes you mad.
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I think that might be a signal of a mode you care about, or that maybe you're a little stuck in.
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So I can give an example, and this time I'll start with the parenting rather than the professional situations.
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So I remember when our kids were young and things were chaotic at dinner.
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I never thought our son would ever sit in a chair.
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I just thought he was going to stand on his chair until late adulthood.
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It was very chaotic, and I would come out of the classroom where I had been teaching or whatever.
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My wife was coming from her job and we had things we wanted to talk about.
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We would usually set a time limit where we'd say, okay, mom and dad want to talk right now for about five minutes.
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Okay, so if you all just eat your food and we'll talk.
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But that just didn't work very often.
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It was a lovely idea that just wasn't really executable.
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And so I usually got pretty frustrated with this.
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I can still remember that sense of like, ugh, I have something I really want to say.
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And I can't say it right now because four other people are talking.
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And this feels like an important thing.
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And I was probably exaggerating how important it was, but it felt important in the moment, right?
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Yeah, yeah.
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And but the way I knew I was stuck, only in retrospect, but the way I know I was stuck was that I could not change my mode.
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It had to be a one-on-one conversation with my partner, or it wasn't gonna be.
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And that that was dumb, right?
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Like if I had been able to open up the mode and say, well, let's try this out and let's, you know, sort of fold into what other people are talking about or what other people experienced that day, wow, that would have been a lot happier dinner table.
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And we probably would have laughed a lot more.
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We did have some dinners like that.
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But so that's one example where I just knew or I just know I was stuck because it I felt squeezed in the moment.
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I felt mad or frustrated.
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And I was just being sort of inflexible.
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Yeah, that's such a great example.
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Thank you for sharing that.
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And we're gonna get into the flexibility piece in just a minute because I love that about your work.
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One of the things as you were talking that was coming to mind for me was just like I am probably, I mean, in my soccer mom, when I'm wearing my soccer mom hat, I'm definitely the sending mode, right?
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But at home, I think I'm probably more of an advocacy person where I'm like trying to convince my child of my way of seeing things or why taking into account a different perspective on this could be supportive or those kind of things.
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And so I think that in moments when, you know, as we're texting a lot now that she's like a teenager, so a lot of our communication throughout the day, whether she's at school or at a practice or something, she's texting.
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And it's those are very short, right?
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Generally.
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And just to your point about the periods, I'm making a full sentence about stuff.
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And you know, I'm getting back a yeah, and I'm like, you know, it's kind of casual for me, but for her, it's a very strong positive response, right?
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Like she's, you know, she's really it's landing for her.
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So what you just suggested makes a lot of sense to me because I find that if I'm not feeling understood, or I don't feel like she fully grasped what I just communicated in a potentially very long text, uh, which is another one of my things I'm working on.
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But if I just get a short response from her, I'm not sure she's understood the full, you know, or like she's convinced of my perspective, or that I've advocated for this point of view in an effective way.
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So that's a good invitation for me to shift into a more, you know, like maybe she's like it's more tacit for her.
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Like there's some unspoken things and she's just like acknowledging, but not gonna write three sentences in a text about it, you know?
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Yes.
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Yeah, I this these stories get all crowded together because we're having these kind of exchanges, it seems like in an accelerated fashion, we're just having more and more of these kinds of exchanges.
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We have them with work colleagues, we have them with children, we have them with spouses.
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When I first moved to Grand Rapids, where I teach now at Kelvin University, I had to come alone because we didn't yet have a house.
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And so I lived in somebody's apartment for a few months, and my spouse and I communicated almost solely electronically.
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And it it was it was pretty difficult for me.
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And I think a lot of it came down to what you just named, which is a sort of felt disparity in the investment in a particular mode of communication.
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So my wife hates to text and finds it just like an activity she does as briefly as possible.
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And I, like you, it sounds like, tend to be a little more verbose in my texting.
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So that was something we had to work through because that her sort of brief responses would signal one thing to me, which wasn't at all what she was thinking and feeling.
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And my long texts, I don't know if they were well received either, at least not in the sense that that I felt.
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So I feel like we're navigating this in six different ways from Sunday with colleagues, coworkers, clients, and with parents and children and spouses.
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And so, yeah, it's a whole thing.
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Flexibility super helps.
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Helps a lot.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Well, and maybe signaling, maybe that was the one I should have said was it like hers is signaling.
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So I love that you brought that in.
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Let's go to flexibility because I think one of the things that I am, I really like the way that you you talk about mode switching, right?
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Like being able to be agile within these.
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So I might have a primary preferred mode.
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One of the things you advocate for is like think about the mode of the person that you're talking to, as you just illustrated with the story with your wife, right?
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Like your mode is this and her mode is this.
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And so if your primary or default mode is not creating the communication that's supporting forward movement, then like how can there be some flexibility?
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How can we put some flexibility into the mix to make it a little more supportive of connection?
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So, what are some of the key things that you encourage people to do when they are choosing to get creative or choosing to stretch?
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And feel free to share that story about the bookstore that you've shared before because I think that's such a great example.
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Well, I'll take your prompt then.
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I think before I tell that quick story, I I think your question is a challenging one because I know when I need to switch modes.
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I feel it.
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I'm stuck.
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But how do we actually do that is a thing that we're gonna need to explore just a little bit more.
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And I think that's where this kind of conversation begins to shade into a kind of therapeutic exchange, because I think how people figure out how to loosen their grip on a particular mode or a particular approach probably varies by the person significantly.
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So I don't know how easy it will be for me to generalize on that.
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But I will tell you about a time when I realized I had to switch modes.
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Yeah.
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So let me can I just insert this real quick?
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I think this is where mindfulness is so key, right?
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So I'm just gonna make a shameless plug for mindfulness at this point, where like my basic definition of mindfulness is knowing what's going on inside of you, knowing what's going on outside of you, and making a choice on purpose.
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So being able to be really present, right?
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Like you described, like if there's some discomfort and you just know it's not working, like being present with awareness, in my opinion, is what can facilitate that creativity, right?
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Like we see that all the time with mindfulness, where there are different pieces of a situation all kind of combining, and mindfulness is what allows us to like say, okay, all these things can fit together.
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I'm not sure how, but I know I'll be able to figure it out instead of saying, these don't work, right?
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So, anyway, let's I feel like your approach to the bookstore is very mindful.
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Yeah, that's really helpful.
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So I want to take that just a little bit farther.
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So that that plug for mindfulness feels really basic to this whole conversation.
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I do think in some ways, like my whole book is just like pay attention.
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Right.
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There's a lot going on.
00:19:54.000 --> 00:19:56.880
And it's frustrating and it's a lot and it's overwhelming.
00:19:57.039 --> 00:20:05.920
But if you can pay attention, if you can, like you said, be aware of what's going on inside you, what's going on around you, and make deliberate choices, I think that you're right.
00:20:06.079 --> 00:20:10.559
I I feel like that is a hugely important way to cope with overwhelm.
00:20:10.720 --> 00:20:15.920
It doesn't eliminate it, it doesn't get rid of the overwhelming conditions, but it does make them livable.
00:20:16.240 --> 00:20:20.400
Yeah, or like I don't know if even manageable, but workable.
00:20:21.119 --> 00:20:21.440
Right?
00:20:21.599 --> 00:20:23.680
Like it gives you like a little ray of hope.
00:20:23.839 --> 00:20:31.440
And and that's one of the things I really appreciate about your work too, is that like you're not saying if you do these things, you're not gonna be overwhelmed anymore, right?
00:20:31.599 --> 00:20:41.599
You're just saying you're gonna be able to work with whatever is in front of you a little, you know, with a little more skill if you use this intentional approach.
00:20:41.839 --> 00:20:49.519
And I think that that's that's another piece of the mindfulness, because with mindfulness, we have this strong practice of self-compassion, right?
00:20:50.160 --> 00:21:00.079
And so I think inserting that into this conversation and recognizing, like you said, everybody's digitally overwhelmed, everybody's just trying to figure it out.
00:21:00.319 --> 00:21:06.079
Yeah, I'm there's nothing wrong with me, I'm not broken, I'm not an awful parent because I'm like really struggling with this.
00:21:06.160 --> 00:21:09.359
I'm not an awful parent because my kid is struggling with this.
00:21:09.519 --> 00:21:12.480
This is just like a condition of being human right now.
00:21:12.720 --> 00:21:17.359
And then if we can just have that as the baseline, the creativity is easier, right?
00:21:17.440 --> 00:21:19.039
Because we remove the judgment.
00:21:19.440 --> 00:21:20.079
Yes.
00:21:20.400 --> 00:21:22.400
Oh man, I feel like I should be taking notes here.
00:21:22.480 --> 00:21:23.519
This is really great.
00:21:23.759 --> 00:21:32.079
I could, in a certain sense, say, I'm a terrible author because in this book on digital overwhelm, I did not address artificial intelligence much at all.
00:21:32.319 --> 00:21:38.160
And it was just really starting to burst out out of the scene as I was finishing the manuscript, right?
00:21:38.480 --> 00:21:44.000
But what I'm choosing to do is to say, nobody's got AI figured out right now.
00:21:44.079 --> 00:21:46.960
And it would be presumptuous for me to say I do.
00:21:47.200 --> 00:21:50.720
Maybe there's another book, you know, five years down the road or something.
00:21:50.880 --> 00:22:00.000
But yeah, I do think that just being patient with yourself in these conditions, or you, as you said, self-compassion, that's a beautiful phrase.
00:22:00.240 --> 00:22:03.839
Showing grace to yourself and to the people around you, it's a lot.
00:22:04.079 --> 00:22:05.920
It's just a terrific lot.
00:22:06.079 --> 00:22:13.599
So just recently, I uh reached out to a bookstore like authors do and said, Hey, could I come and do a little talk?
00:22:13.680 --> 00:22:19.039
I've got some friends who'd like to hear, and I'd like to do a talk at your fine bookstore.
00:22:19.279 --> 00:22:23.599
And it happened to be a really great bookstore, Schuler Books in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
