A Working Parent’s Guide to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Oversubscribed Newsletter

Season: Q1 2026

New Year, Fresh Start

Article by Megan Hughes, PhD & Amanda McGovern, PhD

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a treatment that relies heavily on accepting difficult thoughts and feelings in order to live according to your values. ACT is a powerful treatment AND has a lot of confusing jargon. There are six psychological skills of ACT that are pictured together in a “hexaflex.” In an attempt to clarify what the heck that is, we put together a hexaflex with examples relevant for working parents.  In this working parent hexaflex, we define each part of ACT and provide examples for work and parenting domains. We share some ACT tools that you can start using today. Today is the initial explanation and we plan to refer back to it in future ACT-related articles.

Click here to access the interactive Working Parent Hexaflex. Then, click on each of the 6 sections to learn more about each process.

If you’d like to learn more about ACT in general, here are some references:

References: 

To learn more about ACT and engage in some exercises, we recommend reading the 20th Anniversary Edition (2025) of the book, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life by Steven Hayes, PhD.

To create our Working Parent Hexaflex we referred to the 2019 book for clinicians, ACT Made Simple by Russ Harris.