Book Review: Work Parent Thrive by Yael Schonbrun, PhD
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Season: 2025 Back to School.
Book Review by Amanda McGovern, PhD
This season, we decided to review Work, Parent, Thrive: 12 Science-Backed Strategies to Ditch Guilt, Manage Overwhelm, and Grow Connection (When Everything Feels Like Too Much) by Dr. Yael Schonbrun. Appropriate, huh? I originally learned about this book through one of my favorite podcasts, Psychologists Off The Clock, in which Dr. Schonbrun is one of the hosts. She integrates her expertise in Acceptance and Commitment therapy, her insights as a clinical psychologist, and her own personal experience as a working parent. The book is divided into three parts: ways to change your thinking and transform your working-parent mindset, ways to change your behavior and work/parent more strategically, and ways to increase your happiness as a working parent. She clearly presents numerous strategies within each section that can be immediately applied in your daily life. Along with teaching these skills, she also provides concrete exercises that guide the reader on how to practice them.
Overall, I truly appreciated that Dr. Schonbrun validates the struggles of being a working parent. She acknowledges that the strategies she offers are not going to “fix” all of our challenges. Instead, these tools will help us grow, increase our psychological flexibility, better regulate our emotions, and deepen our life experiences and sense of meaning. One of my favorite strategies that she presents is developing a working-parent enrichment mindset. She defines working-parent enrichment as the “extent to which experiences in either work or family improve quality of life in the other”. By shifting our mindset that work and parenthood are always in conflict, we can begin to see how each role enhances the other, how focusing on one of our roles can buffer the stress of the other, and how engaging in the two roles brings greater meaning to our lives. Personally, I’ve found that being a psychologist and being a parent constantly enrich each other. As a psychologist, my ability to empathize, validate, and help my clients emotionally regulate has been beyond helpful as I raise my kiddos. As a parent, I’m constantly practicing patience, curiosity, and mindfulness with my kids, as well as navigating the challenges of working parenthood. All of these skills serve me so well in my job as a psychologist.
Along with changing our thinking, Dr. Schonbrun advocates for rest, boundaries, pleasure, connection, and the pursuit of creativity. She grants the working parent permission to “not do it all” and in fact, do less, the antithesis of our societal messaging. One of the other tools that I loved in this book was the risk-benefit analysis for subtracting activities from our lives. I employ this decisional framework when I’m overloaded by tasks for the week (e.g., go to my son’s soccer game, see that extra client after hours, go to my consult group, volunteer at my daughter’s school) and want to determine what activities give me the highest amount of benefit with the least amount of risk. By identifying activities that do not align with our values, we have the power to choose what we want to devote our time to.
To end, I found this book incredibly inspirational, psychologically astute, and useful. I hope that the tools from this book help you thrive as a working parent.
Schonbrun, Y. (2022). Work, Parent, Thrive: 12 Science-Backed Strategies to Ditch Guilt, Manage Overwhelm, and Grow Connection (When Everything Else Feels Too Much). Shambhala Publications.