So, Now What?

16- I’m Not Controlling, I Just Like My Kid’s Future More Than Sleep

• angela tam

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What if your “responsibility” isn’t a personality trait but an inherited survival strategy? We dig into the hidden forces that turn care into constant vigilance—especially for parents of color and families shaped by immigration, war, and systemic inequity. I share how legacy burdens show up as rigid routines, a relentless mental load, and the belief that relaxing is risky, then walk through a gentle experiment that builds relief without asking you to lower your standards.

Across this conversation, I name the invisible imprint many of us carry: safety comes from vigilance, preparation prevents harm, and rest is a luxury. We talk about how that imprint can bypass partnership because doing it alone feels safer than trusting someone who might not match your intensity. Instead of arguing about what’s “reasonable,” I invite you to pick one non‑negotiable in your home and ask a single, clarifying question: what harm am I preventing if this never changes? That shift from reflex to awareness is the doorway to breathing room.

We explore real‑world stakes like public vs. private school decisions, where uneven systems make high standards feel essential, not excessive. Then we widen the lens to what kids actually need beyond preparation: connection, repair, and seeing adults model shared leadership. When worth rests on human dignity rather than danger prevented, protection can coexist with softness and support. Your nervous system can update. Your standards can stay. And the load can be shared.

If you’re ready to move from hypervigilance into shared safety without collapsing your care, listen now. Subscribe, leave a review to help others find the show, and share this episode with a friend who carries a lot—what’s one non‑negotiable you’re ready to examine?

Come follow me on instagram @MentalLoadCoach and subscribe to my newsletter here. Looking forward to adventuring with you!

SPEAKER_00:

Good morning. Cheers if anyone's up right now drinking their beverage of choice. I have my water, my diluted tea here. It's my tea bag from yesterday. Um you can find me on YouTube. I'm recording live and I'm recording my podcast at the same time. So let's see how it goes tech-wise. I'm like so not tech savvy. Thank you all for joining me. I wanted to talk about the thought of if you ever thought to yourself, I'm not controlling, I'm just responsible, this episode is totally for you. Not because you're doing something wrong, but because the way you're holding responsibility may be costing you more than you realize. And there's something about how if the world doesn't feel safe for your kids, like for me, I have Asian kids of color. They're, I don't know if you could see me. I realize I'm just like a floating head. And I'm going to tilt my bone like this. If the world doesn't feel safe for your kids, if relaxing feels irresponsible, if lowering your standards feels like gambling with your kids' futures, this is for you. This episode is for you because I definitely resonate with this having kids of color. And also I have war trauma in my blood with my parents fleeing the war and coming here with nothing. So this is living inside my body as well. Because today I'm not going to ask you to let go of your responsibilities. I'm going to ask you to look closer to your responsibilities and look inside. If you're listening to this, there's a good chance you don't see yourself as being overfunctioning. You don't see yourself as being too responsible. You don't see yourself as being someone who is going above and beyond. You just see yourself as someone who's paying attention, who's being realistic, who's doing what responsible parents do. This is you're being you to you, you're being a basic parent. You think if I don't think this through, something bad could happen. Maybe not right away, but if I don't sign my kid up for this extracurricular, they're not, they're really not going to get into, they're not going to have a bright future. If the world is not set up to protect my child, I have to protect my child. And my standards to you are not excessive. They're necessary. Your own standards are not too much. They're meeting your kids at a basic level is what you tell yourself, probably. And honestly, there's so much truth in that, right? Like your children do need stability. They need advocacy, they need adults who are paying attention to them. So if anyone has ever suggested to you, just relax, just lower your standards. Your body immediately not only rejects that, but it also says that this other person is not worthy to be trusted with the mental load, especially if that person is your partner. Here's the part that stays invisible at this stage. When you say to yourself, I'm just doing what needs to be done, you are likely taking default ownership of your child's emotional safety and development and future readiness. You're creating rigid routines and standards or rules that sometimes feel non-negotiable and you're mentally bypassing partnership, you're not, it doesn't feel safe to include your partner because it's faster and safer if you handle it on your own. Not because you don't inherently think you need support, but because your system believes if I lower my intensity, my children will pay the price. If I hand this over to my partner to even partner with me, they're not going to do as good of a job as I am to keep my kids safe. So why would I hand it over? Why would I share the load? And this isn't about personality, it's about conditioning and about how we have been programmed. This is the missing context, and I want to introduce a term to you that is not used in our vernacular, and it's called legacy burdens. What's often missing from conversations is history. Many parents, especially parents of color, did not grow up in systems where mistakes were forgiven, safety was guaranteed or even assumed, and help reliably showed up. You, like me, might have grown up really fast. You probably didn't have, you probably didn't have much of a childhood where you were really carefree and not chronically stressed. And you might not have awareness of this, but or it might not be in your explicit memory, but you might have learned that no one was coming to rescue you. You had to figure everything out yourself. And you might have seen what happened what happens when adults are not vigilant. This is my childhood to a T. My parents were busy. Refugee parents tried to make it in this world without with a pen, with no no money, no intergenerational wealth, and no skills that were transferable. And they really had to focus their resources on themselves. And for a rule, I was left to figure things out myself. And I was learned, I learned from an early age that no one was coming to rescue me, no one was helping me. If I was in a pinch or if I needed, if I was going through some trouble, I had to figure it out for myself. So this is my nervous system imprint, which is that I've learned that safety comes from being vigilant, and safety comes with preparation, and preparation prevents me from experiencing harm. And relaxation is a luxury. And all these things, those three things, safety coming from vigilance, preparation preventing harm, relaxation being a luxury, those are imprints in my nervous system, and nothing that I say, none of those things are things that I say consciously. And so this is what we call a legacy burden. A legacy burden is a pattern that you inherit and not something that you choose into. And here's the key is that you didn't invent this way of parenting. You adapted into it. This is your survival mechanism that you defaulted into because of your imprint. And this is my story as well. And now let's talk about that action. Not the kind that asks you to drop responsibility, but a tangible step that you can do today to move towards a little bit of relief. You can, I invite you to pick one role in your family or run one routine or one standard in your home feels absolutely non-negotiable. Not the biggest one, not the scariest one, just one. Something you'd say, this is just how it has to be. This is just a given in my household. And I want to hear what that might be if you're following in the chat too, it on Instagram on the live stream. Feel free to put it in if you have anything that you're thinking about that you're like, huh, I want to try to pick one thing to look closer into that I thought was something that I couldn't drop previously. And I'm not gonna ask you to drop it, but I'm just gonna invite you to notice it. The question that I want to invite you to ask yourself is without fixing anything, is and just noticing is what harm am I preventing if this never changes? Not is this reasonable, should I relax, is my partner wrong, but what am I protecting my family against? And just stop there. There's no action that's required, there's no delegation that's required, no conversation that's required. But this that matters because it shifts you from automatic default vigilance, hypervigilance, to awareness. You're not loosening your standards, you're not like dropping your responsibility to say, I'm not gonna do this anymore, but you're meeting the part of you that's holding the standard. And that's how change becomes possible. So the request or the step, the first step is to identify something in your family that's not negotiable. You just don't feel like is something that you could negotiate with anybody to drop. And it could be like an extracurricular that you're like, oh, I need to keep this in my family. Or it could be, I need, so I have my older kid is in middle school right now, and they are a bunch of my friends are applying for their kids to go into private middle schools. There, the question is, should I do private or do I do public middle school? And there's conversations around how sometimes this area is non-negotiable. Like I will, there's this sentiment that if you put your kid in public middle school, that they're really not going to be set up well for their education, the high school education. And in certain parts of Seattle where I'm at, that is incredibly true. Like our public school system to some people might be severely lacking. And I get that because I came from a New York City public school system where that also the standards of education was not guaranteed. So the first step is identify one non-negotiable rule, routine, or standard in your home that feels non-negotiable. And the second question is ask yourself, what is this rule protecting your family against? Once you do this, something important often happens. And you begin to see I'm carrying legacy and personal burdens that didn't start with me. My default way of functioning is a result of my imprint. Overfunctioning is protective, but it's exhausting. And if I stop, I am so afraid that everything will fall apart, or I'll be judged as careless, or I'll be seen as someone who is such a bad parent. And that awareness is not a failure. It's the beginning of relief. Because once you see your protective mechanisms, once you see your per your over-functioning protector that helps your family to stay safe, you don't have to fight that protective mechanism. You begin to befriend that protective mechanism. And here's what parents slowly discover. They discover that protection can coexist with softness and shared leadership. And your nervous system can be updated and not overrided. And your worth is not measured by how much danger you prevent, but it could really rest on something that's a human birthright, which is your human dignity. Your worth is measured by your human dignity, which everyone inherently has. And you're you also slowly discover that your children just don't just need preparation. They don't need you to be hyper-vigilant. They really need you to be connecting with them on a heart-to-heart level. They really need you to repair with them when you screw up. And they the repair means to humbly acknowledge the impact of your actions and move towards them in humility. And they really need to see models of shared responsibility. They really need to see you and your partner sharing that responsibility. And you don't, you deserve support that doesn't depend on being in permanent crisis. So if you're listening to this and thinking, I've never looked at this way before, that's exactly where you're meant to be. And that's exactly where you're supposed to be. You don't need to change how much you care. You don't need to lower your standards. You just need to start seeing why your system learned to hold everything alone. Because awareness, not effort, is what opens the door to relief. And so a lot of people think if I try harder, I will feel more relief. But actually, awareness is what brings relief. So if this episode or this live stream stirred something in you, and you're starting to wonder how I can move from hyper-vigilance into shared safety, this is the work that I want to invite you to do at my group coaching program. My group coaching program explores the invisible systems you walked into, like patriarchy, racism, sexism, misogyny, immigration trauma. And we work with the overactive protective mechanisms inside of you, which includes the overactive internal project manager that plans, predicts, prepares your kids, and optimizes safety for them. And gently we move towards self leadership and shared responsibility without collapse. And you don't have to do that work now. Now you could start to see it. Take care.