The coronavirus continues to affect every area of life,
but to some it could be more serious than for others.
It could actually be life or death.
Kaila and Isaac's 11 months old baby boy is waiting
to see if his doctors will have the capacity
to perform the surgery he needs as the medical community
is overwhelmed with trying to deal
with the current pandemic, they're joining us from Colorado.
Also joining us is Dr. Daniel Amen, who is really focused
on us taking care of ourselves mentally
and emotionally during this difficult time of isolation.
And Dr. Amen I know you've been listening
to what I've been talking about with Kaila and Isaac
and Robin is always want to say that you've got to take care
of yourself so you can take care of others.
And Dr. Amen, this is something that these two parents owe
it to their children to take good care of mum and dad during
this difficult time.
What's the most important thing they can do
to make sure that happens?
I'm so sorry for your job loss, for the stress.
I have a granddaughter who's handicapped
and has a severe seizure disorder
and there's just nothing worse.
And so one, acknowledge it's hard but two,
just like Robin and Dr. Phil said, if you don't take care
of yourself, you are not gonna be able to be there
in a good way for all of the children.
So this is the most important time in your life
to practice mental hygiene, which means sleep is critical
and when you can't, there's all sorts of great strategies
to help you sleep and one of my favorite one
is have a journal by your bed.
And so when you have a worry that goes around three times,
write it down and then write down what you can do about it
and what you can't do about it.
And focusing on what you can do will help you so much.
Be very careful not to catastrophize what we talked
about earlier because now, unless it's an emergency,
you don't want him to have the surgery at a time
when everybody's infected, everybody's stressed
and the surgeons are completely stressed out.
You want to give it some space so that things can get back
to normal and it's hopefully sometime soon that will happen.
Feeding right, but you're gonna have more influence
over the other four children than at any other time
in their lives, and so being a good model, practicing
the sort of clean way of thinking, will help them so much.
There is a difference between blame and responsibility.
And my question is, have you all sat down and talked
to each other and acknowledged, look,
this is a tough situation and our child's
in a tough situation, but we didn't do anything wrong
to create this situation.
There's no room for guilt in our lives here.
We shouldn't be beating ourselves up over
this 'cause we didn't do anything wrong.
We didn't bring on this pandemic, we didn't bring
on this medical challenge that we have with our child.
I mean, have you guys actually say out loud,
we did not create the situation,
there is no room for guilt here?
I don't think that we've actually talked about that,
but we've known about, we've thought about it I think
to ourselves but we actually haven't sat down
and talked about that because for the longest,
I had a lot of blame, I blame myself.
How important is that Robin?
I mean, particularly from a mother's standpoint
to give voice to the fact that you didn't create this,
you don't own it, but you are gonna manage it.
I think it's so very, very important because as a mother
and a woman, I think we can both relate
to that mum guilt in very situation
but especially when our child is suffering.