Why I hate the term "Self-Care" and use the Five Minute Model instead.
I hate the term self-care with an incredible passion.
It starts with the trenches. If you’ve had two children under four, you’ll understand the phrase being “in the trenches.” It’s an apt comparison, because it feels exactly like a war trench: constantly shovelling, constantly moving, just to get one foot forward, and then dropping at the end of the day from sheer, utter exhaustion.
My memory of that stretch is a loop. Feeding. Endless nappy changes. The park, two or three times a day, because it was the only thing that bought a few minutes of quiet. Monotony, and the relentless need to keep moving. Children under four are entirely dependent on you, and if you’re the parent at home with them, it is more exhausting than going to work, dropping the kids at daycare, and coming home.
Then add a layer: unknown or suspected neurodivergence. A child with eating issues, sleeping issues, socialising issues, speech delays, fine motor issues and a parent fielding a steady stream of advice from neurotypical parents that simply doesn’t apply, and going quietly out of their mind trying to make it fit anyway.
This is the reason I hate the term self-care. It implies a luxury that parents of neurodivergent children simply do not have when their youngest is under four. When your youngest is under four, you are scrambling to survive. Self-care, for a parent of a neurodivergent child, is survival. It isn’t a spa day. It’s staying upright.
I remember exactly when I first recognised I needed to take time for myself. Noah, my youngest would have been around five and a half. That was a year and a half after his diagnosis, and a year after he had regular access to occupational therapy and speech therapy.
That timeline matters, because it’s the honest version of what happens after diagnosis. There’s no immediate pivot to self-care. First there’s a deep dive: researching the diagnosis, in our case autism and adhd, and trying to implement everything you’re picking up from therapists, from the paediatrician, from books, on top of a part-time job that was still 20 hours a week. Self-care isn’t next on that list. It isn’t on the list at all.
It was only once that recognition had worked its way through, from a whisper in the back of my head to something loud enough I couldn’t ignore, that I started. Not with a spa day. With one-minute breaks. I built those up to five minutes over the course of a year, and it was incredibly hard. Not thinking about my children, not managing something, not fixing something, just taking a minute for myself, wasn’t a skill I already had. It was a practice I’d actively pushed away for six years, and I had to learn it from nothing.
That’s the Five Minute Model. Not a spa day, not a beach, not a wellness retreat. One minute, then another, until you can hold five without your brain snapping back to the next thing that needs fixing. It’s not aspirational. It’s the actual, achievable unit of rest available to a parent who is still, most days, just trying to get through the trench.
So when people suggest self-care to parents of neurodivergent children, I understand why it lands as rage instead of comfort. We don’t have time for a spa. We don’t have time for yoga on a beach. Most days, we barely have time to see our friends. Suggest five minutes instead. That, we might actually be able to find.
What do you do when you get your 5 minutes
