Are We Choosing Parent Burnout?

Last Halloween, my daughter’s group Halloween costume with her friends required significant construction. I ordered the materials to create human-sized tic tac boxes but I advised my 11-year-old that she was primarily responsible for making it happen. She dutifully put the red plastic easter eggs in the bins and taped them according to the Pinterest directions (much more meticulously than I would have, by the way). Despite the Pinterest lady’s suggestion that all of this was super easy, we hit a snag with how to make the eponymous green and white label.

In a group text thread, the other moms pinged proposed solutions for making this label. I suggested we ask our kids to brainstorm together for a solution before we do. The text bubbles continued popping up with ideas and my text bubble sat there with no response. Ignored.

These other moms and I are neighbors and friends. Our daughters have been a tight-knit friend group since second grade. Maybe they thought I was joking? Or maybe it’s such a foreign concept to consider not taking on this task in our busy work and parenting week that my suggestion to let the kids do the work didn’t even register. Is it so ingrained to add our kids’ stuff to our to-do lists at the expense of our own time and energy that we don’t even notice?  

“The Facts Are Losing”

Every parent should read this 2022 article from The Atlantic: How to Quit Intensive Parenting. It asks and answers why we continue intensive parenting even when we know it’s not working well for our kids, families, or us. In case there’s a paywall, I’m sharing two excerpts from the article that echo messages I wish were a bright red header on every school and extracurricular activity email. 

“Rafts of research prove that intensive parenting mainly serves to burn out parents while harming children’s competence and mental health. But the facts are losing. In a 2018 survey, 75 percent of respondents rated various intensive-parenting scenarios as ‘very good’ or ‘excellent,’ and less than 40 percent said the same about scenarios showing a non-intensive approach.”

Intensive parenting burns us out and makes our kids more anxious and less independent—but doing it makes us feel like “good” parents. 

We all hear the commands for parents’ “self-care,” a phrase that has started to ring as empty as the new bag of chips I just bought after my teenager gets to it. Yet so much of our culture reinforces and encourages the opposite of true self-care: consistently putting our kids’ needs above our own. Of course, parenthood is at least partially defined by the need to sacrifice our priorities for our children. (The entire transition from being childless to having a newborn in the house is proof of this demand, as primal as their cries every 1-2 hours all night.)

But this does not need to be a blanket swapping out of meeting their needs by sacrificing ours. That is unequivocally bad for us, our stress levels, and our mental health—and bad for our kids’ development and their mental health. The problem is we need a total revamp of our parenting culture that has somehow veered into the danger zone of equating total self-sacrifice with “good” parenting.  

“…we need to normalize saying yes to prioritizing adult friendships and an adequate amount of sleep. We need to reassure one another—explicitly, publicly—that being a whole person is being a good parent. Generally, content parents are less prone to conflict and more prone to listening, and the opposite also holds true. Small, everyday parenting decisions may not have a massive impact on kids, but the causal link between parental well-being and child well-being is quite strong. Anxiety-driven intensive parenting has even been implicated as one factor in the rising youth mental-health crisis. Freedom from intensive methods provides both parents and their children with the ability to fashion a healthier life.”

How to Really Be a “Good” Parent

We can be very effective, loving parents and set boundaries around our own time and energy; in fact, the science shows that these boundaries help us be better parents. I spent the last year writing a book about autonomy-supportive parenting, a science-based approach to nurturing our children’s self-sufficiency and confidence. To summarize dozens of studies and decades of research: parents who practice autonomy-supportive parenting do less, their children do more, parents are happier, children more confident, and the whole family is healthier.  

I now see opportunities everywhere to let my children solve a problem or think critically to replace my automatic reaction to solve and think for them.

I also see examples everywhere of other parents not only not doing more than necessary for their children, but practically refusing to give it up. There’s no question that this habit contributes to burnout and we have a choice to stop—if we take a pause to notice that these parenting behaviors are choices.

Some may say, it’s just helping with a Halloween costume. It is. But these seemingly trivial decisions add up to patterns of behavior and messaging. We get used to the relentless pace of busyness in our lives without stopping to question if all of the busy is necessary. We also communicate to our children risky messages about every little need of theirs being central to family life and that they need us to solve their problems.

In the end, my daughter and I had to enlist the expertise of a Kinko’s worker to print and laminate the Tic Tac labels for the front and back of the plastic bins. It turned out that our group of fifth-graders couldn’t have completed their costumes wholly independent of outside help.

But that’s not the point. The point is the messages we send our children. Whose task is it? Whose time becomes devoted to it? I didn’t rush to Kinko’s over a lunch break to squeeze another domestic errand into my busy schedule. I planned with my daughter when she could come with me and made sure she actively participated every step of the way.   

Even as I rant about it, I'm not immune to this cultural tide of intensive parenting. But especially after writing my book about how to raise autonomous and confident children, I have become aware of these minor daily decision points and bit by bit I am swimming against the tide. Even if my mom friends ignore my text.    

**You can pre-order my book Autonomy-Supportive Parenting: Reduce Parental Burnout and Raise Competent, Confident Children on Amazon and Bookshop.