The “Do-It-All” Parent Trap
None of us feel like we can accumulate more stress, yet our current events keep piling. We’re going to help you, at least, reduce some parenting burden in this month’s newsletter, so that you can better manage overall stress.
We’d like to help parents let go of the illusion that parents can do it all—at least all the time. Parents spend so much time sitting with the guilt or shame of falling short of an imagined work/life balance.
Why is this so hard for me? Why am I struggling? What’s wrong with me that I can’t figure this out?
It’s not you; it’s modern living. In the last century or so, society has undergone a major transition as women secured the right to vote, sought employment, and gained financial independence.
Unfortunately, our world was—quite literally—not built for women to have choices. Our traditions and social structures are designed around the unpaid labor of women. And conversely, men were not expected to live complex emotional or family lives.
The productivity standards for the 40-hour work week were created with the assumption of a full-time stay-at-home wife who would take care of everything else, leaving a man to focus on his career at even the exclusion of his own self-care. Someone else was shopping for groceries, cleaning the bathroom, making a home-cooked dinner, scheduling doctors’ appointments, managing the social calendar, and eventually assuming full responsibility for the children.
As women gained agency and economic self-determination, America failed to adjust to a reality that meant not every child has a caregiver at home all day and not every worker has someone managing things at home.
Children in America have a chaotic schedule that a typical office job fails to accommodate. No nine-to-five employee can make a 2:30PM school pickup work. Instead, parents can participate in a cutthroat race for limited after-care spots. God forbid; you miss the e-mail announcement that the application is open.
The calendar is impossible. Few employees have enough leave to take off to stay home for all the school holidays and still have enough leave left to cover the all the times their kid brings home the flu. Vacation? Yeah right.
Even summer break wasn’t designed with parents in mind. It’s a relic from a time when farmers needed children home to help with harvest. Unfortunately, there’s no modern initiative inviting parents to bring their kids to work for the summer.
Instead, there’s a race to sign up for summer camps that often involve a midnight signup or annual waitlists. And even after securing that prime spot and selling kidneys to afford it, parents can expect that day to end at 3PM as well.
Even when they are at school, the expectations of parents don’t often meet the realities of a career. There’s frantic juggling every time you get an invite to an event at school next week that happens at midday or the hours spent finding after-school sports and activities that will fit in that tiny window between the end of the workday and bedtime. And there’s the daily struggle to try to squeeze all the unpaid labor of a full-time stay-at-home parent into a couple of hours after the kids fall asleep.
In a world where the foundation is so misaligned with reality, parents work overtime to smooth the cracks. We know that this means women often withstand the worst of this. In two parent working families, they are likely to still handle the majority of housework. They are more likely to adopt flexible schedules, part time work, or even working remotely while providing full time childcare.
The gender pay gap means that when parenting factors push up against employment, women are more likely to take the hit.
Of course, you are struggling.
Families with a stay-at-home parent are not immune to challenges. Because society fails to account for the value and importance of what was traditionally “women’s work,” stay at home parents remain underappreciated and frequently stigmatized. They lack the same level of financial protection and freedom afforded to other workers in our economic system (no disability, limited social security, lesser retirement income). Since their work isn’t always recognized as such, they often don’t get time off, chances to recharge, or accolades.
In addition to that struggle, there is the judgment that springs from either options. Social media adds an extra, if not constant, layer of stress. It can generate doubts we didn’t even know we had.
And therein lies the trap. The stakes feel high because there’s nothing more precious than our children and our own identity. Yet often all the options feel wrong and hard, and even worse, sometimes financial realities mean there’s not a choice to be made at all.
When we feel insecure, we start to look everywhere for evidence that we’ve got it right or at least not as wrong as someone else did. The blame game, the compare despair, juggle struggle, however you rhyme it, it can make us feel less than. We can then act as if we’re in competition with other moms and parents instead of recognizing that we’re all doing our best to manage the same struggles in an unhelpful system.
So, what is the path forward?
Foremost, we know that women really need to stick together, because it’s the mothers who receive the most critique. When in doubt, blame the mothers - patriarchy and misogyny defined this trap.
Some people even decide the problem is women themselves. If we just hadn’t made such a fuss about equal rights we wouldn’t have to balance two roles. But that’s a faulty way of thinking because we aren’t limited to envisioning only what is and what was.
Feminism is about having the choice about how to live one’s life. It was never about careers vs. staying at home. It’s always been about getting to choose. The problem isn’t women; it’s the way we continue to treat the work historically done by women as unimportant.
We can unpack distorted thoughts as a way to diminish some of the stress around “doing it all, all the time.” You might notice these false beliefs taking form such as:
Villanizing: We can cast ourselves as the villain. We look inward and say that the problem is that we’re not doing enough to get it right. We’re too lazy, disorganized, unmotivated, or untalented. The reality is that our current setup is hard for everyone, and harder the fewer resources you have available.
Zero sum game: We turn against our partners and compete with them. We make parenting a zero sum game, when it’s not. Two people can be experiencing difficulty and one’s pain doesn’t have to be greater than the other to be acknowledged and cared for.
Sacrifice: Regardless of how parents decide to manage employment, we are often left feeling like we’ve sacrificed something. This is a little tricky because sometimes things need to give and we do need to let some things go to prioritize others. This can lead to thought that we're doing more and giving more than anyone else which can often be a distorted thought.
Trad-wife envy: When women find themselves struggling to find balance in the modern world, they can sometimes falsely idealize times gone by. This tempting fantasy is best embodied by the trad-wife influencers out there baking bread while wearing their adorable aprons. It's tempting to think maybe life would be easier if feminism never happened. But like most social media, that's not reality. Before gaininig financial freedom and self-determination, women were often left powerless to protect themselves or their children. And even the trad-wives you see on social media are an illusion cultivated for clicks--their lifestyles are funded by wealth and their stay at home image is in itself a monetized career. Stay at home parenting is hard, and pretending it is always sunshine and daisies isn't doing anyone any favors.
Confirmation bias: Parenting is a big and important job. There’s no manual and we want to do it right. We’re biased toward what we think is best, and that bias means our brain over-emphasizes things that meet that view, and under-recognizes things that go against our perspective. This can result in judgement toward our partner or other parents because we want so badly for our way to be the best one.
Black and white thinking: In a highly stressed environment, people become insecure. Insecurity breeds the desire for control. When the illusion of control is present, there’s little room for multiple things to be right. Without the flexibility for multiple truths to be present at once, criticism, rigidity and anxiety breeds. There are many roads to good enough parenting.
Our role at the Center is to help parents find their way out of these distorted thought patterns and to find compassion for themselves. We can work with you to find ways to alleviate your accumulated stress, and we can help recognize where you are capable of. By talking through some of the following, we hope parents can be more compassionate and sensible about what you are capable of.
We have no quick solutions, and the therapeutic process isn't instantaenous, but over time we can help you enhance your ability to thrive instead of just survive.
