How She Feels Mom Guilt

Today, we’re going to start a series of several episodes about mom guilt, by talking about what mom guilt is and why we feel it. This will be the more philosophical part of the conversation. I’ve always thought of you, listeners of the How She Moms podcast, and myself, as mom philosophers—people who think about the ideas surrounding motherhood, as well as being practitioners. I didn’t actually use the term mom philosopher out loud for a long time because I thought it sounded pretentious, but now I embrace it and I apply that title to you too. It just means we’re giving motherhood a lot of thought.

Then next week’s episode will be the practical side of mom guilt. We’ll talk about some tactics we can use to neutralize mom guilt. And then, because the interviews on this topic were just so good, I’m also going to share several of them with you as stand-alone episodes.

What Is Mom Guilt?

One thing that has surprised me as I’ve interviewed moms about mom guilt is that some moms feel it very intensely, some moderately, and others actually have no idea what I’m talking about. I’ve even had to explain to some of them what mom guilt is. My grandma, Donna Dayton, for example. After I explained, and asked her if she experienced it, she said:

I think we all just did the best we could to get them educated and go to church.  

But unlike my grandma, most of the moms I’ve talked to feel mom guilt to some degree or another. I have talked to moms all across the mom guilt spectrum for this series, so we can learn from each of their perspectives.

 I asked Monica Packer, host of the About Progress podcast, and a growth coach, to define mom guilt for me.

 For me, it’s a nagging voice in my brain that is harsh, and absolute. It uses a lot of “should language,” you should be doing this, you should be doing that. It’s a critical voice. When I look back on my 10 years of parenting, I’m still pretty new at this mom gig. I’m just starting to get the hang of it actually. The undercurrent of self-criticism is the big problem.

 Brene Brown talks about the difference between guilt and shame. When we’re talking about mom guilt, I think we’re really discussing mom shame. We are shaming ourselves. Guilt is a whole other conversation. 

Earlier this week I was so hard on myself for an interaction I had when we were both at the height of frustration. Instead of thinking about what I could do better and apologize and repair and move forward, I heard that shaming voice. 

It is rooted in a fear of not being a good enough mom, not doing enough for the kids, not teaching them enough, not being there enough. It’s a hyper awareness of all of our inadequacies. 

We are in the driver’s seat of this mom shame bus!

Since Monica mentioned Brené Brown and the difference between guilt and shame, I think it’s worth defining that here. In her TED Talk, Listening to Shame, Brené Brown said,

 Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is “I am bad.” Guilt is “I did something bad.”

So an example of mom guilt would be telling yourself, “Oh, I made a mistake. I should do that better,” and mom shame is taking it to the next level: “I am a bad mom.”

But then Brené Brown takes it even farther and says that guilt can actually be a positive thing. 

I believe that guilt is adaptive and helpful—it’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.

Chanelle Neilson, a life coach for moms, at chanelleneilsoncoaching.com, talked to me about this, using the very relevant example of doing work on her computer. 

Sometimes I’m in the zone on the computer, and doing what I’m supposed to do. When I start to deviate and get distracted, I feel the guilt the most. When I find myself checking Facebook or whatever on the computer, I think, “Do I need to be here?” That’s when I start to question myself. That’s really a big trigger for me. 

I do sometimes feel it when I’m working. Sometimes when I’ve been working for a while, even if I know I’m not needed, I still just feel separation from my family.

The message that we hear is that Mom shouldn’t feel guilt. The truth is, guilt is a teacher. Every time I feel that guilt, it’s an opportunity to check in. Am I feeling guilty right now because my little guy needs my help and no one’s helping him? If so, can I help him right now? Can whatever I’m doing wait until later? 

Even if everyone’s just watching TV, or it’s family movie night, and I’m missing the situation, I need to check in and see if I’m having those feelings for a reason. Sometimes I’m going to feel that guilt because I’ve been on the computer for five hours, and the family does need me. That guilt is a signal that I need to stop. The messaging that we get that we shouldn’t feel guilt is actually wrong. We need to learn from our guilt.

Guilt is growth. Shame stunts growth.

 Anna Zupancic was one of the moms I interviewed who really doesn’t struggle with mom guilt. She feels it, yes, but more in this instructive sense. She is confident that though she’s not perfect she’s doing her best, and that really came through, even in a one-hour interview. In fact it took her a while to even think of an example of a time when she felt mom guilt. When she did think of it, she gave a good example of how we can use guilt in an instructive way—to improve without being hard on ourselves in the process.

Most of the time, when my kids ask me for something, I default to no. But occasionally I’m present enough in the moment to realize I’ve said “No,” when I probably could have just said “yes,” and had an easy win. When I don’t seize that moment, I regret missing that opportunity to say yes. I’ll apologize for saying no when I should have said yes. Or I’ll have to apologize for telling them to find something else to do when I should have been there with them. They do know I will always say yes to reading to them. I can’t always drop what I’m doing right away, but I finish things up as quickly as I can so I can read.

Now that is some healthy guilt. Anna is also the mom from episode 86, How She Celebrates Birthdays, who threw her three-year-old son a garbage party. You should definitely go back and listen to her tell that story.

But unfortunately it gets more complicated than that. Because especially when there’s shame mixed in, let alone anxiety and/or depression, guilt isn’t always a reliable emotion. It’s not always logical. Here’s an example from Chenelle Nielson:

Sometimes our guilt is so silly. I’ve felt guilty for reading a book to one child. Why? Because I have five kids. I’m not reading a book to the other four right now! Guilt can be a silly emotion sometimes because we can’t both go to work to provide for our family and be with our kids. Sometimes we just need to look guilt in the face. It gets pretty flimsy, and it kind of dissolves if we really look at it head on.

 I like Renee Reina’s answer:

General guilt is based on something that is rational, whereas mom guilt is never rational. Mom guilt is about things that literally don’t matter. If you sit down and think about it, you realize it doesn’t matter. Even though rationally, you can talk to yourself and know it doesn’t matter, it gets stuck in your head, and you will experience it.

 Renee has a PHD in psychology, and is also the host of the Mom Room Podcast and a tiktokker extraordinaire. You can find Renee on Instagram and tiktok @themomroom

So if mom guilt is illogical, or at least if it can be, how do we know if it’s that instructive, adaptive guilt or just something to dismiss?

KaeCee Reed, a mom of two, owner of a real estate company, and one of my favorite humans, gets a second opinion, usually from her husband, Jake—another great human:

I have lots and lots of guilt. I have to talk it out and give myself permission to feel guilt, and then give myself permission to let it go.Then I talk to my husband Jake and ask if my feelings are legitimate? He can say that it’s actually a legitimate feeling, but he usually doesn’t say that. My feelings are not usually legitimate. I will have some idea in my mind that is completely false. They can be spurred on by a post on Facebook that makes me think I was doing something wrong. When I find that posts are starting to make me feel guilty, or I start to question my abilities. I just have to stop reading posts for awhile. 

Whether it’s your spouse or other moms, if you feel guilt taking over so much that you’ve lost perspective, you can ask for help! It’s really useful to get a pulse of what other moms are feeling, for perspective and solidarity.

So, since I have access to this large community of moms, I asked our Instagram community what kind of thing things they feel guilty about.

I’ve divided their answers into two categories: omission, guilt for not doing something, and commission, guilt for doing something. Any guesses as to which was more prevalent? 

Out of 103 responses, 84% said they struggle with mom guilt. And 72% said that they feel more omission guilt, what they feel like they should be doing, vs. 28% who feel guilty for what they shouldn’t have done.

This tracks with what Bryce Reddy, a licensed counselor who specializes in maternal health, has found in her patients. She’s had lots of experience helping moms deal with mom guilt.

I think it’s more of an omission thing. Moms will worry that they should have fed their baby a certain way so they wouldn’t be a picky eater. It’s kind of a hindsight thing. They’ll tell me they should have played more or have done more fun things with their kids, but they’re just burned out. As moms, we worry about things we’re “supposed to” be doing. We assign ourselves jobs in retrospect that we didn’t follow through on and feel guilty about that.  

Speaking of her online work, you should all pause this right now and subscribe to Bryce’s Instagram account, @mombrain.therapist. This is where I found her, because she makes the most relatable graphics about motherhood. I feel like she can peer into my soul every time she releases a new one.

It’s not very surprising really, that we feel so guilty about things we think are not doing, because there is an infinite amount of things that can fit in this category. Since we can’t prioritize everything at once, there are always things we’re not doing well or at all. And this is where guilt can become illogical really fast. Because, well, we don’t have the infinite time it would require to do all the infinite things.

AND, we all have this image in our heads of what a mom should be, whether from our own expectations, societal pressures, or just from looking at other mothers, including our own. We can’t be just like any of those other mothers. And let’s remember, that’s a really good thing.

When I asked about guilt triggers on Instagram, some of the responses in this category of omission were:

• Not knowing what to do or how to help
• Not reading all school communication or following up on homework
• Not doing enough, or doing too much
• Not getting everything done
• Not being patient enough
• Not spending enough quality time with each kid
• Not being the mom I thought I would be.

That last one is a biggie. A lot of these shoulds stem from our expectations of ourselves or expectations of others, both real and perceived. I did a whole episode, number 30, called A Mom’s Job, all about this topic of expectations and writing our own job description.

 We even often feel guilt when we’re doing something good, or just fine, because we’re not doing something better. Let’s call this opportunity cost guilt.

Renee Reina talked about this in our conversation:

There are times I cannot just sit and enjoy cuddling with Milo and watching a movie because I’m thinking I should be outside. I should be doing something like baking muffins with him. Even though rationally I’m trying to tell myself to sit and enjoy this moment, I feel bad for lying there and watching a movie. Before I even had kids, if I was tired, I would lie down and watch a movie. I wouldn’t think twice about it. 

You can tell you’re feeling the omission category of guilt when you use the word should. I should be doing this, or I should be doing that.

By contrast, the commission category of guilt is when we say, “I shouldn’t have done this or that.” Things like losing our temper or, say, accidentally leaving a kid at church—not that I’d know anything about that. Some things the How She Moms community put into this category are:

• Decisions that impact kids negatively
• Taking time for myself
• Losing control of my emotions
• Trying to control everything
• Working out
• Speaking harshly or yelling
• Leaving kids when I work

There’s also another category of guilt, that can be either commission or omission, and that is guilt for the past—or regret. Here’s Monica Packer:

Regret is a really painful feeling. As we get older, we have more regret because we’ve lived more years. We have more ways of knowing that we could have done that differently. Part of that mom guilt is regret. 

We’ll talk more about why mom guilt happens in the next section, but I think this is a good time to examine another question that keeps coming up. If mom guilt is a thing, what about dad guilt?

I’ve never heard of dad guilt, but I think a lot of that has to do with just how we wrap up our motherhood into our own identity. My performance as a mom (meaning my kids’ performance), is indicative of how I view myself as a person, and how good I feel I am. 

There’s a cartoon going around that shows a side by side of a mom and a dad doing the same thing. The first slide is both a mom and dad wearing joggers and a relaxed shirt, holding a bag that says fast food. On the dad’s side, it says,“fun dad.” On the mom’s side, it says, “lazy mom.” I read the article with the cartoonist who did it. They asked her about what feedback she was getting from the cartoon. Hundreds of women wrote to tell her what she shared is so true, but that voice is actually the voice they hear in their own heads. It’s not other people saying, you’re a lazy Mom, you’re a bad mom, you’re uninvolved, you’re just a normal mom. It’s their own voices. It just shows how it’s a social thing. It’s embedded in the way we think, the way we act, and the way we evaluate. It’s kind of in the very air we’re breathing.

Craig Knippenberg, a child and family therapist, provided a dad’s perspective of this.

It’s easier as a father, because if you see a dad with his preschooler at the coffee shop, holding them, and they’re talking to them, and he’s having this coffee, what does everybody think? What dad! Right? That’s all he has to do. That might be the only thing he does with that child for the whole week, but he’s labeled a super dad because he looks nurturing. For men, play with the kids a little bit and everybody thinks, “Oh, you’re such a great dad.” But that door doesn’t swing both ways for moms. For moms, it’s a much harsher world. The bar is so much higher for moms. People who randomly go up to moms and say, “Oh, you should do this,” or “you shouldn’t be doing that.” You just want to slug them. 

Historically, I think women judge themselves more based on their mothering and then feel guilt or shame that it wasn’t good enough or up to the standards. They may then judge other moms about their parenting. 

However, let’s be wary of getting into a guilt arms race. Maybe moms feel more guilt than dads, generally, but dads are also people, so they too feel guilt when they make parenting mistakes. It would take a whole bunch of new interviews to investigate this question of the extent to which dads feel guilt, but a quick Internet search turned up several articles, mostly about dads who feel guilt for not being present enough with their kids.

Why We Feel Mom Guilt

Now that we’ve talked about what guilt is, let’s talk about why we feel mom guilt: eight reasons, actually. But let’s get this out in the open first: guilt is a normal feeling to have as a mom, and most moms feel it to some degree. Don’t go feeling guilty for having mom guilt!

1. We care so much

In fact, feeling mom guilt can be a sign that you’re a really good mom, because it means you’re trying really hard.

Here’s Bryce Reddy, a licensed mental health counselor who specializes in maternal mental health, and especially in the transition to motherhood:

 I think mom guilt is the feeling we have that we’re either doing something wrong, or messing up our kids, or falling short in some way. I think it’s pretty closely related to regular old guilt, but it just feels so much stronger in motherhood. I think we don’t want to mess up because we take this job so seriously. When we feel really passionate about something, that’s when that guilt can grip us the strongest. We take this job seriously, we want to do a good job. We start micromanaging or analyzing every little choice that we’re making. We put a lot of weight what its outcome is.

It’s a big responsibility to be in charge of another human being, sometimes when you’ve just barely figured out how to take care of yourself!

It starts right with pregnancy. So many new rules that you have to follow to protect this baby. I loved hearing this perspective from Dr. Anna Lisa Jones, a gynecologist and obstetrician, because it shows that it can happen to even someone who knows a lot about how to take care of both moms and babies.

People would say, “Oh, she’s so tiny.” I would want to punch them in the face. I felt this guilt that somehow my body was not giving her what she needed, or I didn’t do something, or I was working too much, or I was not eating enough, and that’s why she ended up small. I don’t know if that’s really true or not. I look back, and it probably was, but I just felt such guilt and anxiety over making sure she got enough to eat. She was also a really difficult baby. She didn’t sleep much. She wanted to nurse constantly. I was in residency and so I was pumping. It was just nuts, those were nutty, nutty days.

There are so many rules, and you feel like if you make one mistake you’re hurting your baby. You can hear an entire episode featuring Anna Lisa on episode 85: How Anna Lisa Heals Herself and Other Moms

2. It’s all new!

A second reason we feel mom guilt is because it’s all so new. And not just when you first become a mom. With every new stage and every new kid you have new things to learn. Of course we’re going to make a lot of mistakes.

This is why three or four times a year, I release episodes to update you on the latest experiments I’m trying in my own home. I share both the failures and the successes, so we can all learn from both.

3. Perfectionism.

Another reason we feel mom guilt is that insidious thief of joy: Perfectionism. As author and philosopher Michael Novak said, “The raising of children … brings each of us breathtaking vistas of our inadequacy.”

Ooh, and when kids realize you’re not perfect, they’re very willing to point it out to you. During a recent argument, one of my kids recently even said to me, “Why don’t you start being a good mom instead of just podcasting about it.” Ouch. But I would suggest that I’m a much better podcaster because I’m not a perfect mom. No one wants a perfect mom, because that would apply a lot of pressure to be perfect too.

I love Bryce Reddy’s perspective on this:

Our kids are always going to have complaints about how we raise them. No matter how wonderful we think we are, how wonderful our parents were, we can all pinpoint things that could have been done differently. There’s nothing wrong with that. We’re not robots. We’re imperfect people raising imperfect people.There are constantly going to be mistakes and errors. There are things we could have done differently or better with hindsight and perspective. But in 50 years, there are probably going to be a whole bunch of new parenting philosophies that differ from what we’re being told today.

Instead of trying to be the mythological perfect mom, or even worrying about whether you’re a good mom, Brené Brown says,

The real questions for parents should be: ‘Are you engaged? Are you paying attention?’ If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time. The mandate is not to be perfect and raise happy children. Perfection doesn’t exist, and I’ve found what makes children happy doesn’t always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.

4. Anxiety and Depression

In a cruel trick of fate, becoming a mother and all that new stuff we have to learn also coincides with hormonal craziness, sleep deprivation, and frequently also postpartum anxiety and/or depression. So come on in, guilt, the door is wide open and we’ve prepared the guest bedroom. 

Here’s Dr. Anna Lisa Jones again, 

I felt guilty. Then I felt anxious and guilty. I was trying to fix it, but I didn’t know how. Then I felt more guilty because I was then having a depression component. I felt guilty that I wasn’t enjoying this baby. I had a newborn, and it’s supposed to be a sweet, bonding time. Everything should be lovely. She’s beautiful. But I felt guilty because I wasn’t enjoying her. I felt resentment towards my newborn, through no fault of her own. I didn’t want to go hold her when she was crying. I just wanted to leave her because she was on me all the time. Postpartum anxiety and depression can definitely snowball. Then you’re constantly trying to manage that. 

You’re not at your best, but you feel like you’re supposed to be, because this baby depends on you. Bryce Reddy also had such great things to say about this. 

They call postpartum depression the smiling depression, because we’re told that this is supposed to be a great time in our lives. It’s supposed to be such a happy time, but it isn’t for a lot of people for a variety of reasons. 

I had postpartum depression, and I’m a therapist. I didn’t realize I had postpartum depression, but I was having all these intrusive thoughts, and I was only eating peanut butter crackers. In retrospect, I can see that I was really depressed! I didn’t even realize it. 

My son was in the NICU, but he was a big, healthy baby. I felt like I was supposed to feel grateful that he was bigger than all the other little babies. 

There’s a pressure to keep denying how we’re really feeling. We have played this role of the really happy, smiling mom, even though there are other clues going on. We need to be mindful, and willing to look at ourselves in those moments– and have our families be aware of the signs and symptoms of postpartum depression prior to us having children. It should not be just us on the lookout for these signs and symptoms. We need to have a support system, including our doctors that’s able to look at us. We have to let them know of any history of anxiety or depression in our past. 

Another interesting thing I started to notice as I talked to more and more moms about mom guilt is that maybe we’re confusing other feelings with mom guilt, or at least mixing them together. For example, if you have to go back to work and leave your baby at daycare, you may feel guilty, but you may just really miss your baby. Those are really two different emotions that we sometimes pin on guilt. Then there are other emotions like anxiety or even loneliness. I asked Bryce Reddy what she thought about this theory:

 I once read this article that said going back to work entailed a bouquet of emotions. New moms were carrying confusion, exhaustion, fatigue, and anger that they had to go back, but also the guilt of wanting to go back. And sometimes it’s easier to focus on the guilt, rather than sitting and dealing with that whole bouquet of emotions that might be coming up. Some of that bouquet might be relief. I don’t know about anybody else, but when I had postpartum depression, I felt relieved to go back to work. I also felt guilty because I felt relief. I wanted to feel connected to myself and connected to something I was really good at because I was not very good at the new mom at that moment. As a new mom, I was still learning, and that felt weird. Being able to identify all of those emotions that are coming up and not shy away from them, is an important piece, too. 

5. Expectations.

Both Bryce and Anna Lisa already touched on this a bit, but the fifth reason guilt sneaks in is that we have so many expectations for ourselves and about what motherhood will be like, and those expectations aren’t always or even usually true.

People wax philosophical about what a wonderful time this is. We’re told all these platitudes as pregnant people and in the newborn phase. It’s rough. 

I remember walking down the road with my first baby who had postpartum depression with. My son cried 24 hours a day. He was a preemie. He was mad that he was outside in the real world. I remember walking down the road, and this couple stopped me to comment, “This is the best time isn’t it?” I just walked away like a zombie. I thought, “Wow. This really what it’s going to be like. How long is this going to be like this?” I started going down this path, questioning, what am I missing? What’s wrong with me? Something must be wrong with me if this is what everyone else is experiencing. 

I definitely felt this kind of guilt when the days were hard with a newborn, especially because we had tried so hard for so long before we finally had our first baby through in vitro. I had imagined having a baby for so long, I thought I would love everything about it. I did really love the newborn phase overall. But I also didn’t love it sometimes. I specifically picture a time when I realized that my first son was going to cry whether I held him or not, and I was starting to lose my patience. So I put him safely in his crib, still screaming, and I very aggressively jumped on my bed to get my frustration out. It’s easy to feel guilty and ungrateful in moments like that.

6. Information overload.

The sixth reason for mom guilt is information overload. We live in an unprecedented age for information and for being able to see how other moms do things. Here’s a voice from a mom who raised her kids pre-Internet to put that into perspective, Janet Thompson, talking about moms in the age of social media:

I just feel for moms today. There are so many things that you can do. Nowadays, you can do all these cute crafts, you can make these super parties, you can do all that stuff. I didn’t feel as much of that. But I did feel it.  

You can hear more of my conversation with Janet in episode 76: How Janet Gathers Family and Friends.

Here’s Bryce Reddy talking about this information overload:

There is so much in terms of parenting education out there right now. This constant information tells us how every single thing we do is impacting our kids in a lot of ways. We’re hearing about it more. Years ago, parents raised their kids. That was it. They weren’t really trying to look 50 years or 40 years down the line about how every action was impacting this little human that we’re responsible for. 

Maybe they should have been. Today, we scroll social media, and we’re constantly seeing all this re-parenting information.We’re seeing all this information about the best ways to parent. I think that we’re internalizing a lot of that. We worry that every little action that we do is having long term impact.That can bring a lot of anxiety, and exacerbate some of the guilt that we might naturally feel.

And often the messages we see are completely opposite. Some people tell us we need to be more firm, with more discipline, others say we should be gentle and soft.

We can take this conflicting information and let it overwhelm us or turn us into unrequited perfectionists, or we can embrace the variety—the endless possibilities—and recognize that since it’s impossible to do all the things, we get to pick what we like.

7. We’ve become very focused on children

My friend Whitney Thomas and I both read and loved a book called All Joy and No Fun, by Jennifer Senior. It’s all about the impact on modern parenting on the parents, and it’s a fascinating read. She says, “Not all that long ago, mothers and fathers…had children because it was customary, or because it was economically necessary, or because it was a moral obligation to family and community (often for all three reasons).

“Today, however, adults often view children as one of life’s crowning achievements, and they approach child-rearing with the same bold sense of independence and individuality that they would any other ambitious life project, spacing children apart according to their own needs and raising them according to their individual child-rearing philosophies.”

Whitney and I had such an interesting discussion about the way this change has affected our perspective…and mom guilt. Here’s Whitney:

 It’s my duty as a mom to help my kids to realize that they are not the center of the world. When we are so focused on our children, it becomes very easy for them to believe that they are the center of the world. It’s a lot easier to replace that guilt for not constantly being with my kids with a need to teach them that people aren’t just there to take care of their every single desire all the time. They need to learn this. By removing myself from the situation to allow myself time for self care, I’m teaching them that they’re going to need to take care of themselves and to be able to take care of their responsibilities in life. It teaches them that they are not the center of the universe. As moms, that’s one of the things that trips us up the most. We’re too zoomed in on our children. We pride ourselves on catering to our children, like we’re being unselfish. Instead, we can look at the big picture of what I’m supposed to be teaching as a mother. We can let go of the guilt when we zoom out and look at the big picture instead of the immediacy of what we’re feeling guilty about.

8. And I saved the one that has had the most impact on me personally for last. One of the reasons we feel guilt is that we really think we have a greater impact than we actually do. We take more credit—and responsibility—than we should. For example, it’s just become commonplace to joke that our kids are going to land in therapy because of us. We think we have the power to ruin our children or to make them succeed. We forget that they’re people with their own choices.

I’m embarrassed to say that I only heard this concept–that we parents are not responsible for our children’s successes and failures—after I started How She Moms. The best podcast episode I’ve heard on this topic is by the lovely Cheryl Cardall, host of the podcast Fight Like a Mother. She was a guest on my show right as her podcast was launching, and oh boy, she’s covered some ground on that podcast. It’s geared toward parents of children with mental health challenges, ADHD, Tourette syndrome and other neurodiversity. It’s such a great resource and she’s such a compassionate host. You’ll want to listen to the whole episode, 54, How to Deal With Others’ Judgements. I’m going to play a clip from the beginning—a collection of common phrases we hear as moms:

“Our son got into his three dream universities with a full ride scholarship.” 

“Well, of course he did. Look at who his parents are.”

“Oh, man, your kids are so obedient and listened to you so well. What amazing parents you are!”

“Whoa. So your son is raising funds to send to orphans in Africa? What a kid. He really learned from the best. You guys are amazing.”

“Wow. That kid didn’t even graduate from high school. Well, of course, he didn’t. Look at who his parents are.”

“Did you hear that Cheryl gets calls weekly from the assistant principal and her kids got suspended. Wow, they really need to be more strict and up their parenting game.”

“Your kids have major meltdowns and put holes in walls and break things. Whoa. You really need to give him harsher punishments to stop him from doing that.”

“Why would you let your kid talk to you like that? Did you hear how her kid talked to her? I would never allow my kid to say those words to me.”

 The judgments levied at us as parents. Sometimes they feel really good when your kids are succeeding and doing well because those are judgments too. But if you’re raising a complex kid with extra challenges, who’s struggling? You often get negative judgments and tons of parenting advice thrown your way. Believe me, I know. Can we see that both sides of these judgments are harmful? The praising of parents for their kids accomplishments is really just as harmful as criticizing us for their challenges. 

What if the kid who had a full ride scholarship to those dream colleges, goes to college, gets overwhelmed, really starts to struggle, and flunks out? What are you going to say then? Is that the parents fault? 

Or what if that perfect Student of the Month suddenly develops crippling anxiety due to that perfectionism and the expectations put upon her and she can’t get out of bed in the morning to go to school? Is that the parents’ failure? Basing our parenting successes and failures on our kids’ accomplishments and behaviors is detrimental to everyone. It feels good to get that payday of, “Oh, there’s a student of the month,” or, “They got the scholarship,” or, “They chose to go on a mission trip.” But what happens when they don’t?

I’m sure you’ve heard people say things like this, both on the positive and negative side, or that you’ve even said them yourselves. I know I have. 

Cheryl goes on to say that we do still have influence on our children, and can teach them a lot of things—so this whole parenting thing still does make a difference. But I want to leave you with that thought—that we ultimately don’t control our children and their behavior, and therefore, we cannot heap guilt or shame upon ourselves for the choices they make or the behavior they choose. You are doing your best. You’re listening to a parenting podcast for heaven’s sake. You are a great mom, so stop shaming yourself, already!