upworthy

parenting challenges

Parenting

21 anonymous parents confess how they're battling burnout by any means possible

"I throw out my kids' crafts and I don't feel bad about it."

Canva Photos & Skylight

Parents are really struggling, and they're confessing the little ways they get by under all the pressure.

I was trying to make a dentist appointment for my two kids last week. Or, rather, I was trying to reschedule a dentist appointment. I'd made one six months ago at their last visit for a day and time that seemed to make sense, but that was basically an educated guess at best. Six months might as well be six years ago! I had no idea what our schedule would be so far in the future, so I did my best. But now it was time to move it, of course, because I had been completely wrong.

I called the office, but no answer. Called again, no answer. Left a message, no call back. Finally, I was able to get a hold of someone through the office's text line. They offered up some new dates and times, which was great. So, I went to check our calendar.

Day 1 didn't work because of back to school "sneak previews." The timing on Day 2 didn't work because my youngest isn't allowed to show up to daycare summer camp past 11 (don't even get me started). Day 3 didn't work because the plumber was scheduled to come that morning. Day 4 didn't work because I had a dentist appointment of my own! I thought day 5 might be a winner, but then my wife reminded me that it was the second day of school—and we couldn't take our kids out of school on their second day of both starting new schools!

In the end, honestly, I just gave up. I needed a break. I had other things to do and my brain was starting to hurt. Plus, I'd already spent what felt like hours on this allegedly simple task.

So, my confession as a dad is that my kids are currently overdue for the dentist, and making them a new appointment is still pending on my To-Do list, because I literally just can't right now. Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels that way.

The folks at Skylight have been collecting confessions from anonymous parents, who share how they're surviving the chaos: Whether it's taking shortcuts, telling little white lies, or just feeling guilty for always falling short. Whatever it is, these parents are doing their best and still struggling.

But that doesn't mean that some of the confessions aren't hilarious. Others are incredibly moving. Overall, it's the perfect picture of the joy, the love, and the anxious guilt that all come together to make up modern parenting.

Yes, people knowingly sign up for this when they have kids, but it's impossible to know just how difficult and frustrating it can be before you're in the thick of it every day. It's also awesome and so fun and joyful! That's the beauty of it all.

Here are some of the best responses from Skylight's anonymous confessions.

parenting, parents, kids, family, stress, anxiety, parenting stress, millennial parents, modern families, culture, society "Sometimes I book a babysitter just so I can drive around in my car alone."Skylight

"I skip pages at bedtime stories." —Dad, 33

"There's a 50/50 shot I forget it's early dismissal. " —Dad, 48

"Still haven't unpacked their backpacks from June. Should be fun." —Dad, 41

"Whenever I want time alone I tell the kids I'm planning Christmas. Even if its March. " —Mom, 45

"I never filled out my kid's baby books. " —Mom, 29

"I throw out my kid's crafts and I don’t feel bad about it. " —Mom, 44

I relate to so many of these, so much so that it hurts. As I'm writing this, there is a cardboard box in my garage filled with just a year's worth of my kids artwork, school papers, and crafts. The box is overflowing and I keep having ideas of sorting through it so I can save the really good stuff, but I just can't get around to it. Literally, I can barely get to the box because it's buried under a ton of other junk I have to sort through!

In my house, we've all but given up saving new artwork unless it's really special, and most of what's in the box will probably be thrown away. I feel guilty as hell about it but I just can't create more hours in the day to deal with it.

parenting, parents, kids, family, stress, anxiety, parenting stress, millennial parents, modern families, culture, society "I secretly prayed my kid's Little League team would lose."Skylight

Here are some more good ones:

"Sometimes when my children are fighting I just let them have it out and continue to read my books." —Mom, 37

"I tell my kids I'm going in my room to work, and not to interrupt. When in fact I am eating ice cream and watching my show." —Mom, 36

"If we don’t have cash in the house for the tooth fairy, we use money from their piggy bank." —Dad, 35

"I tell my kids I’m studying, but really I’m reading my spicy book. " —Mom, 42

"That cute, smiling picture I posted on IG? My toddler was having a full blown meltdown and the only reason she smiled was because I sang Baby Shark." —Mom, 33

"I’m never sad when a practice or game canceled for rain or heat!" —Mom, 39

As a travel soccer family, I can definitely relate to the sweet relief of a cancelled practice. Our daughter goes about three times per week year round, which is an enormous time commitment. The practices are usually in the evenings around dinner time, and we have a younger kid that needs to keep a normal schedule, so practice evenings are usually pretty chaotic and often end with one or many of us eating junk from McDonald's. Worse, I feel a lot of guilt that I stay in the car or at a nearby coffee shop working on my laptop while other parents are out in lawn chairs watching practice. What am I doing wrong? I wonder constantly.

parenting, parents, kids, family, stress, anxiety, parenting stress, millennial parents, modern families, culture, society "I told my kid our town doesn't have a hockey team, because lord knows I'm not waking up ... to take him to practice."Skylight

OK, here are just a few more:

"All I want is time with my kids and time without my kids." —Mom, 33

"Yes, I threw out your Halloween candy." —Dad, 52

"I’ve forgotten my son at early pick up before." —Mom, 37

"Some days, I feel like I’m not giving enough to either side of my life." —Mom, 32

"I’m constantly feeling guilty when I’m not with my kids but feel overwhelmed when I’m with them. " —Mom, 44

Ah, yes, the true brilliance of being a parent is that you get to feel like you're failing in every aspect of your life simultaneously. Parenting takes time and energy away from advancing in your career, but don't worry, your career also takes time and energy away from being a great parent. It's so awesome!

You can see all the confessions as they roll in right here.

parenting, parents, kids, family, stress, anxiety, parenting stress, millennial parents, modern families, culture, society "i told them I had to work late, but I just drove around crying until I felt better."Skylight

In 2024, Skylight teamed up with The Harris Poll to create something called the Mental Load Report. The findings were fascinating and illuminating.

The survey results showed that parents spent an average of 30.4 hours per week on "planning and coordinating family schedules and household tasks," or the equivalent of a near-full-time job.

Parents were found to receive an average of 17.5 communications (emails, texts, phone calls) about their kids' activities every week. It's a stark difference from when we were kids and our parents never heard anything until it was Report Card time.

Planning for "time off"—securing childcare, summer breaks, activities, etc.—took over 100 hours per year. Summer vacation? Yeah, right.

Moms, unsurprisingly, are carrying more of the mental load. But 60% of all parents felt taken for granted or under-appreciated in their household for all the care and planning that they do.

Add it all up and it's no wonder the US Surgeon General put out an advisory warning recently about the poor mental health of parents. An advisory is a "public statement that calls the American people's attention to an urgent public health issue and provides recommendations for how it should be addressed." The report lobbied for expanded paid family leave, expanding public and private insurance coverage of mental health care like therapy, and creating more family-friendly and free community spaces like parks.

Those measures would go a long way, but in the meantime, parents are just trying to cope any way that they can. Whether that's stealing some of your kid's Halloween candy for a little pick me up, or telling them you have an appointment just so you can go somewhere quiet and scream in your car. We're getting by, however we can.

From Your Site Articles
parents
ParentingFamily
Family

Being a parent may be 'hard,' but these moms have a better way to define the experience

The words we use can have a big effect on our attitudes as parents.

via Helena Lopes/Pexels

A mother holding her baby.

If there's one thing you learn raising multiple children all the way to adulthood, it's that parenthood is humbling. It's many other things, too—wonderful, joyful, delightful, frustrating, confusing and tiring—but humbling might top the list.

When you're in the early years of your parenting journey, humility hasn't always set in yet, which is how a debate between moms about whether or not parenting is hard got sparked on social media.

It began when a mom of four kids under 7 wrote on X, "So many parenting books talk about how incredibly hard parenting is. However that had just not been my experience at all. My kids are 1.5-7, I have four, and there are certainly difficult moments, but I would not describe parenting itself as being hard. Am I alone in this?"

Is parenting as hard as people say it is?

People began sharing their experiences, explaining that they thought parenting was easy too until they had a more difficult kid. Some parents said that if moms think parenting is easy it just means they have easy kids or a lot of help. Some said that if parenting is hard for you, it's a skills or attitude issue, which prompted some heated debate about how much of your parenting experience is within your control.

Many of the people who claimed that parenting was easier than they expected have small children only. That explains part of their thinking, especially if they have relatively easy young ones. But it's also a reflection of how the parenting discourse has shifted to become more raw and unfiltered in recent years, largely thanks to the mommy blogging era. Two decades ago, when I was raising my own small children, blunt honesty about the challenges of parenting came as a breath of fresh air to those of us who had only ever heard about how wonderful motherhood was. Now "real talk" has been the norm for a whole generation, probably swinging the pendulum to the other side, bombarding young parents with messages about how hard parenting is.

There's something to be said for expectation. If you go into motherhood expecting it to be hard, it may not be as difficult as you imagined. If you go into motherhood expecting it to be all giggles and cuddles, you'll be in for a rude awakening. Messaging makes a big difference on that front.

What do people mean when they say parenting is hard?

Of course, there's also the fact that "hard" is completely subjective. How do you measure that? Some moms who said parenting is not that hard said things along the lines of, "There are hard moments and sometimes it's frustrating and it's definitely tiring, but it's not hard." But some of us would absolutely equate "frustrating" and "tiring" with hard. So some of this is just semantics.

All "hard" really means is "requiring much effort or skill," which I imagine most people would agree parenting requires. However one of the above moms implied that if parenting is hard, it means you're not good at it, which understandably rubbed some people the wrong way. Same with the idea that attitude is most of what makes parenting hard.

But whether parenting is hard or not isn't even the right question. The question is whether hard = bad. I would argue it absolutely does not. In fact, I think "parenting is hard" is totally compatible with "parenting is delightful" and "parenting is enjoyable." Parenting being hard doesn't negate the joy and the wonder of it all.

Running a marathon is hard, but people still choose to do it because they love to run and because they enjoy the challenge. It's exciting and exhilarating and exhausting, all at the same time. The effort—the hard—is a big part of the experience.

Tending a farm is hard work, and it's celebrated as such. It seem strange to imply that saying "parenting is hard" must mean there's some sort of moral failure happening. Isn't hard just the nature of it?

Is parenting really supposed to be easy?

Parenting isn't meant to be impossible or torturous, but I don't think it's supposed to be a breeze, either—at least not if you're trying to do a good job. Being a bad parent is easy, at least for a while, but good parenting takes continuous, conscientious effort. There are a million circumstances, from age and stage of development, to individual temperament and family support, to your own upbringing and expectations of parenting, that can make it easier or harder. But until you've done the full arc of raising multiple children through to adulthood, you simply don't know what unexpected surprises might be in store. Humility can be chosen early on or forced upon you later, but I've yet to meet a veteran parent who hasn't been humbled by parenting somewhere along the way.

When my children were little, I had a completely different perspective on parenting than I do now that I have two young adults and a teen. Different parents find different parts of parenting difficult, and again, that's not bad. I love being a mom. Motherhood has been the greatest gift of my life and I adore my relationship with my incredible kids, but it was—and still is, in some ways—hard to be a parent. There's no way around that and I feel zero shame in saying it. The hard work of sowing good character, watering their hearts and minds, weeding out negative influences and nurturing them as individuals has allowed us to reap the fruits of our labor in a beautiful family life.

Perhaps those who find parenting "easy" just have their own interpretation of what "hard" or "difficult" means. Or perhaps they haven't hit a hard stage of parenting yet. Or maybe they really did hit the jackpot combo of easy kids and tons of support and that won't ever change. Who knows. All I know is that parenting well is hard, but that hard and great and joyful and wonderful can all totally go hand in hand.

From Your Site Articles
parenting
FamilyParenting
Family

More parents are taking 'teen-ternity leave' from work to support their teenage kids

Parenting through the teen years takes a lot more time and energy than people expect.

Photo by Eye for Ebony on Unsplash

Raising kids through adolescence is not for the faint of heart.

When you have a baby, it's expected that you'll take some maternity or paternity leave from work. When you have a teen, it's expected that you'll be in the peak of your career, but some parents are finding the need to take a "teen-ternity leave" from work to support their adolescent kids.

It's a flip from what has become the traditional trajectory for modern parents. Despite the fact that the U.S. is the only developed nation in the world to not have mandated paid parental leave, most parents take at least some time off when a baby is born to recover physically from pregnancy and birth and to settle into life with their tiny new human. Many parents then opt to have one parent stay home full-time during their children's younger years, as full-time childcare is often cost prohibitive, and raising babies and toddlers requires an enormous amount of time, attention and energy.

Parents often return to work when their kids are in school full-time, and many feel a bit of a respite from the relentlessness of parenting as their kids become more independent and capable of doing things on their own. It's not that older kids don't need their parents, but their needs are different. Physical parenting gives way to more complex emotional parenting as kids get older, and for a while, those emotional challenges are somewhat simple.

Then the tween years come along. Then the teens. And for some parents, a realization hits that parenting kids through puberty takes almost as much time, attention and energy, as toddlers do. Only now, those needs are much more complicated and consequential.

Taking "teen-ternity leave" from work may not be feasible for many or most parents, but those who have the means to take a break from work to focus on family full-time during their kids' teen years shouldn't be judged for it. Raising teens is rarely easy, but for some parents, getting their kids through their teen years is the hardest thing they will ever do.

For one, adolescence is when mental health struggles really come to a head. If you've never parented a child with anxiety, depression, OCD, or some other mental illness, consider yourself fortunate. The mental and emotional toll for parents in that boat is immense, and the amount of time it can take to find the right kind of care and manage the various manifestations of whatever they struggle with can be significant.

teen boy curled up in a corner of a room

Mental health struggles often arise during adolescence.

Photo by Fernando @cferdophotography on Unsplash

Another reality of parenting teens that makes going to work challenging is the tendency for teens to spend the better part of the day not wanting to talk and then totally opening up at like 10:30 at night. Late night heart-to-hearts are a hallmark parenting in the teen years, but it can be hard to sustain if you're having to wake up early and head to work in the morning. And the emotional nature of these conversations requires a lot of thought and energy.

Helping with homework becomes more complicated as parents try to pull their advanced math knowledge up from the recesses of their minds, and then there's the transportation problem. Until a teen can drive themselves and unless they have their own car, someone has to take them to and from their various activities. It may sound silly to take time off from work just to drive your teens around, but it's not just the transportation—it's the transportation on top of everything else.

Is all of this just modern overparenting run amok? Not really.

“We often think the heavy parenting lift is for young kids, who need help getting dressed and more supervised playtime. But once you have a teenager, you realize bigger kids, bigger problems,” Amanda Craig PhD, LMFT, family therapist, mom, and author of the book, "Who Are You & What Have You Done with My Kid?: Connect with Your Tween While They Are Still Listening," told Parents.

The pandemic, of course, didn't help matters. Kids who went through that world-changing event during their formative years had their sense of normalcy and safety rocked, not just on an individual level, but a societal one. Research on the brains of teens before and after the pandemic shows there were actual neurobiological impacts of that time period. Teens today have also grown up during a particularly turbulent time in politics with that turbulence shoved in their face continually via social media. It's not surprising that a lot of young people are psychologically struggling and needing more support from their parents than previous teen generations did.

Maybe a teen-ternity leave—which is really just a different form of parental leave—isn't a bad idea. Imagine if we lived in a world where it was actually economically feasible for more families.

From Your Site Articles
parenting
FamilyParenting
Trending Stories