How to Feel Less Guilty as a Parent

Over the course of the pandemic, I’ve spoken at dozens of community events and workplace town halls for parents. Time and time again, parents have told me: “It doesn’t matter what, I’m doing. I always feel like I’m letting someone in my life down. Sometimes it’s my kids or other family members. Sometimes it’s my coworkers or my employer. I simply can’t be there for everyone in the way I want to be or that they need me to be. There isn’t enough of me to go around.”

Parents have been feeling guilty — really, really guilty — because they have been asked to shoulder an impossible load: to juggle the often competing demands of work, family, and school.

It’s a massive and unsustainable load and parents have been carrying it for a very long time.

So what can you do to sidestep some of those feelings of guilt? Here are a few strategies.

Know that you are not alone. Everyone is scrambling and stumbling and feeling stretched in all directions and worrying about letting their kids and their co-workers down. It’s not just you. It’s pretty much every other parent I know.

Give yourself permission to be a gloriously imperfect parent and your child permission to be a gloriously imperfect kid. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to say and do things you regret because everyone’s under a lot of stress. The good news is that you can recognize when this is happening and then pivot to repairing the relationship. Parents don’t have to be perfect and neither do kids. We can learn and grown together.

Practice self-compassion. Tell yourself, “I’m doing the best I can in a really difficult situation.” If you’re finding it hard to do this, think about what you would say to a friend who was struggling with feelings of guilt about their parenting. Odds are you’d offer words of support and encourage to that friend. Shouldn’t you be at least as kind to yourself?

Recognize that you’re not the one who should be feeling guilty: it’s policymakers who should be feeling guilty for letting parents and kids down in so many far-reaching ways. You have been put in an impossible situation — and you haven’t been given the supports needed to manage all these competing demands at the same time. It’s not that you’re doing anything wrong. It’s that the cracks in the system have finally broken wide open, and in a way that has caused disproportionate harm to certain families. And that’s not okay. As we start to think about the kind of world we want for ourselves and our kids moving forward, it’s pretty clear we need to get serious about addressing systemic inequities as opposed to allowing ourselves to be mired in the muck of individual guilt. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. Our families and our kids deserve nothing less.

Ann Douglas is the author of Happy Parents, Happy Kids — a book that offers strategies for feeling less anxious, less guilty, and less overwhelmed as a parent; and getting to a happier, healthier place alongside your kids.

Related resources

How to feel less guilty as a parent (video)

The secret of good parenting: lose the guilt (interview with the CBC Radio show Tapestry)

Can we talk about summer parenting guilt? (blog post)

Self-Compassion is the Ultimate Parenting Guilt Eraser

Here’s that parenting guilt eraser you’ve been looking for.

It’s called “self compassion” and it makes parenting so much easier and less stressful.

Learning about self-compassion has been life changing for me, both as a parent and as a person.

• It has encouraged me to embrace my own glorious imperfection.

• It has helped me to see myself as a work-in-progress and to recognize the hard work of being human as an amazing opportunity for personal discovery and growth.

• It has helped me to recognize that I don’t have to be perfect and neither do my kids. We can be gloriously imperfect together.

And that’s why I write and speak about self-compassion so passionately and so often: because self-compassion is the ultimate guilt eraser.

Eager to start applying the principles of self-compassion to your own life? Here’s a simple way to get started. Think about what you would say to a friend who was having a really hard time (what you would say to support and encourage that friend) and then say those very same kind and reassuring words to yourself. Perhaps you might find yourself telling your friend something like this: “You’re doing the best that you can in a really difficult situation.” (Because sometimes life – and parenting – can be really hard.)

Want to know more? My most recent book, Happy Parents, Happy Kids, takes a deep dive into all things self-compassion. I also highly recommend Kristen Neff’s book Self-Compassion – the book that got me thinking about self-compassion in the first place.

If you have a story to share about how you’ve been working at practicing self-compassion in your own life and/or encouraging other people (maybe your kids?) to do the same, I’d love to hear it. Hopefully, by sharing your story, you'll encourage other people to be a little kinder to themselves, too -- which may help to send out ripples of kindness into our world.

Can We Talk About Summer Parenting Guilt?

Work-life imbalance tends to get worse during the summer months, fuelling feelings of parental guilt, notes Ann Douglas, author of Happy Parents, Happy Kids.

Can we talk about summer parenting guilt: about the fact that work-life imbalance has a tendency to become nothing short of crushing during the summer months?

Most parents I know are scrambling to piece together a patchwork quilt of summer childcare solutions — often very expensive solutions — in order to respond to the problem that has been dumped in their laps: the fact that the school year calendar is completely out of synch with the world of work.

Why does this matter? Because there’s a huge and growing body of research to show that work-life imbalance is a major source of parenting guilt and parental unhappiness.

But here’s the thing: parents aren’t the ones who should be feeling guilty. It’s policymakers who should be feeling guilty—for failing to create family and workplace policies that actually acknowledge the realities of what it means to be a parent in 2019.

We need policies that recognize the fact that the world of work has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Most parents aren’t just working: they’re working full-time — and someone needs to be caring for their kids while they’re at work.

So instead of allowing yourself to feel crushed by work-life imbalance guilt this summer, channel that emotional energy in other directions. Talk to other parents about what they’re thinking and feeling. Look for opportunities to join forces in some way. Maybe there’s a way you could help one another to shoulder some of the summer parenting load. And, while you’re at it, maybe you could start a conversation about the kinds of social and workplace policies that would actually help to ease that load. Because if every parent is feeling massively overloaded, isn’t it time for workplaces and policymakers to look for ways to ease that load? On second thought, isn’t it long past that time?

Ann Douglas is the author of numerous books about parenting including, most recently, Happy Parents, Happy Kids, which explains why so many parents are feeling anxious, guilty, and overwhelmed — and what it’s actually going to take to make things better.

A Short History of Parental Guilt

If you've got kids, you've got guilt -- which is why I jumped at the chance to write this article ("A Short History of Parental Guilt") for 49th Shelf (a website devoted to Canadian writing).

Hope you enjoy reading the piece as much as I enjoyed writing it. (It was great to have an excuse to pour through my personal collection of vintage parenting advice books once again.)