I made a commitment a few weeks ago to post twice-weekly for at least the following 3 weeks - this post marks the end of that period, and I’ve (just!) managed to make it. Shortly after I made the commitment, we had an unexpected change in our childcare situation, so I’ve had less time than I hoped for writing and almost didn’t post a couple of times. But I’m glad I pushed myself to do so, especially in a time where it would have been really easy to deprioritise writing. Going forwards, I plan to post at least once a week, but also definitely plan to experiment with periods of more regular posting once we’ve got childcare sorted (I might even try 30 posts in 30 days at some point…)
I’ve been thinking recently about what people mean when they say parenting is - or isn’t - hard.
Sometimes I feel like people who disagree about how hard parenting is are talking past each other. Someone, probably on twitter, will post something about how hard parenting is despite being very joyful, and someone else will disagree claiming it’s really not as hard as people make out (and is, actually, very joyful!) Are these people having really different experiences, or do they just mean different things by “hard”?
Another time I’ll be talking to another parent about how hard I’m finding parenting, get the feeling they empathise and feel similarly, and then find out they are planning to have two children under 2. I cannot for the life of me imagine feeling ready to have another child anytime soon, and so I find it hard to imagine that this person really finds parenting hard in the way I do right now.
I’ve found it helpful to distinguish two different things we might mean when we say parenting (or anything, really) is “hard”:
Parenting is challenging me and taking a lot of my energy, but I feel roughly within my capabilities
Parenting is really pushing me past my limits; I’m struggling or don’t feel like I’m coping well
I think there’s quite a big difference between feeling very challenged and struggling, though both could be described as finding something “hard”. When people disagree about how hard parenting is, maybe they are having very different experiences, or maybe they’re talking past each other because they are talking about very different types of “hard”. If a friend and I are talking about how hard parenting is and I’m then surprised to hear she’s planning another baby soon, maybe she’s feeling challenged but not struggling.
I think everyone finds parenting a challenge, and most people struggle at some points, some much more than others.
I’ve had periods of both, and the difference feels pretty big. As I wrote about recently, I found having a very young baby challenging but generally not a huge struggle, largely because my expectations for myself and the situation were appropriate. By contrast, I had a period where I struggled a lot more with an older baby, largely because I had more demands on myself beyond just being a parent, and felt unable to keep up with it all. At this stage now, I feel like I flip flop between challenge and struggle on a daily, sometimes hourly basis.
Of course, it’s not just that people mean different things by “hard” - experiences of parenting also differ widely. This is another reason I get a bit frustrated by disagreements about how hard parenting is: there’s no absolute answer for everyone! Circumstances can make a huge difference to how hard or easy parenting is: the kind and amount of support you have; your child’s temperament; money; mental health; work circumstances, and many other things. Unless you know exactly how someone else’s life looks on these dimensions I’m not sure it’s all that helpful to draw any conclusions from how ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ they say they find parenting.
Anyone who knows me won’t be surprised to hear me say I’d like to see more nuanced discussion of the difficulties of parenting (or anything, really). I think I would have enjoyed reading more of this before becoming a parent myself, too. I’ll try to write more about this from my own experience in the coming weeks and months, but a few quick reflections for now:
For me, a lot of the difference between challenge and struggle has been shaped by my attitude towards and expectations of a situation: I can accept and deal okay with a bad night’s sleep if I’m prepared for it (e.g. my child has a cold and I expect them to be disturbed for a night or two), but might really struggle with exactly the same night if it comes out of the blue and I’ve got in my head that I need 8 hours to do something the next day.
Practically, by far the most important factor has been having enough support - both from friends/family, and childcare - to have the time to take basic care of myself and keep stress levels manageable. Without that, small challenges and stresses can compound, because you don’t have the space to process or recover from them. Suddenly having way less time to take care of yourself is one of the biggest challenges of being a parent, in my experience (I remember in the very early days, once referring to going to the toilet as “self care”...)
Having a child just brings a lot more uncertainty and unpredictability to your life, and I think your ability to accept and deal with this makes a big difference to whether you feel challenged or struggle. Personally, this is still one of the things I find hardest: there are just so many more things outside of my control that I care about that could possibly go wrong on any given day (illness, injury, meltdowns, bad sleep to name a fun few), and I don’t always find it easy to accept that.