You wanted children. You imagined laughter, sticky fingers on the kitchen counter, maybe even the cliché of Sunday morning pancakes. What you didn’t picture was the quiet heaviness that sometimes arrives alongside love. The pressure to be endlessly patient when you’re exhausted, to always show up when you’re frayed, to carry not just your children’s moods – and on occasion your partner’s – but the weight of your own unmet needs.
From the outside, parenting often looks like pure joy. Inside, many mothers and fathers confess a different truth: guilt at snapping, shame at wanting a break, the silent fear of getting it wrong. In therapy, what strikes me most is how rarely these feelings are voiced. Parents arrive whispering what they think should never be said, and I’m paraphrasing the words of my own mother here: “I love my children dearly, but sometimes I just want to shoot them to the moon.“
This is not failure. It is human.
Growth and loss in every stage
Psychologists describe parenting as a developmental leap for adults, not just for children. Each stage – newborn chaos, toddler storms, teenage distance – asks us to grow, to shed parts of who we were, and to meet ourselves anew. That growth hurts. It confronts us with echoes of our own childhood, with grief for freedoms lost, with the hard work of separation, and with the gnawing anxiety that what we give might never be enough.
Recently I was chatting with a colleague about parenting, and we found ourselves circling the same truth: motherhood and fatherhood are never simple identities. Single parenting sharpens the solitude of responsibility and magnitude of expectations. Shared parenting brings its own complexity: who does what, who is “better” at what, and how children learn to navigate those differences. “Have you asked Dad? He’s in the next room.” And yet they come to you, three rooms over, because, “You’re better.”
Being needed is both flattering and suffocating. There’s the precious ten minutes on a beach, when they’re digging in the sand and you breathe for the first time all day. And there’s the Monday morning when you realise you feel (and look) more tired than you did on Friday evening, especially when the kids are younger.
Parenting is shaped by the temperament of the parent, the personality of the child, and the alchemy of relational patterns that unfolds between them. Independence and self-sufficiency wrestle constantly with the child’s needs. Teaching them to tie their shoelaces takes twice as long as doing it for them – but then one day they can, and the world tilts. You’ve been the one teaching for so long that you forget you too are still learning, still needing to reinforce compassion for yourself.
In the 1960s paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott observed, “there is no such thing as a baby… whenever one finds an infant one finds a caregiving relationship [original: maternal care]”. His idea of the good-enough parent was radical because it relieved us of perfection. Parenting, he argued, is not about flawless patience and perfection; it’s about presence, responsiveness, and willing to repair when things go wrong.
Thinking about Brené Brown’s words, “Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity”, it becomes clear how this applies to parenting. Allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, to admit we don’t always have the answers, opens the door to deeper connection with our children in a way that striving for perfection never can.
The long view
One never stops being a parent, even when the children are grown and become parents themselves. The shape of care changes, but the tether remains. Perhaps this is the essence of parenting pressure: the role is never finished.
Therapy does not offer easy answers. What it does offer is space. Space to unravel the weight of being needed, to rediscover the person behind the parent, and to remember that love is not proven by exhaustion, but by the courage to show up – again and again, imperfect but real.
If this article resonates and you would like to find out how we can help you, contact us to schedule a confidential enquiry call today.
Written by Veronika Kloucek, Senior Psychotherapist, Trainer, Supervisor, and founder of The Village Clinic with support from AI tools for grammar and clarity. All editorial ideas and authorship remain fully human.
References & Suggested Reading:
Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent–Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. London: Routledge. — A foundational work showing how our early bonds shape the way we parent.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Hogarth Press. — Introduces the idea of the “good-enough parent,” freeing us from the pressure of perfection.
Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly. New York: Gotham Books. — Explores how vulnerability, far from weakness, can deepen love, parenting, and connection.