The Quest to Become Perfect Parents Is Making Us Bad Parents
New research shows that too much pressure can lead to parental burnout
Have a question about raising your kid? Great. Here are 2,862,983 answers. Books, blogs, research studies, Facebook groups, and that lady at the post office are all ready to spew instructions at moms and dads on how they can avoid ruining their children. The underlying message that this mountain of information sends is: There’s a right way and a wrong way to parent. Don’t mess this up.
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that an estimated 3.5 million people in the United States are suffering from parental burnout. In a recent study in Clinical Psychological Science, researchers looked at the modern quest to be the perfect parent, and what they found is ironic: “If you want to do the right thing too much, you can end up doing the wrong thing,” Moïra Mikolajczak, the study’s lead author, explained in a statement. “Too much pressure on parents can lead them to exhaustion, which can have damaging consequences for the parent and for the children.”
Parental burnout, to be clear, is not ordinary stress — all moms and dads will have sleepless nights and various worries about their children’s well-being. Rather, burnout is exhaustion so intense that it leads to one doubting their parenting…
