My four-year-old is in the living room playing with a dinosaur, a pig and Jessie the cowgirl from Toy Story. I’m trying to cook dinner. “Mama, mama, pllleeease can you play with me?” I hear a pot lid rattle. The broccoli is starting to smell burned; I dash back to the kitchen. “Help! Quickly come! I’m falling!” I rush through. She’s dangling from the sofa pretending to fall off the side of a volcano. “HEEELP!” The broccoli is definitely burning. And there goes the door. “Muuuuuum, I need a poo!”
This wild ride of five minutes is one most parents will recognise. Getting through the day is to feel like you’re being pulled in a solar system’s worth of directions, and by turns defeated, happier than you’ve ever felt before, like a husk, in control and like you’re careening off a cliff. It throws up a need to get very good at planning, and prioritising what demands to acquiesce to, when to say no; when to sit down and play, when to say: “Sorry, I need to sit down, or go for a run.”
Take the morning rush as an example – often a key friction point: clothes need putting on, teeth need brushing, porridge needs eating, all while getting ready for work. Tensions can fray quickly, especially on little sleep. Sarah Ockwell-Smith, a parenting expert known for her emphasis on attachment parenting, suggests preparing children mentally. “Try in advance to think: ‘What can I do to make this easier for myself or my child?’”
Otherwise, she says, “We get in a panic and everything gets really rushed and they’re like: ‘Oh, I’m going to dig my feet into the sand here and not move.’ Then everybody’s in fight-or-flight mode.”
I think back to my morning: spikes in cortisol, check; intransigent child, check. Ockwell-Smith suggests a simple way around it: “Put another hour into your day.” Easier said than done when you’ve had five hours’ sleep, half of them with a foot in your face. “I know it’s insanely early, probably,” but, she says, “you have a really calm breakfast together. You do half an hour playing with each other first … and then everything is slower and easier. And although it’s horrendous having to get up earlier, you will feel so much better.”
In some instances, having a routine will add some ease to otherwise tricky days. Dr Martha Deiros Collado, a clinical psychologist whose books and advice on social media emphasise connection over control in parenting, thinks “a bit of routine that becomes predictable makes things smoother for everyone. We know that kids do well with a routine.” But, she stresses, it doesn’t have to be elaborate. “It can be things like a rough wake-up time, rough timing for dinner and bedtime … these are things that we do, they’re non-negotiables.”
But sometimes overplanning might actually be making days more stressful and Collado is clear of the “need to have a degree of flexibility embedded within a good routine”. Sometimes a curveball – work, illness, particularly bad sleep – might mean you need to adapt your plans. In these instances, she says, “You’ve got to accept that good enough doesn’t mean you do it all. It means you do what you can when you can. And on days when you’re in survival mode, you appreciate that you did the basic requirements.”
Sometimes, though, it feels impossible to sort the must-dos from the nice-to-dos, the good from the good enough. This week for instance, making a spinach and ricotta cannelloni felt inexplicably pressing. The increasingly slimy kilogram of spinach in the fridge has been glaring at me accusingly every day, making my week – without hyperbole – 25% more stressful than it otherwise would have been. Honestly, it would have been a lovely win, but not having done it shouldn’t feel like failure. Collado suggests thinking about “actual needs” – “I need to feed my children, but I need to feed me too. My kids need to go to school and I need to get to work.” Wants, by contrast, are “extras”. She gives the example of an upcoming outing. If on the day, for whatever reason, it doesn’t feel right, “we’ll just be like, ‘that’s OK’”. It sounds simple but it’s a permission that could have saved me, and I’m sure many parents, from days forcing round pegs into square holes.
One way of opening up a little breathing space might be taking yourself and your kids into environments that offer opportunities for your children to mix with other children of different ages; where kids can play without needing you to be a dinosaur to their Jessie. Elena Bridgers is a science writer with a focus on “motherhood and parenting in hunter-gatherer societies”. Given these are the societies we evolved in for much of our species’ existence, she believes “there’s a lot we can learn … by studying [them]”. For one thing, in those societies, “child rearing is collective”. This is the infamous “it takes a village”. To replicate that at least a little, Bridgers recommends getting into child-friendly public spaces such as parks or, in winter, she used the indoor play area of a local McDonald’s, where her “kids spent hours playing there with whoever showed up so I could get work done”.
Sometimes, days spent parenting would feel a lot less pressured if we eased up on the idea of what we should be doing, of the kind of parent we wish we were. Anyone who has ever felt guilt-ridden after exposure to Instagram content of mums setting up elaborate play scenarios or craft tables for their children will know what I mean. Bridgers is comforting: “Less is more”, she says. “The evidence suggests that children need sensitive, attuned caregiving. They need social stimulation, like singing and reading to them and making silly faces. But they don’t really need you to play with them.” Instead, she suggests, “involve them … if you have chores to get done, you can give them a task”. That kind of interaction is, she says, “good for children’s learning and development and there’s no evidence to suggest that is in any way less good for them than playing Lego with them”.
Boundary holding is another hot topic, and can be key in preventing the steady march to being spent by mid-morning. Far easier said than done, but it can be useful to think about which of your boundaries are fixed and which are malleable. Ockwell-Smith suggests asking: “Why am I doing this? Does it really matter if they jump on the sofa?”
Of course, she says, boundaries around safety are absolute, while others might offer an opportunity to slacken. If a child wants to wear a Spider-Man suit to nursery, maybe relent and give yourself an easy life, says Ockwell-Smith. “If they want to wear it to a funeral, probably less so.” Collado gives “bedtimes, breakfast times, bath times” as an example. “My kids don’t go to sleep at eight on the dot every night … some nights it’s earlier [if] that’s what they need and sometimes it’s a bit later because they were watching Strictly.”
Parenting coach and mum-of-three Olivia Edwards suggests some language that might help jostle children along, by giving them a sense of autonomy: “‘I wonder how we can make sure that we wrap this up and get to school on time?’ Or: ‘What’s your plan for making sure that we can put this away and come back to it later and go downstairs and get our shoes on?’ It stops it from being ‘you just need to do this thing because I’m telling you to do it’.”
In fact, in all aspects of parenting, language matters. Collado recommends using language that is “about joining in”. Rather than telling them you need to hurry so you can get to work, she says, “kids are motivated by emotion and playfulness”. Try creating a shared project of getting out of the house by asking: “How quickly can you grab your shoes? Can you get to the front door before me?” With older kids, she says, “it’s about making sure they feel heard … talk to them, negotiate …. Like, ‘OK, you’re really tired. I get you.’ But you might say, ‘I can’t leave you home alone … so you know what? You need to come with me to the shops, but you get to choose dinner tonight.’”
But sometimes, impossible-feeling situations arise. “It would be really nice if we could say to people: ‘You can’t do it all’,” says Ockwell-Smith. “Our society is not set up for this. It feels hard because it is really bloody hard.” When there are no quick tips that are going to help, she recommends what she calls “do the least harm”. So, “in a moment when something desperate is calling for you, admin or work, and your child is [too], you think, ‘what’s the least harm?’”
When things do go wrong and days implode, the concept of rupture and repair can be a tonic, helping foster reconnection with children, as well, let’s be honest, as helping to ease guilt at having taken a tone you regret. For young children, says Ockwell-Smith, that might be “apologising, having a big hug and playing, because that’s how kids like to reconnect”. For older kids, it’s maybe thinking: “‘I have to get time in my schedule to have a day with my teenager to do something fun and reconnect and have time to listen to them.’”
Aside from all the great, gooey benefits of connection, Edwards points out that on a practical level a connected child is “more internally motivated to want to collaborate … They’re less likely to resist and fight back.”
Key to doing all of this might be setting yourself up with the tools to cope. Edwards puts an emphasis on the nervous system. “It’s quite easy for our nervous systems to be overwhelmed from a sensory perspective,” she says. I think back to this morning, trying to get my wriggling daughter’s shoes on, overheating in a coat I’d put on prematurely, being tickled in the ear with a feather and asked to sing Jingle Bells. “If you’re finding that your patience and your tolerance is low, if you’re getting very triggered by your child’s behaviour … that’s a real sign that you need to be prioritising that space and time for you,” says Edwards.
A little self-awareness goes a long way, says Edwards. “Get good at looking at your own flags, because I think we also aren’t very good at reading our own science until it’s spilled into pure deregulation.” H2O is your friend. “Just drinking cold water can work really well for lots of people and also children. Because it just stops the nervous system from getting into that state of activation where your heart’s pumping. It slows everything down.”
Callado is clear on the need for self-care: “To be a mother does not mean you have to be a martyr … this whole idea of self-sacrifice is a societal myth to put a pressure on mothers that is completely unachievable.” She points to the research: “Children do best when they see their parents as full humans in their own right.” And, she says, to be a “full human you need to do things that fill your cup”. She sometimes says to her daughters: “You know how you love play dates or little parties and you have such fun with your friends? … I need that too.” Modelling that behaviour is, she says, really important.
But as Ockwell-Smith warns, self-care can quickly become “something else we can fail at doing … ‘I’m not a good mum because I don’t do enough self-care.’” Instead she does something called “self-kindness”, “which doesn’t require time, it doesn’t require money, it doesn’t require separation from the children, it doesn’t require doing something right. It’s just literally saying to yourself, ‘this is hard because it is really bloody hard, not because I’m a bad mum’.”
It’s about “treating yourself as you would your children. So if you’ve had a bad day, you just go, ‘Do you know what? It’s just that, it’s a bad day. This is really difficult.” It might sound simple, but being kind to yourself when you feel like you’re failing isn’t easy. “It’s allowing yourself to mess up and be good enough.”
