How to be a mum in 2017: Make sure your children’s academic, emotional, psychological, mental, spiritual, physical, and social needs are met while being careful not to over stimulate, underestimate, improperly medicate, helicopter, or neglect them in a screen free, processed foods free, plastic free, body positive, socially conscious, egalitarian but also authoritative, nurturing but fostering of independence, gentle but not overly permissive, pesticide-free two-story, multilingual home preferably in a cul-de-sac with a backyard and 1.5 siblings spaced at least two years apart for proper development — also don’t forget the coconut oil.
How to be a mum in literally every generation before ours: feed them sometimes. (This is why we’re crazy.)
— Bunmi Laditan
Parents are well aware of the problematic nature of today’s parenting culture, and they’re usually able to identify the overwhelming messages as contradictory and ridiculous. We poke fun at “good parenting” ideals and the judgment and competition that comes with them. The popularity of movies and shows such as Bad Moms, Workin’ Moms, or The Letdown, and websites like Scary Mommy, suggests that we understand that we’re overdoing it. We can laugh about our fixation with developmental milestones and our competitiveness around things like lunch-box art. Unfortunately, while mocking it might be easy, letting go of the internal expectations to be a perfect parent is a much greater challenge. A 2014 study about the impact of intensive-mothering messages found that while parents can see the inherent problems of setting this gold standard of good parenting, we are actually working harder than ever before to try to achieve it.1 Parents I work with often express this contradictory feeling of “I know better but I can’t seem to do better or feel better.”
The rules of parenting are moving targets, and since I first became a mother fifteen years ago, I’ve watched intensive-mothering expectations morph and become even more impossible to achieve. While the goal of a “happy, healthy, and successful” outcome for children is not unique to our era, the number of resources required to achieve it is unprecedented and parents’ efforts toward it are more highly scrutinized than ever. Parents in the 1980s might have felt pressure to make sure their children were eating enough vegetables, but now we’re expected to give children a comprehensive diet of organic food that’s cooked at home, and ideally gluten- and sugar-free as well. We still look to parenting experts, but the amount of information available to us is contradictory and always changing, making it hard for us to know what to trust. And with the rise of the internet and social media, the intimate details of our lives are now witnessed publicly in a way they never were before.
Western parenting culture is now dominated by a parenting philosophy that I call impossible parenting. Impossible parenting is rooted in the core concepts of intensive mothering that demand child-centred families, research-based decisions, and continuous responsiveness. But now that is no longer enough, and parents are also expected to obsess over health and risk aversion, hyperfocus their attention on psychological outcomes, and ensure everyone experiences gratitude and joy along the way. And all of it must be demonstrated on social media, because in many ways parenting has become a lifestyle brand that aligns with whatever community subculture you want to belong to, such as attachment parents, free-range parents, tiger parents, or feminist parents. While each community interprets impossible-parenting standards slightly differently, there are six core values that underpin this new culture.
Sacrifice has long been connected to the concept of parenting, and there is a certain amount of personal sacrifice involved. How we spend our time, energy, and financial resources changes dramatically when we have children, particularly in the early years. This is normal. But when groups of parents get together, a competitive edge sometimes creeps into the conversation about how much we have suffered. While I think this is because we want so badly to have our sacrifice acknowledged and validated, it can often show up as a race to the bottom: who’s the most tired, who had the worst recovery from birth, who had to soothe a screaming baby for the longest. A close friend of mine who had a relatively smooth birth, whose baby took to nursing easily and was a pretty good sleeper right from the beginning, said that she was reluctant to share her experience with other parents because she felt like it would upset them. She felt as though her contributions about her struggles with parenting were dismissed because in some ways she was suffering less than them.
I experienced a stark example of this myself when I participated in an invasive medical study when my children were very young and I was very poor. My family celebrates Christmas and that year I didn’t have enough money to buy the children presents, so when I learned that this study paid $400, I jumped at the opportunity and considered myself lucky to be selected. It involved several steps, but the big day involved lying in a CT scanner with an arterial line into my left wrist so that they could easily draw blood every thirty minutes while I was in the machine. My head was strapped down using a mesh mask, and the research attendant stretched two small holes for my mouth and nose before the mask hardened to lock my head into place. As they slid me into the bore of the machine, which felt like a teeny tiny space, it triggered a claustrophobic response and I started to panic. I should have quit right then, but I was so desperate for the money that I silently suffered through a two-hour-long panic attack. I tried desperately to stop my body from shaking, and I wasn’t sure what to do with the tears flowing into my ears and my nose, because the mask was so tight they had nowhere to escape. I was so traumatized that when it was all over I couldn’t regulate my heart rate. The staff was worried about letting me leave because of the wound from the arterial blood draw; they threatened to stitch it shut surgically if I didn’t calm down. Overall it was an awful experience, and it left me without the use of my wrist for almost a week because I was afraid that if I moved it, I would bleed out (I wouldn’t have). When I started to tell people what had happened in the days that followed, I wasn’t met with outrage, or support for how I’d felt the need to endure this traumatizing procedure. Instead I was met with praise — so much praise — about what a good mother I was to give my children the beautiful Christmas they deserved.
Unfortunately, we do receive subtle (and not-so-subtle) messages that reinforce the idea that the more we sacrifice, the more we demonstrate our love for our children. This is obviously a false connection, and it can lead us to put our physical and mental health in jeopardy. Normalizing parental suffering as an act of love prevents people from getting the mental health support that they need. Telling people that they’re better parents if they suffer more can artificially boost their parenting confidence, creating a sick cycle of rewards for (often unnecessary) sacrifice. This sacrifice/love cycle emphasizes the message that good families are child-centred, as opposed to a family-centred philosophy where every family member’s needs matter equally.
There’s an increasing amount of pressure for parents to “get it right” with children in the early years, with vague hints that there could be devastating consequences if you don’t follow the rules of parenting experts. Or not-so-vague hints, as in Bowlby’s threats of possible adult delinquency or psychopathy for children who don’t manage secure attachment before age five. During my first year of parenting, the Ontario government rolled out a campaign that used the slogan “The Years Before Five Last the Rest of Their Lives,” which advocated for attachment parenting practices and early learning strategies as the best way to set your children up for social and academic success later in life. It was probably the most terrifying message that I, a poor, depressed mother with a high-needs baby, could have received. I attended some of the free classes offered, and I was told that what happened in his life during the first five years would create his psychological imprint for lifelong relationships and program the neuropathways in his brain. This left me anxiously flip-flopping between trying to get my baby to watch Baby Einstein videos or stare into my eyes while I fed him, and feeling like there was no point because I had surely already messed him up.
Parents start investing in their children’s future during pregnancy, with pregnant parents making diet or lifestyle changes so they will be as healthy as possible for the baby. It continues with birth, as many parents fear that if they don’t give birth a certain way they won’t give their baby the benefits of the vaginal microbiome, or that they won’t be able to nurse if they don’t do immediate skin-to-skin. Anxiety continues to grow as new parents try to figure out what to do with their babies’ sleeping/eating/activities/socializing to ensure they are smart/confident/social/healthy. Although it’s common for parents not to immediately bond with their baby, concern that they won’t be able to can quickly convince parents that they aren’t cut out for this or that their children will never be able to form a healthy relationship.
One of the biggest challenges is that you are expected to parent in multiple timelines. You have to parent the child you have in front of you, with all the day-to-day problem solving that requires your immediate attention (e.g., feed them when they’re hungry); you’re expected to parent for the child you want (e.g., set boundaries and manage tantrums); and you’re also somehow required to parent a child that will turn into an awesome adult (e.g., teach them sound morals). It is really tricky and complex! Not to mention that doing so contradicts the parenting advice about just “being present” or “being in the moment” with our children, a complaint that many parents have brought to my office. They don’t feel like they can just relax into moments with their children, because so much of parenting requires you to be multiple steps ahead in the hopes you can make the future easier. You need to leave the park in the next ten minutes so you can make it home in time to give the baby lunch, otherwise they won’t go down for their nap on time, which means they won’t sleep well at night, which means they will be cranky tomorrow. So much of parenting involves preventive planning, making it difficult, if not impossible, to live in the moment all the time.
A significant influencing factor in the invest up front belief is the concept of status safeguarding, which Melissa Milkie and Catharine Warner describe as “extensive maternal labor in the service of creating a thriving child who is distinguished as unique and, more fundamentally, over the many long years to adulthood, set to achieve a similar or better place in the world in the social hierarchy compared with his parents.”2 In other words, parents want their children to have similar or better life experiences than they did, and we work hard to ensure this happens. But it’s not easy, because status safeguarding demands individual approaches for each child, with unique strategies and interventions to protect their academics, talent, social status, emotions, class, and access to resources.3
There has been an intense boom of classes for babies in recent years, including music classes, movement classes, yoga classes, and communication classes such as baby sign language courses for children that don’t have hearing or oral communication impairments. One of the goals of baby sign language seems to be to help parents meet their babies’ needs even more efficiently, as we have very little tolerance for dissatisfied babies.4 The idea is that the natural development timeframe for language-based communication is too slow, requiring an early-investment strategy to speed it up.5 The notion that children need extra classes to develop the skills they need for life continues to grow in popularity. Parenting researcher Linda Rose Ennis argues that it’s really a way for working parents to alleviate their guilt by giving them a way to support and entertain their children without being present. Essentially, the activities parents schedule their children into “may be more about providing a transitional space between separation and connection to be with one’s child where guilt is appeased, more than a way to educate and prepare one’s child for a rich future.”6 Of course, not all parents have access to the same amount of time or financial resources to invest in their children, which can have a negative impact on their parenting identity.
Parenting itself is scary and filled with unknowns, but impossible-parenting culture is laden with fears. Parents are bombarded with messages about all the ways their children might be in physical or emotional danger. Much like the invest up front messages, worries about potential threats to the family begin in the fertility process, particularly related to age and pregnancy: every client I’ve had in their thirties has shared fears about trying to conceive after age thirty-five, even if they have no evidence to suggest that fertility could be a challenge for them. This worry only increases during pregnancy, as pregnant bodies are given a long list of dos and don’ts. Don’t consume sushi, unpasteurized diary, sugar, processed meats, coffee, or alcohol, or you could harm your fetus. Do eat organic, watch your calorie intake, and move your body, or you can harm your fetus. This is heightened for people with a history of loss, as fears about staying pregnant can be all-consuming, despite how little control we have over it.
These fears intensify once we meet our children. Concerns about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) are what I hear about the most from anxious parents, which I can relate to personally. Fear of SIDS was a significant part of my PPA and insomnia, and I became obsessive about watching my baby breathe, fearing that if I stopped watching him he would stop. But SIDS is not the only thing that overwhelms parents with fear. I’ve met parents desperately afraid of poor attachment, baby carriers, infant flat head, allergies, car seats — there seems to be no end to what might threaten a tiny infant. Researcher Solveig Brown’s study of maternal fear found that mothers are also very afraid of the impact the outside world will have on their children, citing rising fears about screens and social media, good relationships with peers, fitting in at school, abduction, molestation, illness, safety, body image, and healthy habits, along with fears about drinking, sex, and drugs.7 That’s a heavy emotional load for parents to carry! All parents want to give their children happy and carefree childhoods, but many feel a tension about raising children today because it feels less safe than previous generations.8 While I couldn’t even begin to accurately assess the risk of an entire generation of children, it certainly feels scary, with more and more of my clients needing to process anxiety related to apocalyptic fears, such as climate change, food and economic security, war, terrorism, police brutality, and oppressive government policies — particularly for racialized, marginalized, and newcomer families. And I’ve found that these fears are directly correlated to postpartum anxiety. This has certainly been true for fears related to the most recent pandemic.
While these fears are valid, it’s also true that marketers leverage parenting fears to sell products by reinforcing messages that children are innocent, priceless, helpless, and constantly in danger.9 Parental anxiety makes it much easier to sell video monitors, sleep sacks (instead of blankets), or wearable breathing monitors. With the rise of parenting experts and research-based parenting, and more access to trauma stories than ever before, vigilant monitoring of children has dramatically increased, resulting in a significant lack of confidence for many parents who are terrified they won’t be able to keep their kids safe.10
It’s an incredible burden for parents to realize that physical and emotional suffering is not just a theoretical part of the human experience but will be a part of their personal experience and their children’s experience. And in a culture that is very uncomfortable with acknowledging death and loss, many of us understandably don’t cope well with the unavoidable fact that we, and everyone we know, will someday die. It feels abnormal and extra painful for children to die before their parents, and I very much related to wanting to wrap my children up in bubble wrap and keep them safe from anything that might harm them. Yet we will all face death and suffering, even though it’s painful, not equally distributed, and often unfair. And while I have a lot of compassion for the depth of anguish a person can experience, it’s problematic that impossibleparenting culture has tried to convince parents that suffering can be prevented with enough worry, planning, and safety products, because when the unthinkable does happen, we think it’s our fault.
Related to both the invest up front belief and the danger is all around us warning, but deserving of a category of itself, is the parenting phenomenon of getting back-to-the-land and keeping everything as “natural” as possible. Many parents have concerns about things like toxins and chemicals, with varying degrees of understanding about what these buzzwords actually mean (I’m still not sure I quite grasp it). There’s a general fear about the health of our children’s bodies, and concerns about the impact of plastics, off-gassing, pesticides, and fragrances abound. As a result, parents are opting more and more for products, particularly clothes, toys, and foods, that feel less processed or mass-produced. Marketers are slapping labels on products with words like all natural or organic, with pictures of farms and trees and animals to evoke a wholesome feeling of safety. This also inspires fears around the impact of particular foods, such as sugar, food dyes, and even infant formula, on babies and children, and many parents are looking for ways to limit their children’s exposure to such things.
How we define what it means to be healthy and what individual practices contribute to this goal are very personal, but the keep it natural messaging has two major impacts on parents. This first is how much time it takes to research, source, plan, and prepare health products and practices in a socio-economic system that values fast-paced, productive living. For example, making your own baby food and cleaning products requires an intense amount of work for a generation of parents that is exceptionally time-starved. Parents are afraid their kids aren’t getting enough natural movement, which increases the demand for evening and weekend activities in an attempt to manufacture opportunities for children to exercise.11 There are even hypervigilant and labour-intensive practices such as going diaper-free, which essentially means starting toilet training right from birth, because it’s more “natural.”12
The second impact is that “all natural” products, health providers, and organic foods are very expensive and not all parents are able to access them, making this impossible-parenting value very class-based. The equation of keep it natural = health = good parenting is deeply problematic, because it means wealthy parents get to feel like good, empowered parents, while low-income parents are left feeling guilty or inadequate. Class-based health inequities are exacerbated by inadequate access to resources such as medical care, therapies, medication, and stress-reducing activities.13
This impossible-parenting value of prescribed self-care is so significant that I have an entire chapter dedicated to redefining our relationship to self-care. The self-care movement has taken hold in parenting communities, but not very successfully, because parents are burnt out and struggling with their mental health in significant numbers. I suspect that this is because the idea of self-care has become tied to a particular set of resource-heavy behaviours, such as spa visits, nights out, or fitness activities. Having self-care activities prescribed to parents by others completely misses the point: what’s required to tend to each person’s needs is personal and complicated and constantly changing. Yet impossible parenting uses self-care as a weapon against parents, leaving many of us blaming ourselves if we struggle with our mood, health, or energy and we haven’t been engaging in self-care in the ways we think we should.
Prescriptions for self-care often hyperfocus on the individual experience of wellness and overlook the importance of the community wellness experience in a way that sometimes feels like we need to compete or hoard “care” resources. Telling parents that the path to wellness is individual ignores the socio-economic and structural barriers that make it so incredibly difficult to balance the work of caring for yourself, your family, and your community. Yes, we need to find ways to take care of ourselves effectively, but we can’t focus so inwardly that we forget to look out for each other or to set expectations of how we want to be cared for. Later in the book I explore the idea of community care and collective care in a few different ways, but for now know that self-care shouldn’t cause distress, be just another thing on your to-do list, or be an isolated experience. But, in many ways, that’s what it’s become.
And finally, impossible parenting demands that we make every moment magical. This includes documenting the growth and development of our children in carefully curated ways to preserve our memories, to make sure our children know their histories, or to share with those in our community, such as grandparents. Parental performances such as “gender” reveal parties, professional birth photographers, and elaborate cake smashes at one-year-old birthday parties have become extremely popular. These contribute to the idealized vision of parenthood, an aggression-free, attuned, blissful celebration of parent-child relationships.14 While there are many enjoyable aspects of parenting and celebrating is fun, the fact that we share so many of these happy performances does tend to encourage us to silence any negative feelings toward children or parenting. This, tragically, leaves many parents suppressing or pathologizing their negative thoughts toward their children, rather than interpreting them as a normal, or even necessary, part of parenthood.15
Many parents feel pressured to demonstrate how good they are at nurturing their children and following expert parenting advice, and, most importantly, that they spend the majority of their non-paid-work time enjoying their children.16 This isn’t necessarily done in competition with other parents, it’s more like a way to reinforce our “good” parenting identity. Social media gives us an easy way to do this, providing parents with real-time validation that they’re doing a good job, with their friends and family literally “liking” their posts and photos. It’s been interesting to watch the impact of social media on parenting unfold. It has provided many avenues of support and community and a platform for parents to share their experiences, while simultaneously inciting feelings of guilt and envy as we see vignettes of the most positive moments of other parents’ lives. I suspect that the intentional crafting of an online family presence is mainly about wanting our friends and family to see our children as just as special and important as we do, but there is certainly a level of performance happening too. Seeing everyone else’s displays of perfect parenting can create tremendous ambivalence and tension for parents, especially if a lack of resources makes it hard for them to compete.17
If you see yourself in any of these descriptions, that’s okay. I am also guilty. As I write this chapter, I am at a yoga retreat trying to fill my self-care prescription. And that’s because there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting an unmedicated birth or making your own baby food or posting monthly updates of your baby on Instagram with a chalkboard announcement of their developmental milestones. The problem is when we value the tenets of impossible parenting to the point that they become our personal litmus test for whether we’re “good parents.” Impossible-parenting values are also a problem when it comes to gendered differences in parenting; people who identify as moms and primary parents are held to higher standards than people who identify as fathers or support parents.
Impossible-parenting culture has a significant impact on our mood, behaviour, and identity and can produce negative mental health outcomes.18 The suggestion that there are “good” parents and “bad” parents provokes all kinds of anxiety. Everyone wants good parents. Everyone wants to be a good parent. Parents live with a constant fear that not being a good parent could lead to a variety of social, physical, or psychological damage to their children, the most innocent people in our communities. Yet the social, physical, and psychological toll of trying to be a “good parent” is often overlooked. In fact, spending more time with your children and giving more of yourself to parenthood is often toted as the solution; Bowlby advocated for minimal separation between mothers and babies in the first five years to protect attachment.19 But maybe the desire to be alone, untouched, and unbothered by the needs of others is normal, and the resentment we sometimes feel toward children is simply a nudge that our needs have gone unattended for too long. Perhaps it’s actually the suppression and pathologizing of negative feelings that are the problem, rather than the feelings themselves.
Authors Susan J. Douglas and Meredith Michaels suggest that “motherhood has become a psychological police state.”20 When we break down impossible-parenting values one by one, it’s no wonder so many parents say that kids are “all joy and no fun,” as they bring us deep emotional connection while taking the adult fun out of our life, albeit temporarily.21 Not only do parents need to hit the behavioural and economic markers of “good parenting,” they also have to like it. The result is that parents are working harder than ever to figure out how to build a career and take care of themselves, their partners, and their community while always prioritizing their children’s needs. And it’s really hard — impossible, actually — to do all of these at the same time. Research on the impact of current parenting messages indicates that parents swept up in all this ideological rhetoric said they feel they’re “so stressed,” “going crazy,” “losing their minds,” “depressed,” and “hav[ing] trouble in their social relationships.”22 My clients with diagnosed mood and anxiety disorders use very similar language.
How is the culture of impossible parenting contributing to low perinatal mood? Returning to Amankwaa’s theory of role collapse, how we interpret what it means to be a “good parent” is critical to our parental identity, which is in turn critical to our postpartum mood.23 Having an idealized vision of parenting that’s based on such perfectionist values creates an impossible challenge, because parents can never meet the standards. They have to choose between feeling like a failure yet working themselves to exhaustion to perform good parenting publicly and try not to get caught, or rejecting these standards and risk being deemed a “bad parent.” And it isn’t difficult to be publicly scrutinized for your parenting choices (just ask anyone who has ever asked an online parenting group for advice about sleep training) because people rarely realize that the rules about how to be a “good parent” are socially and economically constructed. While overt impossible-parenting messages might make for a funny TV show about how mom groups judge each other, the extent of the damage these messages do remains invisible. While we laugh at the standards, we simultaneously hold ourselves to them and are held to them by our communities.
Judging parents as “good” or “bad” has implications beyond poor parental confidence or internalized shame. There are public consequences if you don’t perform “good parenting” appropriately because of parental surveillance, or what I call parental policing, whereby community members and experts monitor parents to make sure they’re doing a good enough job. If they aren’t, they get in trouble, which could mean anything from awkward conversations with daycare providers to interactions with child protective services. Of course, not all parents are under surveillance in the same way. Marginalized parents are most at risk for parental policing, which means that those who feel the most pressure to perform “good parenting” often have the most hurdles to do so. It’s not surprising that, young parents, low-income parents, newcomer parents, refugee parents, and BIPOC parents have increased rates of PMADs.24
I didn’t get support for my PMAD the first time. Partially because I didn’t fully understand what was happening to me, and partially because it didn’t feel like it was safe to talk about my mood given the landscape of surveillance I had to navigate. Young and single and unemployed, I felt an intense need to perform “happy parenting” in front of others, especially helping professionals, because I had this looming fear that if anyone knew how I was really feeling, they would take my baby away. When I was interacting with medical or social services, I felt like I was constantly bombarded with subtle messages, such as when an ER triage nurse asked where my “baby daddy” was when I came in with a sick baby, or not-so-subtle messages, like when I was asked, as I left the hospital after giving birth, if I had somewhere safe to live (something I was not asked with my second child, when I clearly had a partner). It didn’t feel as though they were checking on my well-being. It felt like they wanted to make sure I was up to the task of parenting.
One of the consequences of leaving the values of impossible-parenting culture unchallenged, as I’ve said, is that not all parents have the same access to resources to meet these expectations.25 Impossible-parenting values presume that families are coupled, white, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, English-speaking, economically independent, with citizenship, which creates barriers for huge subsets of the population through no fault of their own.26 It creates “an institutional form of discrimination against single, poor, and minority mothers that seeks to ‘other’ and shame women who cannot and/or will not mother in this way,” which I argue applies to all parents and not just those identified as mothers.27 Not to mention the fact that the messages of how to be “good” at parenting are contradictory and confusing.28 How does a single parent provide enough financial resources and be child-centred at the same time? Do they put a young infant in daycare, or take a hit to their income and stay home? It feels cruel to hold parents to impossible-parenting standards that are out of reach. It’s the culture of impossible parenting that needs to be called out as a problem, not a parent’s ability or inability to perform “good parenting.”
There’s a community agreement embedded in our culture to protect children from “bad parenting.” The intention of the agreement is to ensure that children are not raised in neglectful or abusive households, but what it means to be abused or neglected is sometimes subjective, which creates tension for parents who want to reach out for mental health support, as they risk being labelled unfit, which can result in unwanted, unsupportive, and harmful state intervention.29 For a parent in the PMAD community, it can be terrifying to hear stories of parents who seek help, only to have their doctor call child protective services because they have misunderstood what it means for a parent to have an intrusive thought about drowning a baby. (Intrusive thoughts are just thoughts, terrifying and distressing thoughts. They aren’t desires or soon-to-be actions.) The hum of surveillance and analysis of parenting behaviour is particularly high for low-income and BIPOC parents; they often express feelings of being extra policed.30 For example, I once provided doula support for a Canadian newcomer who had learned English as a second language. It was suggested at her four-week well-baby visit that her child required an X-ray because of possible shoulder distortion. The parent was hesitant to subject her newborn to radiation, so she followed up with the delivering doctor who assured her that her baby was healthy. When this parent turned down the referral to radiology, police arrived at her door a few hours later because her pediatrician had reported that she “misunderstood” the importance of the X-ray and was putting the infant in danger. Although the baby was deemed healthy and not in any danger, child protective services opted to keep her file open “in case she needed support,” despite her insistence that having an open case file felt intrusive and that if she needed additional support she was fully capable of sourcing it herself.
The culture of impossible parenting is hurting families. Children just don’t need their parents to follow such a narrow script.31 While it may feel overwhelming to think about the work it will take to change this problematic ideology, it’s incredibly important work. Through the rest of this book, I propose how we can change parenting culture for the better, to ensure that all family members — you, your partners, your children, your extended families — have permission to be imperfect, embracing all the messy and difficult emotions that coincide with imperfect humanness. In later chapters, we will delve into ways that we can ease the internal expectations of good parenting, but first let’s explore the four areas of parenting that feel the most difficult: birth, sleep, relationships, and bodies.