The REAL reason you are struggling as a parent

By Sally Prebble (PhD)

Eleven years ago, I had just come home from hospital after a difficult delivery with my youngest child. I was very overwhelmed, very exhausted… and pretty desperate.

Despite teaching parenting courses and having spent years studying psychology, I was really stumped. I thought I was doing everything the books said, I was certainly trying my best. Why couldn’t I bring our family out of chaos?

"This is Normal"

What was interesting was that the message I received from the doctors and midwives and other health professionals I was in contact with was… underwhelming.

"Of course you're tired."

"What do you expect? You're a mother of three..." 

"Everyone is in the same boat." 

"No one has enough support, no one has the energy." 

"This is ALL normal."

I’m not sure if that was supposed to be reassuring or alarming, but a decade later, my work with parents and families over the past decade confirms this pattern. En masse, parents are really struggling, ping-ponging between their own lack of capacity to cope and managing their children’s dysregulated behaviour.

Yeah, but…why are we all struggling?

But I became fascinated with this problem: Why are we all struggling? What is going so wrong? And for so many of us?

What I have come to see is that there is a pattern to the chaos; a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle that keeps many families stuck.

If you are also feeling stuck in family stress and overwhelm, I want to show you how this cycle works, and some of the practical steps that you can take to shift your family out of these patterns, and into a different cycle. Starting today.

(Prefer to watch? You can view my video on this topic here.)

The Exhaustion–Behaviour Loop

Two parts of this problem were really obvious to 11-years-ago me:

1. I was exhausted (no energy), and
2. My children’s behaviour was very challenging for me to manage.

And to a certain extent, I could understand how these two parts of the puzzle related.

The reality is that dealing with challenging behaviour every day is exhausting. Beyond exhausting. Breaking up fights, dealing with tantrums, looking into the cold and detached face of your child while they rage at you. This is highly stressful stuff! Rather than receiving the support and care we need to deal with this, parents are often blamed and ridiculed for these difficult situations.

I could also see that the more exhausted I became, the less capacity I had to manage these situations in a way that would be helpful. I was less able to be present with my children, to empathise, to connect with them. I was withdrawing, and the more I withdrew, the more challenging all of my children’s behaviour became.

The Broader Social Context: It's Not Just You

What I have realised is that there are some important bits of this puzzle that are missing. There is a broader social context that our modern parenting endeavours take place within.

This is not an individual one-off miserable situation. This is a broad, widespread miserable situation that many of us are facing together.

It is not an individual problem, it's a social problem.

The Village That’s Missing

The first part that was invisible to 11-years Ago Me was that I needed a lot more support than I had access to. I needed practical hands-on help. I needed time to rest and recuperate. I needed other loving adults to care for my children so I could recharge my batteries. I needed a whole social network that didn’t exist.

Our children’s brains and nervous systems evolved at a time when the average child had 15 or so loving adults caring for them.

Not one parent.
Not two parents.
Not two parents and an occasional grandparent.
Not a continuously rotating roster of underpaid daycare staff.
No, 15 or so highly involved, loving adults.

The social isolation that most of us experience while raising our children, combined with the pressure of fast-paced modern life, leaves many parents exhausted and under-resourced.

We Can’t Give What We Don’t Have

The end result of this deficit of support is that many parents today do not have the support, resources and capacity to give the depth of care and connection that our children’s biology anticipates. We. Just. Don’t.

This isn’t a failure of the amount of love we have, or our skill or our intentions – or our ability to set firm boundaries or operate a sticker chart – it’s just a really crappy structural problem.

We live in a world that prioritises money, efficiency, entertainment, profits and materialism.

But not supporting our children to make sure they get the amount of connection they need. Our children are at the very bottom of this priority heap.

Why Children "Act Out": A Biological Drive for Connection

Due to the absence of the proverbial ‘village’, our children are often entirely reliant on us, their parents, to provide all of the vital connection and attachment they need. 

The kind of paid support we are able to access (e.g.school, daycare, afterschool care) give parents a break from caring for children, but only in order to go to work and participate in this economic machine. They are neither giving us the rest we need to restore our energy reserves, nor giving our children the consistent, loving connection they need to soothe their nervous systems.  

And here’s where things get really interesting.

The part of this whole modern parenting conundrum that 11 Years Ago Me didn’t fully understand, until my sweet children taught me the lesson, is that children will work really, really, REALLY hard to make sure they receive the connection their evolutionary programming tells them they need.

Children work like their survival depends on it to maintain the relationship with us. Because, guess what?  Their survival does depend on it.

We now have more evidence than ever before that a child’s secure bond with their caregivers is critical for their brain and emotional development, physical health and learning. Connection with us is what allows them to get all of their other needs met, including basic needs like food, water shelter. Connection is the need that is most vital to them. 

When a child can’t secure the unconditional love and affection they crave, it places their nervous system in a state of stress. 

If we don’t recognise why they’re doing this, all of this  can just look like “bad behaviour”, wilfulness, defiance, oppositional behaviour, problems with attention, rather than seeing that so much of this behaviour is a desperate child using whatever behavioural tactics are available to them to secure the connection they need. 

Depending on the child, this may look like:

• Clinging and separation anxiety
• Tantrums and rage
• Defiance and anger
• Withdrawal and shutdown

And if we don’t understand this, it just looks like “bad behaviour.”

The Vicious Cycle in Motion

Here’s how this whole cycle played out for me, and for so many other families I have worked with.

• Without enough SUPPORT
• I was left drained and depleted, without the ENERGY I needed to survive each day. 
• I didn’t have the inner resources or external support I needed to give my children the CONNECTION their nervous systems needed to stay regulated, and they respond with escalating 
• BEHAVIOUR as an evolutionary response to the threat posed by not enough connection. 
• Trying to cope with all the challenging behaviour and conflict, used up whatever ENERGY I might have had for 
• building CONNECTION with my children,
• Or seeking out the external SUPPORT I needed to surround me.
• Without SUPPORT, I am drained and depleted (no ENERGY), left to manage alone….

And around and around I went, in an ever accelerating vicious cycle.

Reversing the cycle so it can raise you up (not drag you down) 

Now, this would be just a sad story if it weren’t for the fact that once we understand this dynamic, we are finally able to see where to put our very precious and limited parenting energy in order to make a change and free ourselves from this vicious cycle. 

In fact, by understanding this, you have a chance not just to slow or stop this downward pattern, but actually to reverse it. Because the interesting thing is, exactly the same cycle, when reversed, can become a self perpetuating force that can lift you and your child up slowly and inevitably. 

Time and time again, I have seen the current that was pulling a family down gradually reverse, until it became a powerful force lifting them up. And I want to show you exactly how to fix this.

Imagine This...

• If  you had enough SUPPORT, how much more ENERGY would you have? 
• If you had enough ENERGY, how much more of yourself could you pour into your deep, affectionate, loving relationships with your children?
• If your children experienced regular, frequent consistent CONNECTION, how much more settled and cooperative might they become?
• If your children’s BEHAVIOUR was more settled, operating from a calm, cooperative state more of the time, how much more ENERGY would you have to pour back into CONNECTION and reaching out to create networks of SUPPORT?

The momentum of the world we live in may be pushing this cycle in an ever downward direction, but our evolutionary wiring, and our children’s, is ready to push the other way. 

What makes a difference is making small and practical changes at various points on this cycle. Strategic, low energy interventions at any of these points on the cycle are incredibly powerful, because they work with the way you and your child’s nervous systems were designed. 

At first, these changes will be small (it takes a while to slow this momentum and reverse the cycle), but over time, they add up to a change in the whole direction of the flow.

We’re talking compound interest here. Small changes that go a long, long way. In this way, it is possible to create a positive and self-sustaining cycle that can lift you, and your children, in the direction of more connection, support and harmony. 

Microhabits that can reverse the cycle

1. Greater self-connection revitalises parents

A  good place to start is usually with investing in yourself, building your capacity and caring for your own resources. This is because this is the thing you have most direct control over and can start straight away - like right now. If you build your capacity, you will have more energy for everything else on this cycle.

You are the most important thing in this system. Starting on yourself is not an act of selfishness, it is an act of sanity and necessity. Learning to care for yourself as an act of love for your children.

The idea of self care has been so co-opted by corporations and marketing we might immediately think of shampoo and chocolate, or even very difficult and unattainable images of expensive holidays or yoga retreats. 

But the type of self care that can make a big difference is much smaller and simpler than this. And cheaper. (This is free.) 

It is learning to notice your own feelings and your own needs in real time. It's like picking up the internal phone that has been ringing frantically and listening.

Try this now:

• Take 30 seconds. Breathe.
• Notice. What sensations do you notice in your body?
• How do you feel?
• What do you long for?
• What small action could care for that need right now? Make a cup of tea? Rest your eyes for 5 minutes? Drink some water? Go for a walk?

(I have made a video resource about this if you are interested to learn more).

Each time you pause to care for your moment-to-moment needs may be a drop in the bucket, but imagine if you learned to do this for yourself regularly throughout each day? Imagine if you could rewire yourself to actually notice how you are and what you need regularly and frequently? Imagine if, instead of forcing yourself, shaming yourself, guilting yourself or pressuring yourself you paused every hour or so and checked what you needed? How far might this go to building back your capacity?

Over time, this practice can transform your conscious experience of the world,and importantly, when you start learning to care for yourself, you will start to naturally have a little more resources and more energy to connect with your children.

2. Well-resourced parents are better able to offer connection

This step is where the evolutionary magic really starts to kick in. Because it turns out that deeply connected children are much, much easier to parent. 

To see the magic for yourself, think back to the last time your child felt really easy to parent.

My guess is that it was a moment when they felt unconditionally loved, safe and connected. The parts of children's brains that allow them to behave compassionately, lovingly, cooperatively are only accessible to them when they feel loved, safe and connected. So when we are able to bring children into the bubble of our loving affection regularly and frequently, their wiring takes over and they naturally soften and become easier to parent.

And no, I don’t mean you will never disagree again, or that they will always do everything you tell them to, or they will never have an outburst. What I mean is that all of this can take place within a softness of connection.

There are many specific tools of connection that we teach in our courses (including skills of empathic listening, learning to hear your child’s pain and so on), but a microhabit that can start turning this around for you today is to think of each moment that you are with your child as a chance to build connection. 

Imagine a wall that needs to be painted. Each time you are with your child is a chance to add one more stroke of paint. Smile, touch, warm words, eye contact, laughing together, invitations into your presence are all low energy but powerful ways to do this. 

Each time you are with your child, trying one small, deliberate, conscious act to create connection. 

Unfortunately, many of us were not taught how to do this, and may never have received affection and love from our own parents. If you feel completely overwhelmed about how to do this, I have a really simple formula you can use. 

As the connection with our children is strengthened, what tends to happen is that their challenging behaviour reduces, giving us more rest, more time and more energy. There is a natural and inevitable shift towards peace, cooperation and harmony.

3. As children's behaviour settles, parents have more capacity to seek support

If you are able to take these steps, you are likely to build enough capacity to have the energy you need to go out and find some additional support you need. 

For 11-Years Ago Me, this was actually the first step I needed to take. I was too depleted to start this process alone. Sometimes we just need a little bit of external support to give us the extra support we need to take a first step. 

If this is  you, I really want to encourage you to take a first small microstep now: 

Write down one step you feel able to take today to reach for some extra external support. 

This may look like:

• Asking a friend for a cup of tea
• Reaching out for a babysitter so you can have a nap
• Joining an in person parenting group
• Finding an online parenting course or support community (you can look at our online course here)
• Finding more resources to support your learning
• Starting therapy or coaching to support your journey

As you are able to take any steps to building supportive networks, you will start to feel less isolated and alone. More support gives you more energy to put into building connections with yourself, your children and your community.

We can’t change the world – but we can change this cycle

We cannot change the historical moment we were born into; but we can make a dramatic difference to our ability to cope - and our children’s ability to thrive. Even taking a small action in these areas can be the step that shifts the entire cycle.

If you feel stuck dealing with your child’s big feelings and behaviours, I’ve created a video resource to help you do exactly that , which you can find here.