Reducing Mom Guilt

What You Can Do to Create a Culture of Support and How Healing Your Own Inner Child Helps

It is more well known and acknowledged these days that mothers have a lot of demands from society to be perfect. They are expected to be working full-time, taking care of household tasks and chores, and spending any free time they have on making sure their children have good lives. Even though there is awareness of the problem, with most of society agreeing that this kind of pressure is bad for moms, nothing much has been done to relieve it. How can we help these parents recognize that they are doing more than enough?

Talking at the level of society’s values makes one feel helpless, like you can’t change anything about it. However, individual actions do make a difference. Culture is created by us. So, if you want to help reduce the burden of these expectations on mothers, you need to reduce your own expectations on others.

Instead of passing judgement on another parent’s choices, stop and wonder how they got there. Is this parent clearly stressed? Do they not have a lot of support? Have they not been shown a different way without shaming? Sit down and remember some of your hardest parenting moments. I would guess that you aren’t proud of yourself when you think about how you responded.

Now you might think, “Even at my worst, I was never as bad as that”. Perhaps not, but what resources, education, and support have you had that perhaps others haven’t? A lot of us shy away from reflecting upon our own privileges, because it makes us feel guilty for having more. You can’t fix systemic problems on your own, but acknowledging how you may have access to more resources and support helps you to pass less judgement.

When you can see fellow parents as peers just needing help, you begin to create a community of support. In fact, you would be more likely to offer help. “It takes a village to raise a child” might seem cliche by now, but it is still true. By offering what support you can, you become the village.

I am sure many people reading this might stop and think, “I would never judge others harshly, in fact everyone around me offers help, I just judge myself”. This often speaks to a deeper held belief: I am not enough. We usually took on that feeling usually at a much earlier age, and then we become high achievers and chronic helpers to try to prove to ourselves that we are needed, that we are indeed enough. However, no matter how hard you work at it, you never end up feeling enough.

This is why people do deeper therapy work. You might have heard about people “healing their inner child”, or doing trauma therapies when it doesn’t sound like trauma. It is trauma though.

Trauma is just a negative feeling that sticks around long past its usefulness, to where it shows up in situations it doesn’t need to. Sometimes the original situation that creates the trauma isn’t an obvious instance of abuse, it can just be a situation where an emotional need wasn’t met, or you took on a belief about yourself or the world when something bad happened. More often than not, it is a collection of a bunch of small moments like that, where they add up and support a deeper held belief being formed.

So, if you find yourself walking the parenting self-help aisles at Barnes & Noble (these books pictured were found at the location within Chandler Fashion Center mall, off Chandler Boulevard and the 101 freeway), just eager to soak in more information to work on yourself, notice what the deeper feeling you are needing to address. Some self-help books can really get you to a point of healing, but more often than not, they just bring awareness to a problem that you will have difficulty solving on your own. Good therapy helps you actually heal from those problems!