Are You Suffering From Parent Fatigue Syndrome?
- 2 hours ago
- 7 min read
Joanna Hulton, Ph.D., practices and teaches eclectic parenting psychotherapy, integrating psychoanalytic psychotherapy, attachment theory, and brain development.
It was my last appointment of the day. I was in session with a young father who had been working for months, trying to understand his kids so he could speak “childrenese” more fluently. On this particular evening, we were talking about the difficulty of being a parent in today's world. Together, we understood that the way he had been parented was not only unhelpful but also causing painful conflicts. Chronic dissatisfaction left him feeling depleted and unhappy. At one point, he leaned back against the sofa and sighed, “Do you know what I am suffering from? Parent fatigue syndrome.” With that phrase, he captured what so many of the parents who come to my office are experiencing.
What leads to parent fatigue syndrome?
How did we get here, and why has it become so exhausting to raise children? Consider this article your official invitation to explore the concerns of so many, as well as solutions that will combat this syndrome. I guarantee that you will feel empowered by the realization that understanding your child ultimately helps you understand yourself. Let us begin.
"In every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents: the uninvited guests at the christening. Under favorable circumstances, the unfriendly and unbidden spirits are banished from the nursery and return to their subterranean dwelling place. This is not to say that ghosts cannot invent mischief from their burial places. Even among families where the love bonds are stable and strong, the intruders from the parental past may break through the magic circle in an unguarded moment, and a parent and his child might find themselves reenacting a moment or scene from another time with another set of characters." – Selected Writings of Selma Fraiberg
Your childhood as a remembering context
In the quotation above, psychoanalyst Selma Fraiberg reminds us of the inevitable: every new parent engages in the “mental work” necessary to become the parent they want to be. In that process, we can't help but recall our own caregivers and identify with them. Our daily acts of caregiving become an intense and highly influential “remembering context” for our experiences and feelings from when we were children.
While we as parents can be sure that this remembering will happen, it is not assured whether the process will happen consciously through stories we share with chosen witnesses or unconsciously through episodes with our children that may be “reenacting a moment or scene from another time with another set of characters.”
This difference is crucial. Whether the remembering occurs consciously or unconsciously determines whether we will be able to liberate ourselves from the “ghosts in the nursery” or become dragged down by them and engulfed in parent fatigue.
If pursued consciously, the act of remembering is a gift that you give yourself and your child, for it is only after we speak about and understand the past that we can use the memories to move freely into the future. Only by doing our best to recall both our good and bad childhood experiences can we redefine ourselves and establish the proper priorities of claims upon our time and emotions to meet the all-consuming needs of children.
When conventional wisdom is not very wise
There is considerable research explaining how individuals reidentify with their own parents after having children of their own. We are all hardwired to scan our memories so that we can engage in the tremendous task of being a parent. The gift of remembering may not come easily. As we consciously recall our past as children, we are likely to come face to face with our ambivalence towards our own parents. It is here that we often collide with the conventional wisdom of the past.
Some of the wisdom sounds like this:
Do what I say, not what I do!
Spare the rod, spoil the child!
Children are to be seen and not heard!
Speak only when spoken to!
Only girls do that!
Only boys do that!
Respect your elders!
Wait until your father gets home!
How about these, which I gathered from a book of vintage quotations:
"Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of memory." "Who loves well chastises well." "My mother protects me from the world, my father threatens me with it."
Alas, some of this wisdom passed down to us clearly has no place in our postmodern age, where our children have both greater freedoms and fewer responsibilities. Children in the present day learn early on that they have some of the same entitlements to self-expression and self-determination as adults. At the same time, children do not play the same economic role today, with its responsibilities, that they did over a century ago. During the preindustrial era, children may have farmed the land and tended the livestock. At the very least, each of them was required to make a contribution to the survival of the family. Likely, very few of our children work the family farm in the morning.
What do our children really need?
Quoting Penelope Leach in Children First, “Children in the postindustrial West have the longest compulsory childhood that the world has ever seen. With all those years of enforced dependence ahead of them, we have to learn that letting them take their own time over growing up is what is best for them now, and what will best help them fulfill their own potential when they are grown. It will not be an easy lesson.”
As parents, we are in conflict. We need to believe that the values of the past are helpful, since not being or acting like our parents might confirm our worst fear, that we as children were, at times, not treated well. So we cling to the conventional wisdom of the past while we are trying to move our children successfully into the future. Alternately, we may have promised ourselves that we would never do to our children what our parents did to us. But from this impossible promise, we can end up hating the very child who causes us to behave like the parent we vowed never to be.
Such conflicts create enormous fatigue. But what is a parent to do? We can start by revisiting that important question: What is the purpose of children, and how do they contribute to today's family? Some sociologists over the years have suggested that we have become fascinated with being part of a leisure class and take pride in having an economic surplus. While this might describe a better life for all of us, it may also adversely influence how we encourage our children to spend their time. The “longest compulsory childhood” has pressured us to find ways to fill their time productively.
Amid the economic upheaval of the 21st century, one must additionally wonder how and if this further complicates how we feel about our so-called prosperity. We want our children to be smart, capable, and successful, and we worry that they will not be ready for the competitive world that awaits. As a result, we have created some of our own conventional wisdom. It sounds like this:
The earlier they go to school, the smarter and more social the child. Start training early, or they will fall behind. Deprive them of medication, and you set your child up for failure.
Some results of this new wisdom are in. In his book Generation Rx, Greg Critser cites example after example of young adults who depended on drugs to learn, yet felt crippled when faced with the important challenges of college and beyond. David Elkind, in The Hurried Child, warns us about the dangers of growing up too quickly. His eloquence brings into clear relief the preciousness of each stage of a child's development. He challenges us not to be seduced by a society that pushes children forward without understanding their essential needs.
But what do children really need, and how do we as parents provide for them? I have spent many years studying parent and child development. The many books that I have read offered differing opinions that sometimes confused me as I tried to cobble together a unified approach that could truly support and inform. In addition, these books contradicted what many have learned from their parents, only perpetuating a low sense of self-efficacy.
I believe that our evolutionary purpose is to keep the traditions of one's family while innovating so as to adapt to the ever-changing world. In doing so, we honor our parents, have empathy for their life journey, and, most importantly, give ourselves permission to create a caregiving style that they might not fully agree with or understand.
Considering that young parents are designed to seek approval and recognition from their own parents, I have found that this lack of understanding can put them at odds with the very people whose approval they seek.
How do we combat parent fatigue syndrome?
I wondered what I could do to help parents choose a new path. It was this sacred mission that guided me to write Parent Fatigue Syndrome: What To Do When Conventional Wisdom Is Not Very Wise.
Stay with me. Together, we will continue to understand and combat the exhaustion you feel as you parent during this most unusual time. I promise that you will understand parent fatigue at its deepest core. In the coming months, I will contribute more articles that will further define and explain Parent Fatigue Syndrome and, most importantly, help combat it.
Next: "Understanding the Absolutely Essential Needs of Children and Their Caregivers"
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Read more from Joanna Hulton, Ph.D.
Joanna Hulton, Ph.D., Family Therapist, Author & Educator
Joanna Hulton, Ph.D. has dedicated herself for the past 35 years as a teacher, workshop leader, and practicing psychoanalyst. She is committed to improving children's self-esteem, feelings of personal efficacy, and ability to learn by transforming the role of family, school, and community. Her interdisciplinary approach inspires her ongoing commitment to exploring ideas and issues from multiple perspectives. As such, her mission is to support the implementation of community programs that promote the mental health of children, as well as the adults in their lives.
