How ‘mum guilt’ can hold us hostage
To date I haven’t come across a Mum who doesn’t feel the heavy weight of guilt when it comes to parenting. It follows us everywhere. Whether you’ve ventured back to work (which I honestly did for my sanity) or you are braving it out full-time at home with the kids (hats off to those women!) the guilt creeps in. It finds you and it holds you hostage. A constant barrage of critical comments that you say to yourself and that starts to erode your confidence as a parent.
Understanding guilt
What is the point of guilt? And why do parents experience it so profoundly?
Well from a biological perspective, guilt, a feeling of emotional distress, is there to signal to us that our actions or inactions for that matter, may have caused harm to another. We usually experience guilt in “micro-bursts”, which essentially signal to us that we are venturing off track and act as a reminder to get back on course, thus promoting more prosocial behaviour. For example, it’s that niggling voice that reminds you, halfway through the day in question, that it’s your Mum’s birthday and nudges you to give her a call! In essence, research shows, the complex emotion of guilt can serve to motivate us to change or rectify our behaviour. We even know that the average person experiences approximately 5 hours of guilty feelings per week!!
However, as much as guilt can act as a handy reminder to do the ‘right’ thing, particularly in small doses, unresolved guilt and the guilt regularly experienced by Mums can be like having a snooze alarm in your head that just won’t turn off!! It can affect our concentration, creativity, productivity and efficiency, making it difficult to function in all of our demanding roles.
More than that, it can make us reluctant to enjoy life. Getting stuck, weighed down between our guilty thoughts means that we might not feel deserving to attend a friend’s birthday, to take much needed time out for ourselves or to enjoy our holiday. Studies have even discovered that those feeling guilty feel physically heavier, to the point where they will actually assess their weight as significantly heavier than it actually is!
And when it gets particularly dark, it can even lead us to self-punish - think of it like emotional self-harm. It even has a name, ‘The Dobby Effect’, for all you Harry Potter fans out there you will remember Dobby the head-banging elf. Dobby illustrates the psychological tendency for people to punish themselves to fend off feelings of guilt. In one study, students who were made to feel guilty by depriving a peer of a lottery ticket (only worth a couple of dollars) were amazingly willing to endure self-inflicted electric shocks to acquiesce their guilt.
And this phenomenon isn’t new. In Catholicism, there is a long tradition of inflicting pain on your body as form of penance for your sins, essentially a way to manage the guilt. It’s widely reported the late Pope John Paul II regularly engaged in mortification of the flesh, like many devout Catholics alongside and before him.
There’s no point me saying to you, “just stop feeling guilty” - that’s not going to work but I can give you some strategies to lessen the weight, and to help you see that you are most definitely not alone in this.
1| Make time for you
This can be perhaps one of the hardest things to do when you are caught in the guilt spiral so think of it this way - you are modelling to your little ones that self-care is important. Observing you taking care of yourself will help teach them to be kind to themselves, to look after themselves and to value themselves. More than that, you will be a better Mum if you’ve refilled your cup, if you’ve taken that time out to replenish, refuel and recharge.
2| Let go of perfect
Hear me when I say this, there is no such thing as the ‘perfect’ Mum, despite what flawless images we might be prone to seeing all over social media. There is so much pressure these days in being a Mum. I love this quote by Bunmi Laditan about how to be a Mum in 2019, as I feel it sums it up beautifully:
“Make sure your children’s academic, emotional, psychological, mental, spiritual, physical, nutritional and social needs are met while being careful not to overstimulate, 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, also don’t forget coconut oil.”
How ridiculous does that list sound?! Our aims and expectations need to be tempered. We should be happy to be doing our very best and providing good parenting as well as we possibly can, rather than feeling under the pump to be flawless super – Mums!
Additionally, one of the biggest messages that is perpetuated is the idea of women “having it all” - the concept that women should be able to seamlessly balance their families and their careers. It’s not easy and it definitely isn’t seamless and the real problem with the notion of having it all is that for a lot of women that means, ‘doing it all’, which is not realistic or fair. It really does take a village to raise a child and these days that village can be pretty scarce. So be gentle with you. Drop the notion of perfection or having it all and remember that it’s okay to not give 100 percent to everything all of the time, you are not a machine, you are human!
3| Lose the word “should”
The comparison we feel to other Mums, and I’m not talking about the celebrity Mums, but our friends, the neighbour, everyday Mums that we compare ourselves to, means that our inner voice sets up these unrealistic expectations. Then, when we don’t meet them guilt surfaces. “I should be making cookies”, “I should be doing more educational activities with my child”, “I should feed them more nutritious meals” - “I should, I should, I should”. It’s a dangerous way to start eroding your self-confidence, worth and abilities. Every time you utter those two words you are judging yourself, criticizing yourself.
A kinder narrative is crucial here, so catch those ‘should’s and add in the word ‘try’, but only if you feel that this particular activity is something you would like to work on. You need to create room within your expectations. Just as importantly, I want you to also focus on your accomplishments. What are you doing well? Trust me, there’s something. A little self-praise can go a long way and the truth is, the parenting gig is hard. Really hard. Somedays the celebration needs to be that everyone survived!
