Why Is Parenting So Hard? The Hidden Reason You Feel Like You're Doing This Gig Blind

Parenting defined: Meeting your kid's needs over and over again until they reach adulthood and (hopefully) move out... and trying to make sure neither of you go insane while doing it.

You can google it. Despite there being a lot of different definitions, that is basically what it comes down to.

We all know parenting is hard. (Anyone been on TikTok lately?) But humans have been parenting since the beginning of time. We literally need to be good parents to survive as a species. So why is parenting so hard?!

If you've ever wondered that while simultaneously cooking dinner, folding laundry, and intervening in a sibling biting situation (no? just me?), you're not alone. And the answer might surprise you. Because the challenge often begins long before the jam-packed schedules and the chaos of daily life even enter the picture.

The trouble is often accurately knowing what your child's needs are in the first place. Anyone else feel like they should have been given a manual when they were leaving the hospital?!

Why Is Parenting So Hard (Really, Though?)

Parenting Defined... And Why It's More Than Meeting Needs

Here's the thing. Even when you think you know what your child needs, you can still be very wrong. Like that time I thought my child was overtired but they were really hangry. I think I still have the scar to prove it.

Understanding your child's needs is at the heart of responsive parenting. But what if the reason you're struggling isn't because your kid is "difficult" or because you're doing something wrong?

What if the real reason why parenting feels overwhelming has nothing to do with your child at all... and everything to do with you?

Not in a blame-y way. In a compassionate, "oh, that makes so much sense" kind of way.

Your Ability to See Your Child's Needs Might Be Impaired

Imagine you look at the world (including your own inner world and your child's) through your own unique pair of glasses. You've had these glasses since you were born, and they have had the opportunity to acquire a lot of dirt and fingerprints since then.

Those glasses are your lens for understanding your child's needs, your own emotions, and how to navigate this whole parenting gig. The dirtier they are, the harder it is to see clearly.

I've talked before about how we often arrive at parenthood with a pretty small, rusty, broken set of parenting tools handed down from our own caregivers. Well, those tools get even harder to use when we're trying to use them while looking through dirty glasses.

Where the "Dirt" on Your Glasses Comes From

So what is this "dirt" exactly? It's the thoughts and beliefs that dismiss our own internal experience. And we pick it up as children every single time our needs go unmet or our voice gets invalidated.

Without a caregiver who lovingly notices the dirt and cleans it off by supporting us to feel fully seen, heard, and understood while making sense of the world in a way that resonates with our own internal experience... it remains. It gets thicker, harder, and more packed on over time.

Three Types of Experiences That Cloud Your Vision

There are three main ways we accumulate this "dirt" as children. Understanding them is a huge part of conscious parenting and breaking generational patterns.

1. Unmet needs that become invisible. You have a need that caregivers in your life are unable to either notice or effectively meet, and you conclude that whatever that need was doesn't matter. Perhaps that you (or at least that part of you) don't matter.

2. Explicit messages from others. You are directly told things you should or shouldn't do, or who you are or are not: "You are lazy." "You need to lose weight." "Stop being so sensitive."

3. Absorbed "rules" from the world around you. You pick up "shoulds" by osmosis. Overhearing things like "Can you believe she did that?!" and quietly filing away what is and isn't acceptable.

In all of these moments, you're learning about how the world works. But that learning is leaving you feeling frightened or lonely. So you follow the new "rules" and believe they are reality. They begin shaping your thoughts about yourself and the world around you.

Unmet Childhood Needs and Attachment Theory

We know from attachment theory and neuroscience that the more a caregiver empathetically notices your internal world and supports you in making sense of it, the more easily you can identify and meet your own needs and those around you.

Research consistently shows that parental reflective functioning (basically a parent's capacity to reflect on their own childhood experiences and make meaning of their child's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors) is directly linked to sensitive caregiving and secure attachment.

When this doesn't happen? You arrive at adulthood feeling blind. You worry you're in the way. You hold onto your broken toolbox for dear life because it's the only way you know to support yourself when you run into trouble.

You find ways of rubbing bits of dirt off the glasses now and then. But no one has ever shown you how to actually get those things sparkly. You haven't even seen sparkly ones because you're always looking through the dirt on yours!

This is why parenting is so hard for so many of us. Not because we aren't trying hard enough, but because our unmet childhood needs are clouding our ability to see clearly.

What Happens When You Parent Through Dirty Glasses

And then you become a parent. YIKES. Now you have to navigate this world and stay alive. You have unmet needs you've stuffed down since you learned they were "bad" or "wrong." You have "rules" you follow to survive. AND you have a child you need to do the same for.

So what actually happens when you try to parent through dirty glasses?

Why Parenting Feels Overwhelming When You Can't See Clearly

If your glasses are really dirty, you might be blissfully unaware that you aren't seeing clearly. You might not even realize your child has an inner world that is different from yours! This means you'll project your needs onto your child. You'll assume they feel what you would feel in their situation rather than seeing what they actually feel. (This is what projecting onto your child looks like in real time.)

You draw conclusions that don't resonate with their experience, and this becomes super confusing for them. They're being told they are taken care of, but something inside them still doesn't feel taken care of.

If your glasses have some clarity but are still really smudgy (and this is where a lot of us live!) you're going to see some of your child's needs but have to do a LOT of work to have clarity on them and meet them. It's exhausting. This is a fast track to parenting burnout. You will be physically unable to keep up. And since you can see their needs a bit, you'll also feel the pain of seeing they're not met. Hello, mom guilt.

When your glasses are clean, you can notice the nuances. You see small signs before they snowball into big ones and have the capacity to pause and get curious about them instead of spiraling into worry. Given intention toward expanding your parenting toolbox, you can meet needs quickly and with relatively little effort. You can also tell your own needs from your child's. You can see the separation between the two of you and fill up your own cup as needed.

This is a huge piece of why is parenting so hard. It's less about what your child is doing and more about the lens through which you're seeing it all. Once you understand this, the question shifts from "why is parenting so hard?" to "what can I do about it?"

The Breastfeeding and Weaning Connection

If you're a breastfeeding mama, this "dirty glasses" phenomenon shows up in a really specific and sneaky way. Even when you're becoming a glasses-cleaning pro, there are times when you turn your head in a new direction and a big blob of yuck pops up out of the corner of your eye.

Internalized messages about breastfeeding sneak in and make it hard to see your child's needs for what they truly are. These are SO prevalent. Can you think of a few?

"If they can ask for it, they are too old." "It's just for comfort now." "You are doing that for yourself, not your child." "You are making a rod for your own back."

All of those messages, whenever you heard them, told you that breastfeeding is dangerous or that your child's behaviors are wrong. This becomes mud for our glasses when they clash with our own desire to breastfeed (or to wean! It can go both ways!).

We develop thoughts and beliefs that disconnect us from that desire, even at an unconscious level. Mud. Lots of sticky mud. Clouding our vision and stopping us from meeting our needs and understanding when to stop nursing based on what's truly right for our family.

If you're navigating the toddler weaning challenges that come with extended breastfeeding support, my free boundaries guide can help you learn to say "no" to the feed while still saying "yes" to the underlying need.

How to Start Cleaning Your Glasses (Yes, You Really Can)

So now you have an idea of why parenting is so hard so much of the time! We often think it's our kids' behaviors that make it hard. "If they would just _____, then I could _____." But it's actually our own inability to accurately see their needs and meet them.

We have this inability because of our own inability to have our own needs met. We didn't have someone come and clean our glasses when we weren't understood. We didn't have someone see our internal pain and confusion and show us we were seen, heard, and understood.

So we picked up a bunch of "rules" and pushed down our ability to connect with ourselves. Now we can't recognize what we need. And we can't recognize what our kids need.

But there is hope. So. Much. Hope.

The Power of Curiosity Over Worry

Emotional regulation for parents starts with one powerful tool: curiosity. When you feel that wave of parenting triggers wash over you, when your child does something that sends your nervous system into overdrive, the most transformative thing you can do is pause.

Instead of reacting from behind your dirty glasses, get curious. Ask yourself: Is what I'm feeling right now about my child? Or is this about me?

I know this sounds simple. It's not easy. But this one compassionate parenting approach has the power to change everything. It's part of what I teach in my free workshop on toddler breastfeeding boundaries and weaning.

This idea that when we lead with curiosity instead of fear, we position ourselves to parent from a place of confidence and connection.

Breaking Generational Patterns With Self-Awareness

Here's the beautiful truth about parenting with self-awareness: you can learn to clean your glasses. Research from the field of interpersonal neurobiology shows that when we make sense of our own childhood experiences (even the painful ones) we become more capable of providing the attuned, responsive parenting our children need.

You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to have it all figured out. Inner child healing for parents isn't about blaming your own parents or wallowing in the past. It's about gently recognizing the dirt on your glasses so you can start wiping it away.

This is what it means to break generational patterns. Not through willpower or white-knuckling your way through the hard moments. But through understanding why those moments are hard in the first place.

You are already doing the work just by being here, reading this, and asking yourself why is parenting so hard. That awareness? That's the first swipe of the cleaning cloth.

Ready to go deeper? My course is a journaling-based program designed to help you create the breastfeeding, weaning, and parenting relationship of your dreams... by starting with the relationship you have with yourself.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is parenting so hard, even when I know what to do?

Knowing what to do and being able to see clearly enough to do it are two very different things. Most gentle parenting struggles come not from a lack of knowledge but from the "dirty glasses" we carry. Those unresolved thoughts, beliefs, and unmet needs from our own childhoods cloud our ability to respond to our children the way we want to. When you feel triggered, it's often your own unprocessed experiences getting in the way, not a failure of your parenting skills.

How do unmet childhood needs affect my parenting?

When your needs went unmet as a child (whether through neglect, invalidation, or simply having caregivers who didn't have the tools to support you) you developed beliefs about yourself and the world that now act as "dirt" on your glasses. These beliefs can cause you to project your own feelings onto your child, miss their actual needs, or burn out trying to overcompensate. Attachment theory research shows that understanding and processing these experiences is one of the most powerful things you can do to become a more attuned parent.

Can I break generational parenting patterns without therapy?

While therapy can be an incredible support, it's not the only path to breaking generational patterns. Self-awareness, journaling, connecting with supportive communities, and working with a parenting coach who understands attachment-based approaches can all help you begin to recognize and clean the "dirt" from your glasses. The most important first step is simply noticing. Becoming aware that your reactions might be shaped by your own history rather than your child's behavior.

Did this resonate with you? If you're in the thick of it... nursing a toddler, navigating weaning, trying to figure out why this whole thing feels so impossibly hard... know that you are not alone. And you are not broken. You just have some dirty glasses. Let's clean them together.