The Right Thing™ Parenting and Impossible Lives
No New Advice. No New Strategies.
Before my oldest son was born, I determined that he should only play with natural things made from wood and wool.
As you can see from the pictures below, this lasted a very short time. Our son had a high need for engagement, interaction, and novelty. He is also a genetic short-sleeper, and only slept between 5-7 hours per twenty-four hour period. In an effort not to go completely insane, we acquired a large collection of the most flashy, tacky, not-natural, blinking, sparkling baby toys we could find.
As the reader might imagine, this was a harbinger of what was to come.
Somehow, in all of my reading about attachment parenting and natural parenting, I imagined that my partner and I would take turns caring for our sweet boy and we would not need childcare. At the time, my partner was teaching five classes at two universities an hour apart, and I was doing consulting work and completing my doctoral work at Harvard University.
Like the wool and wooden toy theory, the “we will take turns caring for him and not use daycare” theory was not long for this world.
Time and again, we kept running into parenting theories that sounded good but in practice did not fit with the reality of our kid or our lives.
As I read about other families where everything seemed to be working well (baby sleeps through night! oh yes our child loves her Montessori counting beads!), I was wondering if I was doing something wrong.
I’m sure you’re seeing where this is going: no, I was not doing something wrong. And, no, dear reader, you are not doing something wrong.1 But why is it that we often feel like we are doing things wrong, over and over again?
On Doing The Right Thing™
For me, the desire to do The Right Thing™ as a parent came from a couple angles. The first one is that I was really excited to have a family. From the time I could hold babies, I loved them. At family gatherings, I would sneak my younger cousins off to a quiet bedroom so that my aunts couldn’t cut into my baby-cuddling time. I was for-sure the only 15-year-old at my high school that subscribed to Mothering Magazine.
But, layered with my sincere and enduring love of children, there were (shocker) several deeper anxieties at play. My particular issues related to my (mostly unconscious) desire to remake my family of origin (and, to some extent, the world) via my own family. Mix in a dash of oldest-daughter perfectionism and type-A over-achiever vibes and I was the perfect candidate for the promises that gentle-natural-attachment parenting offered. If it wasn’t working, never fear, I WOULD TRY HARDER.
Yet, for me, and many parents, trying harder does not lead to better results. This applies to whatever flavor of The Right Thing™ you are trying to do on the parenting front. It might be the various versions of Christian parenting, gentle parenting, Tiger parenting, or Free-Range parenting. This is not because something is wrong with the parents, or because they are not trying the right way. It is because the thing they are trying to achieve is not achievable.
The idea that if we do The Right Thing™, we will get the outcomes we want is a very appealing narrative. As Michelle Albanes-Davis notes in her excellent article, Good Girl:
I thought that if I was perfect, it would protect me. If I was honest, followed the agreed upon rules, and tried my fucking hardest, then the people around me would do the same. But life doesn’t work like that… There is no recipe for a good, safe life. You can follow someone’s instructions to the letter and still fail.
While she is not writing about parenting, her argument touches on the underlying appeal of the The Right Thing™ parenting narratives. We live in a world where parents and children are vulnerable. We know this. We feel this. We want life to go well for our kids. We would really like to have a decent life where we have the things we need, where we feel comfortable and secure, where we suffer less, and where we protect the people we love. And, most of us live in a culture where, when things do not go well, the default is to blame the individual who is living the life where things do not go well, and the solution almost always involves buying something to improve the situation.
Enter The Right Thing™ approaches to parenting and child-rearing: these respond to our fears about safety and security in a very insecure world, as well as our own issues related to being good enough in a culture that beats an incessant drum of “not good enough.”
Impossible Lives
My kids are now 11, 14, and 16. When they were small, I was constantly saying to my therapist and anyone who would listen: What exactly am I doing wrong here? Why can I not keep the house clean and make food and have a job and just do basic things without feeling like I am drowning?
It wasn’t just baby carriers or screen time (not until they are two!) or sleeping or what foods were okay when. It was, like, everything.
As I lamented to my therapist about how impossible it all seemed and what was I doing wrong, he gently noted to me that it did not just seem impossible. What I was trying to do actually was impossible. It wasn’t just me, but it was the whole system of work-education-parenting-relationships that wasn’t working for me or for most parents. Everyone was drowning.
In 2015, when I had a three children under six, I read this article about parenting in The Atlantic and almost cried relief when I read:
The solution to the work-life conundrum is not “enlisting men” in the domestic sphere. The solution is establishing social supports that allow families to function. That is, men can’t have it all, for the same reason women can’t: whether or not the load is being shared 50-50 doesn’t matter if the load is still unbearable. It will not become bearable once women lean in, or once the consciousnesses is raised, or once men are full partners in domestic life. It will become bearable when decidedly more quotidian things become commonplace - like paid parental leave and affordable, quality day care.
The relief was, of course, not that we live in a culture that fails to support parents. Rather, it was that I, personally, was not somehow failing to figure out the right mix of parenting strategies and shared-labor approaches.
As a psychotherapist, I spend a large portion of my days reassuring my own clients that they are not somehow uniquely inadequate at parenting, marriage/partnership, working, keeping the house, paying bills, all while trying to figure out what to do about the suffering they see in their newsfeeds and with the people they know.
And, while this can be helpful to read about in Substack, The Atlantic, or to process it with your therapist, it is one thing to be able to say, “Yes, okay, I am not uniquely failing at getting my shit together as a parent and person,” but it another thing to know where to go from there. I mean, do we stop reading all parenting guidance? Do we just say, “Oh well it is all impossible so why even try?”
It is easy to say that no one is perfect and parenting is not a one-size-fits all, but it is another thing altogether when, practically, you have to figure out how to raise kids, keep a house, pay bills, and it all feels very precarious and untenable and you have to get through the day/week/month.
No New Advice. No New Strategies.
When you are a baby-psychotherapist starting out, one of the early things you learn is that you are not there to give your clients advice or strategies. You are there to be present to their pain, wonderings, and to be a non-judgmental presence where they can safely explore their own experiences, wisdom, and inner-knowings. As a person who very much likes to Get Things Done, this seemed ridiculous to me. It was so clear to me what [Client name] could do to solve [client issue]. Why should I withhold my very wise and insightful advice from someone paying me to help them with their problems?
As it turns out, if we need practical advice, there are many books, articles, Substacks, and, now, ChatGPT, that can give us a nice list of things to do or not do. Sometimes this is what we need. Usually, if this is what we need, we do not pay a psychotherapist to tell us what we can look up. Thus, it stands to reason, that psychotherapists have something else to offer to people who are struggling that is not advice, strategies, or action steps. Psychotherapy, unlike our culture or many of our families, is created to be a space that trusts our own wisdom and inner-knowing. This wisdom and inner-knowing often takes time to excavate from the years of conditioning that tells us that we are not enough, that we need fixing, that we should be ashamed of who we are or what we do, or that we are doing things wrong.
Thus, we should not begrudge each other our favorite strategy to get baby to sleep or whatever The Right Thing™ parenting approach seems like it might suit our family. But, at the end of the day, we know this: lots of approaches work. Some approaches work well for your kiddo, others work well for others’ kids. We all have our arguments, our Hill We Want to Die On, our hopes for how children are treated, and how families are organized.
Underlying all of this is often a longing to make an impossible system work for us. Underneath the books, special basinets, toys, and webinars promising us that we can find a way not to mess up our kids, is a hope that we will be good enough - for ourselves, for our kids, for our community, our family of origin, or others that would render a judgement on the outcome of our short time here on earth.
We cannot address these two things - impossible lives and our longing to be good enough - with the right strategies, advice, or theories of parenting.
We would be well-served to draw ourselves and each other back to the reminder that we live in a world that is not designed to make things good or healthy for children, families, or parents. We cannot counter that reality with the right approach to bedtime or discipline or meal-prep.
I often remind my clients (and myself) that if being hard on ourselves or doing The Right Thing™ worked, things would be better by now. Thus, our calling is to find ways to gently let go of the idea that being hard on ourselves and figuring out just the right way to parent is the best way forward. This gives us a little more space.
In this space, we can be more curious about what is going on below the surface with us. And as members of communities, identity groups, states, and nations, we might be curious about what is going on for others who are also trying to make these impossible lives work.
As we create space, and develop practices of compassion and curiosity for ourselves and others, we might find that we can more easily envision a shared future that is less impossible. We might find ways where children learn that they are enough, and that no achievement or outcome makes us more or less worthy of love, health, belonging, or peace.
No New Advice. No New Strategies. Just things for us to reflect on as we tumble forward together, hoping and trying for lives that are less impossible, more peaceful, and more loving. For us and for others.
June 23, 2025, vol. 2 issue 5
The fine print
If you’d like to read more about this issue, please visit this resources page, where we have a gathered selection of books, blog posts, Instagram accounts, and articles.
Please note that this is for informational purposes only. Nothing on here is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, psychotherapist, or other qualified provider with any questions you may have about a medical or mental health condition. The use of the information provided on this site is at your own risk.
A note on this space
This Substack started out as the newsletter for my psychotherapy practice, Lotus & Phoenix. I have come to realize that it needs to be slightly different than that. While I am a psychotherapist, I am also a researcher, non-profit leader, pastor, and parent. This space brings together my work in all of these areas.
I am experimenting with what this Substack will look like. For now, you can expect that this will be a place for original essays, reflections, and sharing of resources as we all try to love and live in a world on fire. Thank you for being here.
I want to note that it is, of course, possible to do things wrong in parenting. For the purposes of this article, we are not going to debate the details of this because it would distract from the underlying point that is the focus of this piece. If you are interested in debates and discussions about what people can do wrong in parenting, and why people should be harder on themselves and others when it comes to parenting, there are many places on the internet where you can find that.
This was excellent, thank you
Elizabeth, What a wonderful, thoughtful essay and reflection. You become a better and more complete writer monthly. I am signing on as "paid" but it would not allow me to do that. For reasons I do not understand.