Mud & Mayhem

Am I the only one who feels like the entire universe of parenting information is specifically designed to make you feel like you’re doing it wrong?

I am a researcher by nature. When I don’t know something, I learn everything about it. I prepare for every scenario — good, bad, and everything in between. It’s how I’m wired. So when a new phase hits or a behavior pops up that I don’t understand, I do what I do: I go looking for answers.

And then I find them. All of them. All at once. Contradicting each other.

Here are the top ten things you should never say to your child.
Here’s what your reaction is actually teaching them.
If you respond this way, you’re setting them up for anxiety.
If you respond that way, you’re raising a people pleaser.
This is what good parents do.
This is what you’re doing wrong.

I turn off my phone feeling worse than when I opened it. Every single time.

I already felt like I was barely keeping up. Parenting in real time — navigating the shifting personalities, the new skills, the phases that show up without warning and leave just as quietly — is genuinely hard. You’re figuring it out as you go, making judgment calls on the fly with incomplete information and a toddler who has zero interest in waiting while you look up the correct response.

And then social media pulls up a chair and says actually, let me tell you everything you’re doing wrong.

I know people are trying to help. I genuinely believe most of the content out there comes from a good place. But the cumulative effect of consuming it is that I feel like a bad parent approximately every forty five minutes. Did I say the wrong thing? Did I trigger something? Am I accidentally installing anxiety into this child through my own response? Is he going to need therapy because of the way I handled that Tuesday afternoon over a spilled snack?

I think about this stuff. I think about it a lot.

And I’ve arrived at a place that I genuinely cannot decide if it’s wisdom or defeat — but I’ve started asking myself not how do I do this perfectly but how do I screw this up just enough? Like, just enough that they’re interesting and resilient and have some good material, but not so much that we’re looking at significant therapeutic intervention down the road.

I realize that is a very fine line to walk.

But here’s what I keep coming back to. The fact that I am this worried about it — that I lose sleep over it, that I research it, that I care so deeply about getting it right that getting it wrong feels catastrophic — that has to count for something. Bad parents don’t spiral at 11pm wondering if their response to a tantrum was developmentally appropriate. They just don’t.

You are not screwing them up. You are figuring it out. In real time. With love and imperfect information and the best judgment you have on any given day.

That is enough. It has to be.

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Does anyone else feel like the parenting internet is designed to make you feel bad? How do you filter the noise and trust yourself? I actually want to know — drop it in the comments.