Do You Experience Joy As A Parent? If Not, You Should Read This

In mindbodygreen's parenting column, Parenthetical, mbg parenting contributor, psychotherapist, and writer Lia Avellino explores the dynamic, enriching, yet often complicated journey into parenthood. In today's installment, Avellino talks about your joy.

I recently released a poll for my Instagram community of parents asking “do you live your life as if your joy matters?” nearly 40% of parents replied that they do not. This statistic felt both shocking and unsurprising to me.

In a culture that greatly benefits from the work of caregivers, it is still deeply undervalued–emotional and domestic labor often goes underpaid and underacknowledged. Additionally, we are being inundated with parenting advice that positions our children at the center of our lives. We are purchasing courses to support us in being who our children need us to be. We are spending our therapy sessions discussing our children.

I have always garnered a lot of meaning from parenting 3 children—my life felt full and chock full of purpose—however it was hard to feel joyful at times. This felt ironic to me. Here I was, gifted with these silly, adorable, playful beings, and I felt less joy.

It was also difficult to find joyful mothers that I identified with—not to be overly reductive but I found many of the ones I met fell into two camps: the ones that were obsessed with talking about their children and the ones that couldn’t wait to get away from them.

I didn’t feel like I fell into either category. I love my children and I love my life without them, too. I have spent nearly 8 years, raising 3 daughters, attempting to fill in the circles of the venn diagram, finding the lines between what brings them joy, what joy do we experience together, and where my pleasure lies outside of family life. 

I love that we are living in a cultural moment where the work, and sometimes pain, of motherhood is being exposed. Books like Nightbitch, The Motherload, Splinters made me feel validated on my sad days, the days I wished I didn’t have to live with a split, the ones when I wanted more time for myself than I had.

There are so many reasons why parenting is hard. We live in a country without paid leave for parents, expensive childcare support, racism and bigotry that require parents to live in fear about the safety of their children, the list goes on. However, I meet many parents that could be having more fun—going out with their friends or partners, planning experiences around their joy—but they don’t. 

Self-sacrifice, even if displeasing, becomes familiar. Additionally, parents feel a lot of pressure to be hands-on and involved almost constantly—jumping on the trampoline, allowing their children to paint their face, and accompanying them to internship interviews. This generation of parents is spending more time and money on their children than past generations. While an increase in emotional investment can be hugely beneficial to child development, I asked myself the question: are you doing this from a place of fear of messing them up or replicating your own childhood dynamics—or because you value it and like it? 

For example, some parents tell me they don’t want to get childcare after school, but also report being on their phones while with their kids consistently. Check in with your kid and inquire about how they’re feeling about the time together as another data point. 

One downside of constant parenting advice and mainstreaming terms like “securely attached children,” is that it makes us constantly try to improve ourselves. We are beginning to believe if the data or knowledge exists, we should be able to integrate it. Following countless scripts is perhaps, in fact, preventing us from keeping in touch with our own maternal wisdom rather than leading from it. 

Nothing that we find in an article or training is going to be integrated into our lives because we will it to. Unless we have the nervous system capacity, time, energy, and skill to implement parenting interventions consistently, we are going to fall into the well worn grooves of frustration with our kids and with ourselves.

Finding a community (structured like with Myshapods or unstructured with open-hearted non-judgmental caregivers) allows us to bring our pain points, our victories, and our struggles over and over again, feeling supported as we practice.

This can be a confronting question to sit with if your joy is not something you’ve been spending much time with. In a world with news headlines drenched in pain and grief, finding a place for joy might feel difficult. Similarly, you may have grown up in a family or have a social identity where your joy wasn’t valued or prioritized, making it even harder to claim it now amidst professional and childcare responsibilities. Mothers, in particular, can be charged with so much of the emotional and logistic labor in the household, that we begin to horde it—believe that we should suffer more than anyone else. 

How we relate to something impacts how we experience it. If you have a negative attitude toward your joy, consider what might help you reacquaint with it.

One of my goals as a parent was to ensure that my children saw a mother that was alive—that means they see me sad, angry, tired, hurt, joyful, energized—the full gamut (in contained and thoughtful ways). Sometimes, my kids are sad when I am joyful. For example, one of my children cried when I went out dancing with friends, and yet I still went. Making our children happy all the time, in particular at our own expense, prevents them from building the capacity to be with sadness and disappointment. 

I realized early on that the parts of parenting I disliked the least were the times when I “managed” my kids: asking them to “please get down,” “don’t do,” requesting several times to do the same thing over and over.

This prompted me to examine what is preventing me from being with them in these moments, rather than powering over them?

This questioning brought me to my triggers—of being out of control, being messy, tolerating excess stimulation—and once I began to address those triggers (in therapy and beyond), I was able to get creative on ideas to “manage” them less.

I like to joke that I am working myself out of the parts of the “job” that I don’t like. We created a culture of community action: everyone helps with lunch boxes, everyone has a dance party en route to the tub (makes it easier than requesting 400 times), everyone brushes their own teeth and picks out their clothes.

I share a lot about what I delight in my children with them. How I appreciate their wildness. How they teach me how to be sillier. How much they make me laugh and make me think. How they inspire me to take better care of the world they will grow up in.

I also share about the joy I experience when they are not there—like the time I took care of rescue elephants, or what me and their father do together when we travel without them.