I remember standing in a supermarket, watching a child prostrate himself on the floor in full operatic meltdown, and thinking (with the serene confidence that only a childless person can muster) “Mine will never do that.”
Reader, mine did that.
Mine did that in a supermarket, in a restaurant, at a birthday party, and once, quite memorably, in a post office queue that was already testing the patience of everyone involved. The parent I planned to be didn’t survive very long at all. And if you’re a parent, there’s a reasonable chance yours didn’t either.
The parent you planned to be.
You had a vision. Perhaps it was loosely formed. A general sense of the kind of parent you’d be, the atmosphere you’d create, the values you’d model. Perhaps it was more specific than that. You’d read the books, you’d observed other people’s parenting and noted, with great clarity, exactly what you would and absolutely would not do.
You were going to be patient. You were going to limit screen time and maintain consistent boundaries and never — never — use food as a bribe. Perhaps you were going to get down to their level and explain things calmly.
And then you had an actual child.
What happened next, the slow, humbling, occasionally hilarious dismantling of everything you thought you knew, isn’t a sign of your failure as a parent. It isn’t evidence that you were naive, or arrogant, or that you love your children any less than you intended to. It is one of the most psychologically complex and universally human experiences there is. And understanding why it happens can change everything.
The blueprint you didn’t know you were following.
Before you ever formed a single conscious opinion about parenting, something else was already happening. Subtly, often without your knowledge and definitely without your consent, you were absorbing a blueprint.
The way you were spoken to as a child. The way conflict was handled (or wasn’t). The warmth that was present or absent. The way your emotional needs were met, or misread, or ignored. All of it was being filed away, long before you had the language or the perspective to evaluate any of it. And then, the moment you became a parent yourself, that blueprint began running in the background like software you didn’t know you’d installed.
Psychologists call this the intergenerational transmission of parenting: the well-documented phenomenon by which the parenting we received directly shapes the parenting we give. Attachment theory explains that the attachment style we develop in early childhood — secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized — doesn’t simply describe our childhood experience. It follows us into adulthood and significantly influences how we relate to our own children.
Selma Fraiberg, the child development researcher, called this something even more evocative: ghosts in the nursery. The idea that the unresolved emotional experiences of our own childhoods come with us into parenthood, uninvited, and whisper in our ear at the very moments we most want to be different.
Have you ever opened your mouth and heard your mother come out? Said something to your child that you swore, with absolute conviction, you would never say? Felt a flash of impatience that felt uncomfortably familiar, like something you recognized from a long time ago? That’s the blueprint.
To be clear, none of this is about blame. Not of your parents (assuming they weren’t intentionally abusive or neglectful), or of yourself. Your parents were likely working from their own blueprints, handed down from their own parents, stretching back further than any of us can trace. Awareness isn’t about accusation. But once you have it, it is one of the most powerful tools available to you.
The parenting philosophy that didn’t survive contact with an actual child.
Here’s what the parenting books and the experts largely fail to mention: parenting philosophies are (almost without exception) constructed around a mythical average child.
The child who responds to calm reasoning. The child who, when given a choice between two acceptable options, thoughtfully selects one. The child whose needs map neatly onto the developmental checklists, who transitions between activities without incident, and who eventually goes to sleep.
For many parents, the philosophy didn’t just fail to survive; it was never applicable to begin with. Because their child arrived as an entirely individual human being, with their own neurological wiring, their own sensory experience of the world, their own particular and non-negotiable way of being. And no philosophy, however carefully researched, accounts for that.
When your child’s needs fall outside the parameters the books were written for, when the strategies that work for most children simply don’t work for yours, the gap between the parent you planned to be and the parent you find yourself being can feel less like an adjustment and more like a freefall.
As a parent to non-typical children (whatever that means), I know this feeling all too well, and I want you to understand: that gap is not evidence that you are failing. It is evidence that you are parenting a real child, not a theoretical one.
The myth of the rational parent.
I always considered myself to be a pretty calm, rational person. And then I had kids. Turns out, I wasn’t particularly Zen at all; I’d just never been tested to my limits before.
Emotional regulation under stress is one of the most cognitively demanding things a human being can do. It requires the prefrontal cortex (that’s the part of your brain responsible for measured reasoning, impulse control, and considered decision-making) to override the amygdala, which is your brain’s rather less sophisticated alarm system.
Under normal conditions, this is challenging enough. Under the specific conditions of parenting, which routinely involve chronic sleep deprivation, relentless sensory input, decision fatigue, emotional labor, and the knowledge that someone has, again, defiled the bathroom floor, it becomes almost neurologically impossible.
For parents whose kids naturally struggle with emotion regulation themselves, this can be even more problematic. This is often the case with neurodivergence, such as autism, ADHD, Tourette’s, but it can also simply be temperament. It’s pretty hard to regulate your own nervous system when a child is screaming in your face or physically lashing out at you 10+ times a day.
What’s more, a parent whose nervous system is already carrying a significant baseline load, whether through chronic illness, pain, fatigue, trauma, mental health difficulties, or their own neurodivergence, is not starting from the same place each morning as the parenting books assume.
The window of tolerance (the psychological zone within which we can function at our most regulated, most thoughtful, most intentional) is narrower when your body or brain has its own competing demands.
Donald Winnicott, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst, offered something far more useful than the pursuit of perfection. He called it good enough parenting. The finding that children do not need (and are actually not best served by) a perfect parent.
They need a parent who is present, who is trying, and who is real. Yes, creating a safe space for your child is absolutely important, but you are a human, and so is your child. Letting them see your humanity allows them space for theirs.
When your child becomes your mirror.
There are moments in parenthood that stop you completely. Not the beautiful ones (though there are plenty of those) but the uncomfortable ones. Like the moment your child exhibits a quality that irritates you far beyond what the situation warrants, and you realize that it is precisely what you do too.
Psychologists describe this through the concept of projection. The unconscious process by which we attribute our own unresolved feelings, fears, and insecurities to others.
In parenting, this can manifest in ways that are subtle and entirely well-intentioned. The parent who pushes relentlessly in academics because they spent their own childhood feeling not quite clever enough. The parent who cannot tolerate their child’s sadness because they were never taught, as a child, that sadness was acceptable. The fiercely over-protective parent whose need to keep their child safe is inseparable from their own unprocessed experience of loss.
These often aren’t conscious choices. Nor are they assassinations of your parenting. But once you can see them, they are extraordinary invitations to understand yourself more honestly, to separate your story from your child’s, and to give them the freedom to have their own.
The identity earthquake.
They tell you that your life will change. They tell you that you’ll love your child in a way you cannot currently imagine. Both of these things are true, and yet neither of them quite prepares you for the experience of becoming a parent and the shifting of identity that comes with it.
There is a word for this, though most people have never heard it: matrescence (or patrescence, if you’re a dad reading this). It describes the transition into parenthood as a developmental passage that is neurologically, psychologically, and hormonally every bit as significant as adolescence.
The parent you planned to be was designed by the pre-matrescenced version of you. That person didn’t know what it felt like to be needed this completely, this relentlessly. They planned from a place of wholeness and time and relative regulation. From a self that still had its original shape. The plan made perfect sense to that person. But you are no longer that person.
The invitation is to begin building a new image of yourself as a parent. One that is rooted not in who you thought you were before, but in who you are actually discovering yourself to be.
Pressure, perfectionism, and social media.
Let’s be honest, the pre-parent version of you did not form their parenting ideals in a vacuum. Those ideals were shaped by a culture that has extraordinarily strong opinions about what good parenting looks like.
We live in the era of what psychologists call intensive parenting. It requires complete emotional investment, constant enrichment, the subordination of your own needs to your child’s needs at virtually every turn, and an almost devotional commitment to optimizing your child’s development and happiness. It exhausts me just thinking about how people manage this.
And then there is social media. (There is always social media.)
Leon Festinger’s social comparison theory, the well-established psychological finding that human beings evaluate themselves largely by comparing themselves to others, was developed long before the existence of an algorithmically driven feed of other people’s parenting highlights.
What Festinger could not have anticipated is what happens to self-evaluation when “others” now includes an endless scroll of parents who appear to be doing all of it. The homemade sensory play, the children who eat varied and colorful meals (with apparent ease and matching linen).
And despite knowing deep down that these images likely don’t reflect reality, we still can’t help but feel the pressure that comes from them.
For parents of neurodivergent children or those who just don’t fit the typical mold, this particular pressure has an additional, lonelier dimension. The parenting content that dominates social media is built overwhelmingly around neurotypical children and neurotypical family experiences.
The parent whose child cannot manage a busy birthday party, who needs forty-five minutes and considerable negotiation to transition between activities, who has never once responded to the strategies that apparently work effortlessly for everyone else — that parent is not just falling short of an impossible standard. They are measuring themselves against a standard that was never designed with their child in mind.
The parent you are vs. the parent you’re becoming.
The gap between the parent you planned to be and the parent you are is not, in itself, the problem.
The planned parent was, by definition, a static image. A finished product. A destination. And parenting, real parenting, the kind that happens in actual houses with actual children on actual difficult days, is not a destination. It is one of the most dynamic, demanding, and transformative processes a human being can undergo.
Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset applies as powerfully to parenting as it does to anything else. The parent who believes they should already be the finished article is the parent who suffers most in the gap. The parent who understands that they are, and always will be, a work in progress has access to something much more useful.
What matters most in the parent-child relationship is not getting it right every time. It is the capacity for repair. The rupture and repair cycle is one of the most valuable experiences a child can have. It teaches them that relationships can survive difficulty. That people who love each other can hurt each other and come back (and learn from the mistakes they made).
Forgiving yourself (and maybe your own parents while you’re at it).
There is a gift that parenthood gives you. It usually arrives some time after the initial fog has lifted:
You begin to understand your own parents.
Not in the abstract, intellectual way you may have understood them before. But in the visceral way that only comes from having stood where they once stood. From having felt the weight of loving someone this much and still, on some days, getting it wrong. From having discovered reserves of both patience and impatience that you didn’t know you possessed.
You begin to see with more compassion that they were tired, too. They were figuring it out, too. They had their own blueprints, their own ghosts in the nursery, their own impossible standards, and their own unmet needs. They were, in all likelihood, nothing like the parents they planned to be, either.
This doesn’t mean that difficult or traumatic childhood experiences are simply erased by this understanding. They aren’t, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Forgiveness might not be possible. But for many people, parenthood can loosen a long-held tightness around the ways they were let down, and replace it with a more complicated, more compassionate, more human picture.
Now extend that same understanding to yourself.
Dr. Kristin Neff’s research on self-compassion consistently finds that we are significantly kinder, more understanding, and more forgiving toward others in our situation than we are toward ourselves.
We hold ourselves to a standard of parenting perfection that we would never dream of applying to a friend. If your closest friend called you and said, “I lost my patience today. I fell short of the parent I wanted to be.” What would you say to them? You would remind them of everything they do right. You would put today’s moment in the context of all the other moments. You would tell them, with complete sincerity, that they are a good parent having a hard day.
Why won’t you say that to yourself?
The parent you planned to be made sense at the time. They were built from the best intentions, and the most hopeful version of what you imagined was possible. But they were also built before you knew what you now know. Before you understood how relentless this love is, how demanding, how beautifully inconvenient. Before you discovered your own edges and your own depths. Before a small, specific, entirely real person arrived and made it clear that they didn’t need the parent you planned. They needed you. The actual, imperfect, trying, repairing, learning, occasionally-losing-it-in-the-post-office-queue version of you.
The parent you planned to be was never supposed to be the destination. It was simply the starting point. An unrevised draft. And now you get to rewrite that story with the more accurate, compassionate knowledge that only lived experience can bring.
