206. Mom Guilt
Whether you feel guilty about taking time away from your children to work, spending too much time on your phone while they play, losing your temper in front of them, wanting time alone, or even feeding them the same foods multiple meals in a row, chances are, you’ve felt your share of mom guilt.
But where does that guilt come from and is it really helpful?
Tune in for an episode all about mom guilt, why it exists, and what you can do about it (so you can spend more time enjoying your kiddos and less time worrying you’re messing them up).
Want customized support creating your wildly delicious life? Let’s hop on a free consultation call.
I’ll help you understand the blockers you’re facing and how to handle them moving forward. And I’ll share how a three-month 1:1 coaching package could supercharge your progress as well as your satisfaction.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN FROM THIS EPISODE:
Where mom guilt comes from and why it’s so common.
The real reason you feel guilty — it’s not what you think.
Why just being a better mom is NOT the answer.
The real key to feeling good about yourself as a mom.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
This week, we're talking about mom guilt.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. This is Kori Linn. Welcome to another episode of Satisfied AF. I'm so excited for today's episode because we're talking about something that so many of my clients deal with and have requested coaching and resources for, and that is mom guilt.
If you're a mom, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. It's those nagging thoughts that creep up when you're sitting at your desk trying to wrap up an important project, or when you're dreaming of a glass of wine and a quiet evening to yourself instead of hanging out with your littles, or when you're actually side-by-side with your kiddo, but somehow you feel like you're just not being present enough with them in that moment.
The lived experience of this may look like a stream of self-critical thoughts delineating all the ways you're failing your children, but it could also look like the ways you think you're failing your partner, your workplace, your business, yourself, or even your hobbies because of how much time and energy is taken up by you parenting your kids.
So for a lot of people, it's kind of that both. It's like whatever you're not currently doing is what you feel guilty for, and there's always something you're not currently doing. It may look like heavy shame or guilt weighing you down, but sometimes it's more like mom anxiety with your head spinning about all the things that could go wrong in the future because of the choices you are making now, or even on the ones you already made.
Whatever way it shows up, it tends to center on the idea that you're falling short in some or many ways. For some people, this can be pretty extreme with your inner voice saying things like, "Oh, you're failing, you're not good enough," or "Wow, you're such a bad mom." But sometimes it can actually be more subtle with messages like, "Oh, I'm so distracted," or "Oh my God, I'm never going to get this time back and I'm wasting it," or "They deserve better."
No matter what your particular mom guilt soundtrack sounds like, it generally involves feeling bad about yourself and the way you're showing up to parenting your kids. But like I said, it can also come with a side of feeling like you're failing at various other areas of your life, whether it's work, your marriage, or even feeling like you're losing a part of yourself.
For many people, it's feeling like you should be with your kids when you're working, but also feeling like you should be working when you're with your kids. And like we said before, sometimes it's being with your kids and wanting to be super present and attentive, but simultaneously feeling like you just don't have the bandwidth to show up that way.
From what I can tell, pretty much every mom feels some variation of mom guilt at some point. It doesn't matter if you're a stay-at-home mom, a working mom, a single mom, or some other kind of mom. Whether it's feeling bad for missing a school play because of work, worrying you've ruined your child's life because you let the TV babysit them while you worked on your business plan, or feeling guilty for hiring a babysitter so you could take a much needed break, it's all under the same umbrella of mom guilt.
And it may seem like this experience is not optional, like this is just part of what it means to be a mom. But is it? And does it have to be? Like does it necessarily have to be a required element of mothering that you feel guilty pretty much all the time, no matter what choices you make? I'm going to argue that it doesn't have to be that way.
But in order to understand how to escape from unending mom guilt and why it might make sense for you to do that, let's take a look at where mom guilt comes from and why it exists in the first place.
One, mom guilt is a direct result of the way many girls and women were socialized. And two, mom guilt is what happens when your habitual response to caring about something is to stress about it, obsess about ways you might fail, and attach your worthiness to how well you're doing.
Okay, so let's talk about how girls and women were socialized first. You, as a woman, or a person socialized as a woman or girl, have received socialization and messaging about what it means to be a good mom, a lot of it in your own childhood, and still tons of it coming in all day, every day. Like, I'm not a mom, but I still get on social media and there's still all these messages and ideas bombarding me all the time about who's a good mom and who's not a good mom and what actions a good mom takes and what actions a good mom doesn't take.
Here are some examples of the messaging you may have received:
Moms are sweet. Moms are caring. Moms are a safe place to land. Moms take care of things. Moms are always there for you. Moms have all the answers. Moms gentle parent and do it with ease. Moms know what to do.
And they always have fresh baked homemade cookies to cheer you up.
And these days, I think there's also a second set of socialization:
Moms are breadwinners. Moms are modeling professional success. Moms are lawyers, doctors, fighter jet pilots. Moms are badasses.
And don't get me wrong, moms are badasses. But all of this kind of adds up to an insane amount of pressure. And it implies that moms are these superhuman people who can go above and beyond and do it all. And oftentimes, moms can and do, but should they have to? And should that be the measure of what it means to be a woman who is also a parent? Where's the room to breathe, let alone room for failure or the room to be a human being with limited time, energy, and money?
An interesting side note about this is that the ideas we as a culture hold about moms don't just create mom guilt for the moms. They don't just lead to women feeling guilty for having perfectly normal human emotions and capacity. All this socialization, all this stress, all these pressures about what it means to be a good mom also leads to a lot of us holding the mothers and women in our lives to very high standards.
This is also something I've coached on a lot is being able to forgive people in our lives for being imperfect, but people struggle so much more with this when it comes to their mothers. And I think that's because of these deeply ingrained ideas we have that basically say, as soon as a woman gives birth, she should be able to be this superhuman person who goes above and beyond in every way.
It's not fair, it's not fair to you, it's not fair to the women in your life, it's not fair to children, it's not fair to anyone because it puts so much pressure on one person that they can't live up to, or if they can, maybe they're like killing themselves to do it, right? And so I think it's just an interesting thing to think about that we put so much pressure on moms and it doesn't just hurt moms, but it does hurt moms and that's enough of a reason for us to take a look at it.
Okay, all of that's kind of a separate topic and I can do more podcast episodes on any of those other ideas if you're interested, but for now we're going to circle back to mom guilt. So basically women have been conditioned to believe that in order to be a good mom, you have to give unendingly and effortlessly to your children. And if you believe the socialization, you're also supposed to find that very enjoyable and fulfilling.
On top of that, whether you're a mom or not, women also have a whole set of social conditioning about what it means to be a good woman. Things like being patient, kind, attentive, helpful, emotionally connected, loving. So some of that is similar to the mom socialization, but there's also all this other socialization about being attractive or being interested in sex, but only in the right ways and with the right people, right?
It's like if you're interested in sex outside of a relationship, our culture's going to call you a slut. But if you're in a relationship with a man, right, because we grow up in a heterosexual patriarchal society, it's like then you're supposed to be this really giving partner who's always available when the other person is, but you don't have more sexual desire, but you don't have a less sexual desire.
So a lot of the socialization we get is obviously all catered around like what's going to serve and benefit men. In many ways, the demands placed on women by socialization directly conflict with each other. So even if you wanted to meet them all, you wouldn't be able to. And then when you add the demands placed on like being a mom, it becomes a truly unhinged amount. And a lot of it does conflict with each other. And there's so much pressure for how you show up to your kids because you're a mom, yes, but also for how you show up to your job, your spouse, your friendships, your family, both as a person who is a mom, but also because you're a daughter, you're a friend, and you're a woman, right?
So it's like this just insane amount of socialization, which means it's a tall, one might even say impossibly tall, order. So it's a tall order, one might even say impossibly tall, and even if it were possible, it might not be how you want to spend your life.
But here's the thing, pushing back against the socialization that you received all throughout your childhood, both in how you were parented and what you observed in culture and what was reflected to you in the media and what's being reflected to you today on things like social media, pushing back against that may feel very uncomfortable, period, and if you're not aware of the socialization and the way it can turn into internal pressure and self-doubt, it might not even feel like something you can push back on.
So let's look at what an example might be if you have this internalized socialization but you don't know it's there. Let's just say you want to go meet a friend for coffee or even just take an hour for yourself to go to the gym or read a book. You might have this thought that pops up in your head that says like, "Shouldn't you be with your kids right now? Like, oh, is this selfish to want to do this?"
And that voice, that idea, that thought is going to sound like you because it's your thought in your head. You might not see it as something that's been fed to you or a pressure that's been put on you. You also exist within a larger context where you interact with other people who may have also received similar messaging as well as having their own thoughts, many of which they may want to share with you, even if you're a total stranger to them.
This is so interesting because parenting is one area where people generally seem to feel much more comfortable asserting their ideas on other people. And in addition to the internal experience of worrying you're not doing enough and you're failing despite trying so hard, you may also overlay what you believe others are thinking about you and your parenting.
Humans are social mammals and we want to fit in, we want to belong, we want to be safe. Sometimes without you even realizing it, that desire can turn into you spending a lot of time worrying about what others think or even imagining them criticizing and judging you and, in this case, your parenting choices.
So you can see why you might have this mom guilt, there are so many pressures coming from how you were raised and the ideas our culture holds about what it means to be a good woman and what it means to be a good mom and all the things you should be able to give, which are generally well past the capacity of any human being to be able to give, let alone do you even have the desire to show up that way.
What about the second factor? The second factor was that mom guilt is one of the things that happens when your habitual response to caring about something is to stress about it, obsess about ways you might fail at it, and attach your worthiness as a person to how well you're doing at it.
This second factor also has to do with socialization, but it's how you were socialized around achievement versus how you were socialized around what it means to be a good parent. While most people would like to feel confident as they work on their goals, for many high achievers that's not the reality. Instead, even when they create amazing things, the path is often littered with guilt, doubt, and internal criticism.
Much like the conditioning around what it means to be a good mom, this is habitual. It's a way of thinking and seeing the world. But it tends to lead to burnout, overwhelm, and exhaustion, not to mention stripping away all the joy and satisfaction out of whatever you're doing, whether it's writing a novel, completing a work project, or yes, parenting your children.
This pattern is one I see so often with work burnout, but of course it also shows up at home. And it makes sense that if one of the ways you've found to relate to your achievements is to feel guilty that you're not doing enough, you would also apply that to how you're parenting your children.
So if you want to be a person who experiences less mom guilt, you are going to need to update your socialization about what it means to be a good mom, and you might also need to shift your ideas about how you show up to the things you deeply care about.
But let's be honest, maybe even given all that, you might still feel a little hesitant about changing your definition of what it means to be a good mom. You might feel a little hesitant about shifting your ideas about how you show up to things you deeply care about. After all, you've likely had those old ideas for literal decades, and it may feel weird to change them.
Like, yeah, mom guilt feels terrible, but isn't it good to feel guilty sometimes? Doesn't it keep you in line and result in you being a better parent? Is it really worth it to go to all the trouble of changing your attitudes and ideas about these things? Let's dig in.
Mom guilt may seem caring. After all, you do care so much about your kids and their happiness. You want them to have good childhoods and grow up to be happy, capable people. But does your feeling guilty actually lead you to parenting them better? Does it lead to your kids having better outcomes? Or does it ruin the moments you do have with them, keep you up at night, and make you break down crying in the shower when you make a mistake and can't let it go?
In my professional experience as a coach who's helped dozens if not hundreds of people achieve their goals and feel better, guilt's not the best motivator. It might make sense to you logically, you're not sure you're doing enough, so you feel bad. But if the guilt doesn't actually result in you parenting more in line with your values or improving in some way, it's not able to cash the check it's been writing you.
Which is to say, guilt can be a liar. It can give you the impression that feeling bad has meaning and is doing something, but you have to look at your life and ask if that's true. Occasionally, a small amount of guilt might lead to some kind of course correction. That can be useful.
Maybe you snap at your five-year-old and then you feel guilty and think, "That's not who I want to be." If you then learn new skills or find other ways of showing up differently, that guilt did its job. But if the guilt just loops on repeat all the time, and even when you make changes and learn new skills, you're still guilt tripping yourself all day and all night, that guilt is not doing its job. It's gone wild, it's running rampant. It's not actually leading to you being different.
In large amounts, guilt can actually do the opposite of inspiring change. It can make you feel like an absolute failure who will never improve, so why try? It can make you feel like there's just way too much you need improving on, and that can cause overwhelmed stress and yes, even burnout. It can strand you in a loop of shame, constantly questioning whether you're enough, trying to claw your way out by proving you're good enough, but never actually able to hit that impossible bar.
Even seeing the negative effects of mom guilt, it may still feel hard to imagine living differently and thinking different thoughts about yourself as a mom. It can feel like you're doing something productive when you worry or beat yourself up. It might also just be the sound check you're used to and the brain loves familiar thought patterns even when they feel bad.
But if you've decided that mom guilt is not what you want to have and that these old expectations and socializations and narratives around being a mom and being a woman and showing up to things you care about with guilt and stress, if you've decided those are not what you want to choose anymore, how do you change them? How do you embrace a new way of thinking that enables you to parent well minus all that unending guilt?
The first step is awareness. Start noticing when you're feeling guilty. What are you telling yourself in those moments? Are you thinking "I should be doing more"? Or, "Oh, I'm failing as a mom"? Once you recognize the thought pattern behind the guilt, you can start questioning it and poking holes.
Like, is it actually true you should be doing more? What if you're actually doing too much and you're exhausted and you need to do less? Is it actually true you're failing as a mom because your toddler is melting down in the grocery store or is that an incredibly common if unenjoyable experience that does not reflect poorly on you or your actions?
Find the internal messaging, the thoughts, the self-talk that's creating the guilt, and then ask yourself, is that even true? And more importantly, is that helpful? Is that helping me show up the way I want to as a mom? A lot of the time, your thoughts don't reflect the whole truth, or they don't make space for the full reality. And even if the thought is technically factual, if it's not helpful, it's not helpful. And you don't have to keep saying it to yourself, even if it's factual.
As an example, if you're late to pick your kid up from school, you could keep thinking, "Oh my God, I was late, I was late, I was so late, like, oh, it's so inconsiderate when I'm late." And you might be like, "Actually, that's true, I was late, it is inconsiderate." But if that's not helping you show up and having a better relationship with your kid now or being the parent you want to be now, then I would argue it's not helpful.
So you could instead think something like, "This is a great time to talk to my kid about what happens, like when you make a mistake, because mom makes mistakes too. I was late today. That's not who I want to be. It was a mistake, but it's not the end of the world. I can still be connected to my kid and I can help them learn to be kinder to themselves when they make mistakes too, because guess what? They for sure will."
Here's another example. You might have the thought, "A good mom always makes time for her kids." Is that thought really true? Does it even make sense? Like, what if you just made time for them for two hours? Is it true that now you must make more time for them? Like ad infinitum or that none of it counted.
This is exactly the kind of thought that people have when they're discounting what they've already done or discounting the good work that they've put in is that they will kind of stay in this space of like, "Well, that's not enough." But it's like, what would be enough, right? Let's either get specific on what would be enough and do it, or let's get realistic and realize that like our brain's never going to say it's enough. So we need to change what our brain says instead of believing it.
Once you start challenging the mom guilt thoughts, you're going to feel much better. And you'll be seeing your life and your parenting with more kindness and more nuance and through the frame of what's going to help you versus through the frame of like, what do I need to feel bad about?
To take things even further, you can replace the old thoughts with more empowering ones. Thoughts like "Taking care of myself as part of being a good mom," or "It's a wonderful thing for my kids to see that I'm passionate about my work and my hobbies." Or "Yeah, I made a mistake and my kids will too, so I'm going to teach them what to do when that happens."
If you're only going to take one thing away from this podcast, let it be this. You get to define what being a good mom looks like for you, and it has to be doable in order to actually feel good. The world and society and Instagram and your Aunt Janet will give you all of their opinions about what you need to do to be a good mom, and you don't have to listen to any of it. You get to decide. And when you are deciding, again, it has to be an amount that you can actually do or it's just going to make you feel bad all of the time.
Having a definition of success that you just know you can't meet, that's a recipe for feeling like shit. So you may be like, "Here's what I would like to be able to give," and that's totally unrealistic. What can you realistically give that can be good enough?
Okay, let's review. Mom guilt is that nagging sense that whatever you're doing is wrong and not enough somehow. It comes from how you were conditioned about how to be a good mom, a good person, a good woman, and also maybe how you were conditioned or learned to think about achieving goals.
The form mom guilt takes and the place to address it is the way you talk to yourself inside your head and out loud. Your mom guilt thoughts might all seem like they're helpful but ask yourself, do they lead to good outcomes or do they keep you sad, stressed, and disconnected from the people you love?
Helpful things to remember as you do this work:
1. You have to take care of yourself and your needs too. You're an actual person and you can't just be taking care of everyone else all of the time and have that work and feel good.
2. You can't totally avoid guilt, and a little bit might help you redirect your patterns and behaviors that don't match up with who you want to be, but systemic guilt will probably just make you feel bad and want to escape.
3. Again, you get to define what being a good mom looks like for you, but remember, it has to be doable in order to be something that's going to feel good.
If this episode resonates with you, and you'd like to kiss mom guilt goodbye and feel more confident about your parenting, I'd love to support you with that. Reach out and let's have a conversation about working together to get you feeling satisfied AF because you deserve nothing less.
Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or leave a review. It helps others find the podcast and get the support they need to. Until next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
The Satisfied AF podcast is the place to learn how to create a life and career that’s wildly delicious. Want a steamier sex life? We’ve got you. Want a more satisfying career? We’ll cover that too. And you can be sure we’ll spend lots of time talking about how to build connected, fun relationships that can handle life’s ups and downs. No matter what goals you’re working on, this show will help you create a one of a kind life that is just right for you. Join me, life and career coach Kori Linn and each week I’ll give you lots of practical tips, tools, and proven strategies to help you create all the satisfaction your heart desires.
Hello, hello, hello. This is Kori Linn. Welcome to another episode of Satisfied AF. I'm so excited for today's episode because we're talking about something that so many of my clients deal with and have requested coaching and resources for, and that is mom guilt.
If you're a mom, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. It's those nagging thoughts that creep up when you're sitting at your desk trying to wrap up an important project, or when you're dreaming of a glass of wine and a quiet evening to yourself instead of hanging out with your littles, or when you're actually side-by-side with your kiddo, but somehow you feel like you're just not being present enough with them in that moment.
The lived experience of this may look like a stream of self-critical thoughts delineating all the ways you're failing your children, but it could also look like the ways you think you're failing your partner, your workplace, your business, yourself, or even your hobbies because of how much time and energy is taken up by you parenting your kids.
So for a lot of people, it's kind of that both. It's like whatever you're not currently doing is what you feel guilty for, and there's always something you're not currently doing. It may look like heavy shame or guilt weighing you down, but sometimes it's more like mom anxiety with your head spinning about all the things that could go wrong in the future because of the choices you are making now, or even on the ones you already made.
Whatever way it shows up, it tends to center on the idea that you're falling short in some or many ways. For some people, this can be pretty extreme with your inner voice saying things like, "Oh, you're failing, you're not good enough," or "Wow, you're such a bad mom." But sometimes it can actually be more subtle with messages like, "Oh, I'm so distracted," or "Oh my God, I'm never going to get this time back and I'm wasting it," or "They deserve better."
No matter what your particular mom guilt soundtrack sounds like, it generally involves feeling bad about yourself and the way you're showing up to parenting your kids. But like I said, it can also come with a side of feeling like you're failing at various other areas of your life, whether it's work, your marriage, or even feeling like you're losing a part of yourself.
For many people, it's feeling like you should be with your kids when you're working, but also feeling like you should be working when you're with your kids. And like we said before, sometimes it's being with your kids and wanting to be super present and attentive, but simultaneously feeling like you just don't have the bandwidth to show up that way.
From what I can tell, pretty much every mom feels some variation of mom guilt at some point. It doesn't matter if you're a stay-at-home mom, a working mom, a single mom, or some other kind of mom. Whether it's feeling bad for missing a school play because of work, worrying you've ruined your child's life because you let the TV babysit them while you worked on your business plan, or feeling guilty for hiring a babysitter so you could take a much needed break, it's all under the same umbrella of mom guilt.
And it may seem like this experience is not optional, like this is just part of what it means to be a mom. But is it? And does it have to be? Like does it necessarily have to be a required element of mothering that you feel guilty pretty much all the time, no matter what choices you make? I'm going to argue that it doesn't have to be that way.
But in order to understand how to escape from unending mom guilt and why it might make sense for you to do that, let's take a look at where mom guilt comes from and why it exists in the first place.
One, mom guilt is a direct result of the way many girls and women were socialized. And two, mom guilt is what happens when your habitual response to caring about something is to stress about it, obsess about ways you might fail, and attach your worthiness to how well you're doing.
Okay, so let's talk about how girls and women were socialized first. You, as a woman, or a person socialized as a woman or girl, have received socialization and messaging about what it means to be a good mom, a lot of it in your own childhood, and still tons of it coming in all day, every day. Like, I'm not a mom, but I still get on social media and there's still all these messages and ideas bombarding me all the time about who's a good mom and who's not a good mom and what actions a good mom takes and what actions a good mom doesn't take.
Here are some examples of the messaging you may have received:
Moms are sweet. Moms are caring. Moms are a safe place to land. Moms take care of things. Moms are always there for you. Moms have all the answers. Moms gentle parent and do it with ease. Moms know what to do.
And they always have fresh baked homemade cookies to cheer you up.
And these days, I think there's also a second set of socialization:
Moms are breadwinners. Moms are modeling professional success. Moms are lawyers, doctors, fighter jet pilots. Moms are badasses.
And don't get me wrong, moms are badasses. But all of this kind of adds up to an insane amount of pressure. And it implies that moms are these superhuman people who can go above and beyond and do it all. And oftentimes, moms can and do, but should they have to? And should that be the measure of what it means to be a woman who is also a parent? Where's the room to breathe, let alone room for failure or the room to be a human being with limited time, energy, and money?
An interesting side note about this is that the ideas we as a culture hold about moms don't just create mom guilt for the moms. They don't just lead to women feeling guilty for having perfectly normal human emotions and capacity. All this socialization, all this stress, all these pressures about what it means to be a good mom also leads to a lot of us holding the mothers and women in our lives to very high standards.
This is also something I've coached on a lot is being able to forgive people in our lives for being imperfect, but people struggle so much more with this when it comes to their mothers. And I think that's because of these deeply ingrained ideas we have that basically say, as soon as a woman gives birth, she should be able to be this superhuman person who goes above and beyond in every way.
It's not fair, it's not fair to you, it's not fair to the women in your life, it's not fair to children, it's not fair to anyone because it puts so much pressure on one person that they can't live up to, or if they can, maybe they're like killing themselves to do it, right? And so I think it's just an interesting thing to think about that we put so much pressure on moms and it doesn't just hurt moms, but it does hurt moms and that's enough of a reason for us to take a look at it.
Okay, all of that's kind of a separate topic and I can do more podcast episodes on any of those other ideas if you're interested, but for now we're going to circle back to mom guilt. So basically women have been conditioned to believe that in order to be a good mom, you have to give unendingly and effortlessly to your children. And if you believe the socialization, you're also supposed to find that very enjoyable and fulfilling.
On top of that, whether you're a mom or not, women also have a whole set of social conditioning about what it means to be a good woman. Things like being patient, kind, attentive, helpful, emotionally connected, loving. So some of that is similar to the mom socialization, but there's also all this other socialization about being attractive or being interested in sex, but only in the right ways and with the right people, right?
It's like if you're interested in sex outside of a relationship, our culture's going to call you a slut. But if you're in a relationship with a man, right, because we grow up in a heterosexual patriarchal society, it's like then you're supposed to be this really giving partner who's always available when the other person is, but you don't have more sexual desire, but you don't have a less sexual desire.
So a lot of the socialization we get is obviously all catered around like what's going to serve and benefit men. In many ways, the demands placed on women by socialization directly conflict with each other. So even if you wanted to meet them all, you wouldn't be able to. And then when you add the demands placed on like being a mom, it becomes a truly unhinged amount. And a lot of it does conflict with each other. And there's so much pressure for how you show up to your kids because you're a mom, yes, but also for how you show up to your job, your spouse, your friendships, your family, both as a person who is a mom, but also because you're a daughter, you're a friend, and you're a woman, right?
So it's like this just insane amount of socialization, which means it's a tall, one might even say impossibly tall, order. So it's a tall order, one might even say impossibly tall, and even if it were possible, it might not be how you want to spend your life.
But here's the thing, pushing back against the socialization that you received all throughout your childhood, both in how you were parented and what you observed in culture and what was reflected to you in the media and what's being reflected to you today on things like social media, pushing back against that may feel very uncomfortable, period, and if you're not aware of the socialization and the way it can turn into internal pressure and self-doubt, it might not even feel like something you can push back on.
So let's look at what an example might be if you have this internalized socialization but you don't know it's there. Let's just say you want to go meet a friend for coffee or even just take an hour for yourself to go to the gym or read a book. You might have this thought that pops up in your head that says like, "Shouldn't you be with your kids right now? Like, oh, is this selfish to want to do this?"
And that voice, that idea, that thought is going to sound like you because it's your thought in your head. You might not see it as something that's been fed to you or a pressure that's been put on you. You also exist within a larger context where you interact with other people who may have also received similar messaging as well as having their own thoughts, many of which they may want to share with you, even if you're a total stranger to them.
This is so interesting because parenting is one area where people generally seem to feel much more comfortable asserting their ideas on other people. And in addition to the internal experience of worrying you're not doing enough and you're failing despite trying so hard, you may also overlay what you believe others are thinking about you and your parenting.
Humans are social mammals and we want to fit in, we want to belong, we want to be safe. Sometimes without you even realizing it, that desire can turn into you spending a lot of time worrying about what others think or even imagining them criticizing and judging you and, in this case, your parenting choices.
So you can see why you might have this mom guilt, there are so many pressures coming from how you were raised and the ideas our culture holds about what it means to be a good woman and what it means to be a good mom and all the things you should be able to give, which are generally well past the capacity of any human being to be able to give, let alone do you even have the desire to show up that way.
What about the second factor? The second factor was that mom guilt is one of the things that happens when your habitual response to caring about something is to stress about it, obsess about ways you might fail at it, and attach your worthiness as a person to how well you're doing at it.
This second factor also has to do with socialization, but it's how you were socialized around achievement versus how you were socialized around what it means to be a good parent. While most people would like to feel confident as they work on their goals, for many high achievers that's not the reality. Instead, even when they create amazing things, the path is often littered with guilt, doubt, and internal criticism.
Much like the conditioning around what it means to be a good mom, this is habitual. It's a way of thinking and seeing the world. But it tends to lead to burnout, overwhelm, and exhaustion, not to mention stripping away all the joy and satisfaction out of whatever you're doing, whether it's writing a novel, completing a work project, or yes, parenting your children.
This pattern is one I see so often with work burnout, but of course it also shows up at home. And it makes sense that if one of the ways you've found to relate to your achievements is to feel guilty that you're not doing enough, you would also apply that to how you're parenting your children.
So if you want to be a person who experiences less mom guilt, you are going to need to update your socialization about what it means to be a good mom, and you might also need to shift your ideas about how you show up to the things you deeply care about.
But let's be honest, maybe even given all that, you might still feel a little hesitant about changing your definition of what it means to be a good mom. You might feel a little hesitant about shifting your ideas about how you show up to things you deeply care about. After all, you've likely had those old ideas for literal decades, and it may feel weird to change them.
Like, yeah, mom guilt feels terrible, but isn't it good to feel guilty sometimes? Doesn't it keep you in line and result in you being a better parent? Is it really worth it to go to all the trouble of changing your attitudes and ideas about these things? Let's dig in.
Mom guilt may seem caring. After all, you do care so much about your kids and their happiness. You want them to have good childhoods and grow up to be happy, capable people. But does your feeling guilty actually lead you to parenting them better? Does it lead to your kids having better outcomes? Or does it ruin the moments you do have with them, keep you up at night, and make you break down crying in the shower when you make a mistake and can't let it go?
In my professional experience as a coach who's helped dozens if not hundreds of people achieve their goals and feel better, guilt's not the best motivator. It might make sense to you logically, you're not sure you're doing enough, so you feel bad. But if the guilt doesn't actually result in you parenting more in line with your values or improving in some way, it's not able to cash the check it's been writing you.
Which is to say, guilt can be a liar. It can give you the impression that feeling bad has meaning and is doing something, but you have to look at your life and ask if that's true. Occasionally, a small amount of guilt might lead to some kind of course correction. That can be useful.
Maybe you snap at your five-year-old and then you feel guilty and think, "That's not who I want to be." If you then learn new skills or find other ways of showing up differently, that guilt did its job. But if the guilt just loops on repeat all the time, and even when you make changes and learn new skills, you're still guilt tripping yourself all day and all night, that guilt is not doing its job. It's gone wild, it's running rampant. It's not actually leading to you being different.
In large amounts, guilt can actually do the opposite of inspiring change. It can make you feel like an absolute failure who will never improve, so why try? It can make you feel like there's just way too much you need improving on, and that can cause overwhelmed stress and yes, even burnout. It can strand you in a loop of shame, constantly questioning whether you're enough, trying to claw your way out by proving you're good enough, but never actually able to hit that impossible bar.
Even seeing the negative effects of mom guilt, it may still feel hard to imagine living differently and thinking different thoughts about yourself as a mom. It can feel like you're doing something productive when you worry or beat yourself up. It might also just be the sound check you're used to and the brain loves familiar thought patterns even when they feel bad.
But if you've decided that mom guilt is not what you want to have and that these old expectations and socializations and narratives around being a mom and being a woman and showing up to things you care about with guilt and stress, if you've decided those are not what you want to choose anymore, how do you change them? How do you embrace a new way of thinking that enables you to parent well minus all that unending guilt?
The first step is awareness. Start noticing when you're feeling guilty. What are you telling yourself in those moments? Are you thinking "I should be doing more"? Or, "Oh, I'm failing as a mom"? Once you recognize the thought pattern behind the guilt, you can start questioning it and poking holes.
Like, is it actually true you should be doing more? What if you're actually doing too much and you're exhausted and you need to do less? Is it actually true you're failing as a mom because your toddler is melting down in the grocery store or is that an incredibly common if unenjoyable experience that does not reflect poorly on you or your actions?
Find the internal messaging, the thoughts, the self-talk that's creating the guilt, and then ask yourself, is that even true? And more importantly, is that helpful? Is that helping me show up the way I want to as a mom? A lot of the time, your thoughts don't reflect the whole truth, or they don't make space for the full reality. And even if the thought is technically factual, if it's not helpful, it's not helpful. And you don't have to keep saying it to yourself, even if it's factual.
As an example, if you're late to pick your kid up from school, you could keep thinking, "Oh my God, I was late, I was late, I was so late, like, oh, it's so inconsiderate when I'm late." And you might be like, "Actually, that's true, I was late, it is inconsiderate." But if that's not helping you show up and having a better relationship with your kid now or being the parent you want to be now, then I would argue it's not helpful.
So you could instead think something like, "This is a great time to talk to my kid about what happens, like when you make a mistake, because mom makes mistakes too. I was late today. That's not who I want to be. It was a mistake, but it's not the end of the world. I can still be connected to my kid and I can help them learn to be kinder to themselves when they make mistakes too, because guess what? They for sure will."
Here's another example. You might have the thought, "A good mom always makes time for her kids." Is that thought really true? Does it even make sense? Like, what if you just made time for them for two hours? Is it true that now you must make more time for them? Like ad infinitum or that none of it counted.
This is exactly the kind of thought that people have when they're discounting what they've already done or discounting the good work that they've put in is that they will kind of stay in this space of like, "Well, that's not enough." But it's like, what would be enough, right? Let's either get specific on what would be enough and do it, or let's get realistic and realize that like our brain's never going to say it's enough. So we need to change what our brain says instead of believing it.
Once you start challenging the mom guilt thoughts, you're going to feel much better. And you'll be seeing your life and your parenting with more kindness and more nuance and through the frame of what's going to help you versus through the frame of like, what do I need to feel bad about?
To take things even further, you can replace the old thoughts with more empowering ones. Thoughts like "Taking care of myself as part of being a good mom," or "It's a wonderful thing for my kids to see that I'm passionate about my work and my hobbies." Or "Yeah, I made a mistake and my kids will too, so I'm going to teach them what to do when that happens."
If you're only going to take one thing away from this podcast, let it be this. You get to define what being a good mom looks like for you, and it has to be doable in order to actually feel good. The world and society and Instagram and your Aunt Janet will give you all of their opinions about what you need to do to be a good mom, and you don't have to listen to any of it. You get to decide. And when you are deciding, again, it has to be an amount that you can actually do or it's just going to make you feel bad all of the time.
Having a definition of success that you just know you can't meet, that's a recipe for feeling like shit. So you may be like, "Here's what I would like to be able to give," and that's totally unrealistic. What can you realistically give that can be good enough?
Okay, let's review. Mom guilt is that nagging sense that whatever you're doing is wrong and not enough somehow. It comes from how you were conditioned about how to be a good mom, a good person, a good woman, and also maybe how you were conditioned or learned to think about achieving goals.
The form mom guilt takes and the place to address it is the way you talk to yourself inside your head and out loud. Your mom guilt thoughts might all seem like they're helpful but ask yourself, do they lead to good outcomes or do they keep you sad, stressed, and disconnected from the people you love?
Helpful things to remember as you do this work:
1. You have to take care of yourself and your needs too. You're an actual person and you can't just be taking care of everyone else all of the time and have that work and feel good.
2. You can't totally avoid guilt, and a little bit might help you redirect your patterns and behaviors that don't match up with who you want to be, but systemic guilt will probably just make you feel bad and want to escape.
3. Again, you get to define what being a good mom looks like for you, but remember, it has to be doable in order to be something that's going to feel good.
If this episode resonates with you, and you'd like to kiss mom guilt goodbye and feel more confident about your parenting, I'd love to support you with that. Reach out and let's have a conversation about working together to get you feeling satisfied AF because you deserve nothing less.
Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend or leave a review. It helps others find the podcast and get the support they need to. Until next time.
Thank you for joining me for this week’s episode of Satisfied AF. If you are ready to create a wildly delicious life and have way more fun than you ever thought possible, visit www.korilinn.com to see how I can help. See you next week.
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