Navigating "Parenting Puberty"
A guest essay by Kate Moreland
Dear friends,
My friend Kate Moreland is an excellent mother.
Not only does Kate care for her five young boys with grace and good humor, but she writes about parenting with a combination of realism and cheerfulness that I find refreshing.
Today, we hear from Kate in a guest essay about the trap of comparing yourself to experienced parents when you are a relatively new mom or dad. Kate calls this stage of early parenthood “parenting puberty.”
Below, Kate explains why new parents should seek advice and a longer perspective rather than giving into discouragement as they face the challenges of parenting from inexperience (even while the experienced mom next door looks like she somehow has it all together!).
You can read more of Kate’s work via her linktree.
Take it away, Kate!
Navigating Parenting Puberty
By Kate Moreland
When a person is growing up, he or she can see others further ahead on the life timeline and thus anticipate what is to come in his or her own future. Toddlers look at young children; young children look at teenagers; teens look to adults. As they do so, they form basic assumptions about the course that their physical and mental development will take.
But since large families and multi-generational living are not the norm in our society anymore, we often have no idea what comes in the years between getting a positive pregnancy test and the later stage of having a passel of school-aged children who read, brush their own teeth, and entertain themselves. That black hole in between is what ought to be called Parenting Puberty.
There is no such term as Parenting Puberty, however (which shows a decided lack of detail in English language life-stage terminology). If there were a term for this strenuous time of life, it might ease the burden on new parents so they could stop believing they are the first parents ever to fret over a child’s diaper, sleep, skin, or any of the other inanities that plague new life. Sadly, however, there is no such term and little acknowledgment that such a stage exists, and so new parents flounder about under the belief that everyone else handles their problems well. As a result, they believe that the challenges of this time must all be entirely the fault of New Dad and New Mom, who are personally failing at child-rearing.
Parenting Puberty is just like adolescence back in our younger years. As teens, we look big, we look like we should be competent, and when we truly focus on a task we can, indeed, do a worthy job of it. However, we do not feel accomplished and we feel continually out of our depth in pretty much everything, and often wonder how, exactly, we arrived at the present moment.
New parents feel this way too. New Dad who has charge of his toddler and infant for the first time and can barely keep them alive in the living room will look out his window and see Experienced Dad pushing a stroller, wearing a baby, and supervising three other kids on bikes as he strolls casually down the neighborhood road. To add insult, Experienced Dad will not only accomplish this, but he also will look happy about it. Relaxed, even! And New Dad will immediately feel inadequate and outnumbered.
What New Dad fails to see in this scenario is that it took Experienced Dad years of practice to get all his younger children to mosey casually down the street with him, and not only did he spend much time and effort to accomplish this, but this very morning he still could not find the children’s bike helmets without the help of his wife. No one is perfect. New Dad does not see that Experienced Dad’s wife is home sleeping because the newborn who looks so peaceful in the carrier screams every night from midnight to four in the morning. All New Dad sees in Experienced Dad is a picture of success, whereas he himself is barely meeting the standard of mediocrity…or so he thinks.
Mothers feel this way all the time, likely because we are wired in such a way as to be predisposed to compare ourselves with others. This is a bad habit, moms, so squash it with all your might; it is straight from the devil. But, reality being what it is, we will fall and continue to do this. New Mom is particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack.
When New Mom, her husband, and her children ages four and under finally find all their Cheerios and lost toys so they can leave their pew after church is over, they are faced with Experienced Mom walking down the aisle in time for the next service. Experienced Mom is likely strolling slowly while her progeny of various ages—including under four—walk decently down the aisle, genuflect (if there is a Tabernacle), and go in. Some shuffling about is natural, but they sit mostly nicely, their button-downs and dresses looking decent and fresh, if not perfectly ironed. Experienced Mom is also dressed nicely, and looks happy to be at church.
Poor New Mom looks at the crusted Cheerios on her blouse, which she did not realize was translucently displaying all her postpartum rolls to the world until she arrived at church; she sees her children who can barely remain in the pew, much less sit nicely; she sees her husband whose face is contorted into a look of blank despair while he pats the melting-down toddler; she sees the difference and deems herself entirely inadequate. How is it possible to be half as in control as Experienced Mom when she can’t even dress herself properly?
But dear New Mom, take it from me: you are doing exactly what you should be doing.
You are in the throes of parenting puberty, and those parents who seem to handle your problems with such effortless ease are simply the product of thousands of hours of effort and repetition. They are the adults of the parenting world not because they have all the answers or a perfect solution to every problem, but rather because they have become comfortable living in the constant state of change that is family life.
Their children have misbehaved at church and other public places so many times that these parents simply are not bothered by it anymore, and thus look serene even when walking out with a screaming hooligan. They have teenagers whose troubles put the tantrums of the toddlers into clear perspective. And with older children in the family, they have many capable hands on call to help make the family circus run smoothly. It is not just Mom and Dad who can feed and clothe the younger children; the older siblings can as well, and in doing so learn their own lessons of patience and charity. So when you see Experienced Mom and Dad walking around with their passel of children, looking so relaxed, remember: they have experience, help, and more practice laughing at the inanities of life.
Whether you are New Mom trying to be on time for just one, single, darn errand this week, or whether you are Experienced Mom with fewer physical trials but far more mental ones—we all start in one place and end up in the other. Everyone feels new sometimes. Having a new baby, starting the first day of school, sending the last child off to college: each one makes us feel like we are back in adolescence, wondering how we got here and what we are supposed to do.
Just as literal adulthood eventually comes to every adolescent, so too does parenting adulthood arrive for new parents, sneaking in, bit by bit. One day, a longtime New Mom will suddenly realize that she is more relaxed when walking into church or an appointment with her brood, that her children are more settled, and that her Cheerio-stained struggles from the years before are not the ones she has now. She does not even use Cheerios anymore, much to the amazement of the New Mom who sits behind her every Sunday and wonders how it is possible to conjure decently behaved toddlers without food as bribery. Her older children are gone nine months of the year in college, or married already. She is both mother and grandmother and has the gray hairs to prove it.
There is always someone with more experience, and someone with less, with whom we can compare ourselves. Rather than compare, however, let’s just try to do better than we did as literal adolescents, when so many of us tried to reinvent every wheel and conquer every hurdle of growing up without taking anyone’s good advice. Instead of staring enviously at a mother who seems to have everything in order, talk to her. Ask her for a tip, and compliment her on what you see. She will almost certainly be happy to chat with you, but it’s up to you to ask. Once we recognize that this seeming difference in skill is actually no more than natural life experience, we can move past the trap of comparison and start to help one another. The wisdom of those ahead of us is worth a great deal, and I truly believe that we younger parents could have a treasure trove of help available to us if we were only brave enough to use it.
Don’t waste the opportunity!
Kate Moreland is a graduate of Franciscan University who spends her time homeschooling her five sons. Writing is her way to share her many opinions with someone other than her very patient husband. When not teaching or cleaning up after various people and animals, she enjoys grocery trips alone and frequently-interrupted discussions about family, parenting, and faith. Find her at her LinkTr.ee @kate.more.land .
Have you been/were you able to find mentors to help you gain perspective during the early years of parenting?
Are you a mentor of young parents yourself? What advice would you give?
Please share your thoughts with us!
Have a wonderful weekend!
Yes! I was nodding so hard as I read! It seems to me that one reason this so easily happens is our culture’s ignorance and devaluing of care work. No one new to any profession would expect themselves to be as good as an experienced person, but because we don’t see, or understand parenting and care work as the skilled work that it is, new parents expect themselves to be competent right away. If we valued the work of parents, I don’t think this dynamic would be so pervasive.
Oh, this is lovely because it is so true. I try to tell new moms what is probably the most annoying advice they've ever heard, "Give yourself five years to figure out what kind of mom you want to be." I know I changed so much in the first years of motherhood, and I still don't have much figured out, so giving new moms a lot of grace has gotten easier for me.