I’m going to say something that might sting a little: the version of parenthood where you erase yourself entirely for your children isn’t noble. It’s unsustainable. And research increasingly suggests it doesn’t even work.
I know that’s a strong statement. I also know it’s one I needed to hear about four years ago, when Ellie was a baby and I was deep in the trenches of trying to be every single thing she could possibly need—while quietly running on empty and pretending I was fine.
Our culture has built an entire mythology around the self-sacrificing parent. The mother who never sleeps. The father who works three jobs. The parent who gives up hobbies, friendships, rest, identity—everything—so their child can have “the best.” And we celebrate this. We call it devotion. We call it love.
But psychologists are starting to tell a different story. One where the parents who raise the most resilient, emotionally healthy kids aren’t the ones who sacrificed everything. They’re the ones who showed their children what it looks like to live a full, imperfect, honest human life—even when that meant occasionally disappointing their kids in small ways.
Let me walk through what I mean.
The martyr trap
There’s a fascinating model of parenting styles developed by researchers Lemasters and Defrain that goes beyond the usual authoritative-versus-authoritarian categories. One of the types they identify is the “martyr” parent—someone who will do anything for their child, including tasks the child should be learning to do themselves. On the surface, this parent looks like a hero. But as the research explains, the martyr’s sacrifices often serve the parent’s psychological needs more than the child’s developmental ones—and can later be used, consciously or not, to create guilt or gain compliance.
That stopped me in my tracks when I first read it.
Because I recognized myself in it. Not the guilt part, thankfully—but the doing-everything part. When Ellie was little, I was cooking from scratch, cloth diapering, making my own cleaning products, writing during nap times, and trying to keep the house from looking like a toy explosion—all while telling myself this was what good mothers did. Matt would offer to help with dinner or take over bedtime, and I’d wave him off. Not because he wasn’t capable, but because somewhere deep in my recovering-perfectionist brain, I believed that if I wasn’t doing it all, I was failing.
The problem with the martyr model isn’t the effort. It’s what the effort communicates. When your child grows up watching you pour yourself out until there’s nothing left, they don’t learn that they are loved. They learn that love means erasure. That caring for someone means abandoning yourself. And that’s a blueprint they’ll carry into their own relationships—into friendships, into partnerships, into parenthood.
I see this playing out in subtle ways already. Ellie is five, and she’s tender-hearted to her core. She wants to help with everything—setting the table, folding laundry, making sure Milo has his blanket. It’s beautiful. But I’ve also caught her apologizing for taking up space. Saying sorry for wanting a turn. And I wonder, honestly, how much of that she learned from watching me act like my own needs were an inconvenience.
What they actually absorb
Here’s the idea that changed everything for me—not just as a parent, but as a person trying to figure out what kind of life I actually want to be living.
A study reviewed by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center found that the types of goals parents model directly influence the goals their children pursue. If parents appear to prioritize external markers of success—status, wealth, image—their children tend to develop similar extrinsic goals. But when parents create what the researchers call a “need-supportive environment,” one where a child feels autonomous, capable, and loved, the child is more likely to develop intrinsic goals rooted in personal values, creativity, and genuine connection.
What struck me about this wasn’t the finding itself. It was the implication. The research wasn’t pointing to a specific parenting technique—some clever trick or script you can memorize. It was pointing to how you live. Your child isn’t absorbing your carefully worded lessons about self-worth. They’re absorbing you. The way you talk about your body. Whether you rest when you’re tired. How you respond when plans fall apart. Whether you have friendships you nurture or whether your entire identity revolves around them.
I think about this every morning during those few quiet minutes before the kids wake up. I sit with my coffee, I breathe, I set a small intention for the day. It’s a tiny ritual—nothing dramatic, nothing Instagram-worthy. But it models something I desperately want my children to internalize: that taking care of yourself isn’t selfish. It’s foundational. It’s the thing that makes everything else possible.
Matt does this naturally in ways I had to learn. He’s never been the type to lose himself in fatherhood. He still makes things in his workshop. He still insists on being the pancake guy on Saturday mornings because it genuinely brings him joy, not because it’s performance. He takes long walks. He reads in bed. And watching him hold onto those pieces of himself without apology gave me permission to do the same—to keep writing, to tend the garden for my own sake, to say “I need a minute” without treating it like a confession.
Our kids see all of this. They see a dad who whistles while he flips pancakes and a mom who sometimes disappears to the kitchen table with a laptop and comes back lighter. They may not understand it yet. But they’re building their internal picture of what adulthood looks like from these ordinary, unscripted moments.
The small disappointments that build big things
Now here’s the part that’s hardest for me, and I suspect it’s hard for a lot of parents who are drawn to a more attachment-focused, gentle approach to raising kids.
When you parent from a place of deep connection—when you co-sleep and babywear and practice “tell me more” instead of “you’re fine”—it can start to feel like your job is to never let your child experience discomfort. Like every unmet need is a failure. Like saying “not right now” is a betrayal of everything you believe about responsiveness and emotional safety.
But it’s not. And the small, manageable disappointments of childhood—you can’t have a cookie before dinner, Mom isn’t available to play right this second, Dad said no to the screen—are exactly how children begin to develop emotional regulation and frustration tolerance. Not through lectures about resilience. Through the lived experience of wanting something, not getting it, and discovering that they’re okay on the other side.
Last week, Ellie asked me to help her build something while I was in the middle of writing. I said, “I need twenty more minutes, and then I’m all yours.” She was not thrilled. She huffed. She went to the living room and started building it herself. And when I came to find her, she had made something completely different from what she’d originally planned—and she was beaming.
That wouldn’t have happened if I’d dropped everything the moment she asked. She didn’t need me in that moment nearly as much as she needed the space to discover she could handle it on her own. And I didn’t need to feel guilty for finishing my thought. We both gained something from that twenty-minute boundary—her, a burst of independence; me, the quiet reminder that my work matters too.
This is the part of gentle parenting that doesn’t get talked about enough. Being attuned to your child doesn’t mean being available every second. It means being honest about your own capacity. It means trusting that a small “no” delivered with warmth isn’t going to break the bond. And it means believing, really believing, that your child is capable of more than you think—if you give them the room.
Repair over perfection
Here’s the truth that finally released me from the grip of perfectionist parenting: you don’t have to get it right every time. You just have to come back.
As Brené Brown puts it in The Gifts of Imperfect Parenting, the greatest challenge of wholehearted parenting is being the adult that we want our children to grow up to be. Not a flawless adult. Not a self-sacrificing adult. A wholehearted one—someone who shows up imperfectly, embraces vulnerability, and models what it looks like to repair when things go sideways.
I lose my patience. I do. There are days—especially when I’m running on bad sleep and Milo is in full toddler-tornado mode, building couch-cushion forts one minute and dismantling the bookshelf the next—when my voice gets sharper than I want it to be. And in those moments, my old instinct is to spiral into guilt. To replay the moment on loop and conclude that I’ve damaged something irreparably.
But what I’ve learned—from the research, from therapy after my postpartum anxiety with Milo, and from plain old trial and error—is that the repair is what matters most. Going back to my child and saying, “I’m sorry I raised my voice. I was frustrated, but that wasn’t about you. I love you.” That moment of honesty teaches them more about emotional maturity than a hundred perfectly executed gentle-parenting scripts ever could.
Because what does it model? It models that adults make mistakes. That making a mistake doesn’t make you a bad person. That you can feel something big, handle it imperfectly, and then come back and make it right. That’s not a failure of parenting. That’s the most important emotional skill a human being can learn.
And kids are watching. They’re always watching. Not for whether you got it right. For whether you came back.
What a life worth living actually looks like from down here
I used to think the goal of parenting was to protect my children from all disappointment, meet every need before they even named it, and somehow emerge on the other side having poured out everything I had.
Now I think the goal is something quieter and harder: to live in a way that makes my children believe a good life is possible. Not a perfect one. Not a curated one. A real one.
Research on parenthood and well-being confirms what most of us feel in our bones: the pressure of intensive parenting—the belief that you must invest every ounce of every resource into your child’s optimal outcome—is linked to greater parental strain, sleep problems, and psychological distress. And that pressure doesn’t stay contained inside the parent. It filters down into the emotional atmosphere of the home, shaping how children experience family life. They may not know the word “burnout,” but they can feel it in the air. They know when the adults around them are running on fumes and performing calm instead of actually being okay.
The antidote isn’t to stop caring. It’s to stop performing.
For me, that looks like getting my hands dirty in the garden while the kids play nearby—not because it’s enriching for them but because it settles something in me. Baking bread on a Tuesday afternoon because the kneading is meditative. Having coffee with a friend from our babysitting co-op and letting the kids see that I have relationships outside of them. Telling Ellie, “I’m working on something I care about,” when she asks why I’m at the kitchen table with my laptop. Reading a book after the kids go to bed instead of folding another load of laundry.
It also looks like struggling in front of them sometimes. Telling them, in age-appropriate ways, that some days are hard. That I don’t always know the answer. That I make mistakes and I’m still learning—just like they are.
I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying your kids don’t need you. I’m not saying attunement and emotional availability don’t matter—they matter enormously. And I’m definitely not saying that self-care means disappearing into your phone while your toddler eats crackers off the floor. (Though let’s be honest, some days that’s the best you’ve got, and that’s okay too.)
What I’m saying is that the best thing you can offer your child isn’t a parent who has given up everything. It’s a parent who is still becoming something. A parent whose eyes still light up over a project, a conversation, a patch of tomatoes that finally came in. A parent who occasionally says “not right now” and means it—not from neglect, but from the quiet conviction that they matter too.
What I keep coming back to
Your children will not remember whether you said yes to every request. They won’t catalog the number of homemade lunches or perfectly narrated nature walks. But they will remember what your face looked like when you talked about the things that made you come alive. They’ll remember whether you seemed like someone who actually enjoyed being here—in this life, in this body, on this ordinary afternoon. And they’ll build their own sense of what’s possible, in part, from that memory.
Progress, not perfection. That’s the mantra I return to on the hard days. It’s pinned to the wall in my kitchen, scrawled on a scrap of paper in my own handwriting, right next to a crayon drawing of what Ellie assures me is a horse.
Most of the time, it’s enough.
It’s more than enough, actually. It’s the whole point.
