What If Parenthood Isn’t What You Expected It to Be?
Parenthood has been one of the most sacred and challenging experiences of my lifetime. As a therapist who has worked with maternal mental health and families for more than a dozen years, and as a mother of three, I have had the privilege of sitting with many parents in the quiet, complicated spaces where the reality of parenthood does not quite match the picture they created before meeting their child.
I hear versions of the same thoughts again and again:
I thought I would feel happier.
I thought I would feel more fulfilled.
I thought I would feel more grateful.
I thought I would feel more complete.
I thought it would be easier.
I imagined my child differently.
I imagined myself differently.
I imagined our family differently.
These are not unusual thoughts. I think many more parents have them than we realize. We do not always say them out loud because parenthood comes with such a powerful cultural expectation that we should feel grateful, joyful, fulfilled, and certain about what we are doing. When our actual experience is more complicated, it is easy to assume that something is wrong with us.
The question is not whether parenthood turned out exactly the way we imagined. The question is how we learn to love, accept, and navigate the parenthood that is actually ours.
There is almost always some distance between the two.
Long before we become parents, most of us have some idea of what we think parenthood will be like. Sometimes that picture is very specific. We imagine the kind of birth we will have, how we will feed our baby, whether we will stay home or return to work, how many children we will have, or what family traditions we want to create. Other expectations are harder to name. We imagine that we will feel an immediate bond with our baby, that our relationship with our partner will deepen, that parenting will feel intuitive, or that becoming a parent will somehow make us feel more complete.
Some of these expectations come from our own childhoods and the parents who raised us. Some come from what we wished we had experienced. Others come from books, social media, friends, family, cultural expectations, and the carefully edited images of family life that surround us. Some simply come from not knowing what we do not know.
Before we meet our child, we cannot know what it will be like to parent this particular child, with their own temperament, personality, sensitivities, developmental needs, strengths, and challenges.
Then the baby arrives, and the imagined version of parenthood meets the lived version.
Sometimes the gap is small. Sometimes it is enormous.
You can love your baby deeply and still be surprised by how much you miss your independence. You can expect to adore the newborn stage and find yourself counting the hours until someone else can take over. You can imagine yourself as an endlessly patient parent and feel startled by how quickly you lose your temper. You can be grateful for your family and still miss your old life. You can feel deeply connected to your child and still feel lonely. You can know you would choose your child again and still occasionally wonder what happened to the person you were before becoming a parent.
None of these experiences, on their own, mean that something is wrong.
Sometimes reality is simply different from what we imagined.
The Gap Between Expectations and Reality
There is a particular kind of grief that can happen when the life we imagined does not quite match the life we are living. This does not mean we are unhappy with our lives or that we do not love our children. We can be deeply grateful for something and still grieve what we thought it would be.
That distinction matters in parenthood because there is an unspoken expectation that having a child should make us feel overwhelmingly grateful and fulfilled. When our actual experience includes boredom, resentment, anxiety, loneliness, frustration, or a longing for our former identity, we can start to interpret those feelings as evidence that we are doing something wrong.
Sometimes the hardest part is not the feeling itself. It is the meaning we give the feeling.
If I miss my old life, I must not love my child enough.
If I do not enjoy every stage, I must not be meant to be a parent.
If this does not feel natural, I must be doing something wrong.
If everyone else seems to be managing this better, what is wrong with me?
Instead of judging these experiences, we can get curious about them. Becoming a parent is a profound developmental and identity transition. The work of clinicians and developmental psychologists such as Daniel Siegel has emphasized the importance of understanding our own internal experiences as we navigate our relationships with our children. Parenting brings our own histories, attachment patterns, expectations, fears, and unresolved experiences into the room with us.
Becoming a parent does not just introduce us to a new person. It also introduces us to new parts of ourselves.
You Do Not Have to Love Every Stage
There is another expectation worth letting go of, the idea that if we are good parents, we will naturally love every stage of childhood.
We will not.
Some people feel wonderfully suited to the newborn period. They enjoy the physical closeness and the simplicity of focusing on basic needs. Others find infancy incredibly demanding and feel much more comfortable once their child becomes mobile and communicative. Some parents thrive during the imaginative world of preschool. Others find those years exhausting and feel much more confident once their children reach elementary school.
Some parents discover that they are particularly well suited to adolescence. They enjoy deeper conversations, negotiating boundaries, watching independence develop, and helping their child navigate increasingly complicated social and emotional experiences. Other parents find the teenage years much harder than they anticipated.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this.
Children change dramatically as they develop, and parenting has to change with them. The skills that are helpful with a three year old are not necessarily the skills that will serve you best with a thirteen year old. A child who once needed constant physical reassurance may eventually need more privacy. A child who once needed you to make nearly every decision may later need you to tolerate watching them make decisions you would not make yourself.
Parenting asks us to continue developing while our children are developing.
We cannot stay stagnant in our expectations or our parenting skills and expect them to work perfectly for a person whose needs are continually changing.
This becomes even more obvious when we have more than one child. Many parents discover that what worked beautifully with one child does not necessarily work with another. One child may need more structure while another needs more autonomy. One may respond to reassurance while another becomes more frustrated by it. One may need encouragement to take risks while another needs help slowing down.
That is not an inconsistency. It can be responsiveness and individualized parenting.
Fairness does not always mean treating every child exactly the same. Sometimes fairness means understanding what each child needs in order to feel supported, safe, capable, and connected.
The Parenting Style That Feels Natural to You May Need to Stretch
It is helpful to enter parenthood with some idea of the kind of parent you want to be. What values matter to you? What did you appreciate about the way you were raised? What do you want to do differently? What kind of relationship do you hope to have with your children?
Those questions give us a compass.
They do not give us a script.
The parent you imagined becoming before having children is based partly on fantasy because you had not yet experienced the actual demands of parenting. You may have imagined yourself as very relaxed and discovered that your child needs considerable structure. You may have envisioned being highly structured and found that your child responds better when you give them more room to experiment. You may have imagined parenting exactly the way your own parents did, only to discover that their approach does not fit your personality, your family, your circumstances, or the particular child you are raising.
There is nothing wrong with allowing your parenting to evolve.
In fact, emotional flexibility is one of the most important parenting skills we can develop.
This is one reason contemporary parenting guidance places so much emphasis on parental regulation. Dr. Becky Kennedy has brought considerable attention to the idea that our ability to regulate ourselves affects how available we are to respond to our children. When we are overwhelmed, exhausted, frightened, or emotionally flooded, it becomes much harder to remain curious and flexible. We become more likely to react from old patterns, fear, or frustration.
Regulation does not mean that we never become angry or overwhelmed. It means developing enough awareness to recognize what is happening inside of us and create enough space to choose our response.
That space matters because sometimes what our child needs from us is different from what we expected to give.
Sometimes We Have to Let Go of the Fantasy
There is a certain amount of fantasy built into becoming a parent. We imagine the family we will create, the traditions we will have, the relationship we will share with our children, and even the kind of person our child will become.
Then our actual child arrives with their own personality.
They may be much more sensitive than we expected. More energetic. More cautious. More independent. More social. More intense. More introverted. They may need things from us that do not come naturally.
This is where parenting becomes less about executing a philosophy and more about developing a relationship.
We can learn from experts without assuming that an expert knows our child better than we do. We can read about attachment, child development, nervous system regulation, boundaries, sleep, behavior, and communication while remembering that our family is not a case study in a parenting book.
We are living with a real child, in a real family, under real circumstances.
That means our job is partly to gather information and partly to learn how to interpret it.
We are living in an extraordinary time in terms of access to parenting information. There are more books, podcasts, courses, professionals, research summaries, and online communities available to parents than ever before. This can be incredibly helpful, especially for those of us who did not grow up with healthy parenting models and are intentionally trying to build something different.
But more information does not always create more confidence.
Sometimes it creates more noise.
There is always another opinion about what we should be doing, and it can become very easy to interpret every piece of information as another way we might be getting it wrong.
The goal is not to become an expert in every aspect of parenting. The goal is to become an increasingly thoughtful observer of ourselves and our children, to learn, adjust, and ask for help when we need it.
The Postpartum Period Deserves Its Own Kind of Attention
This becomes especially important during the postpartum period, when a new parent is adjusting physically, emotionally, relationally, and psychologically all at once.
Karen Kleiman's work with postpartum parents has helped bring attention to the frightening thoughts and complicated emotions that many new mothers experience but are afraid to discuss. One important clinical distinction is that an unwanted thought is not the same thing as an intention.
A new parent may have a sudden thought about dropping the baby, something terrible happening while driving, or accidentally causing harm. The thought itself can feel horrifying because it is so completely at odds with what the parent wants.
The parent may then become frightened by the fact that the thought occurred at all.
What kind of mother thinks that?
What if having the thought means something about me?
What if I cannot tell anyone because they will think I am dangerous?
This is where shame can make a difficult experience much worse. When parents believe they are the only ones having these thoughts, they are less likely to talk about them and more likely to become frightened by their own minds.
Talking about these experiences with a qualified professional can help put them into context and determine whether they are unwanted intrusive thoughts, part of an anxiety disorder, or connected to something that requires more immediate intervention.
The same principle applies to the ordinary difficult days of parenthood.
Good parents lose their patience. They have days when they do not enjoy parenting very much. They need breaks. They can feel bored, angry, lonely, touched out, overstimulated, or desperate for five minutes alone.
A difficult day is not a mental health disorder.
Missing your old life is not postpartum depression.
Feeling anxious about your baby does not automatically mean postpartum anxiety.
Having a frightening intrusive thought does not mean you want to act on it.
The important question is what happens when these experiences become persistent, intense, impairing, or increasingly difficult to manage.
When It’s Time to Get Some Support
As therapists, we also have to be careful not to normalize so much that we minimize significant suffering. There is a difference between a difficult adjustment to parenthood and a postpartum mental health condition, even though they can sometimes look similar at first.
A parent may be exhausted because they have a newborn who wakes frequently. If they are unable to sleep even when the baby is sleeping because their mind is consumed by catastrophic fears, that deserves further attention.
A parent may be worried about their baby's safety. If they are spending hours checking, researching, seeking reassurance, or avoiding ordinary activities because of overwhelming fears, that anxiety may have moved beyond ordinary new parent concern.
A parent may occasionally think, I can't do this today. Persistent hopelessness, feeling worthless, feeling disconnected from the baby, or experiencing thoughts of death or self harm deserves immediate attention.
When It’s Time to Ask for Help
Some signs that postpartum depression or anxiety may be moving beyond an expected adjustment include:
Persistent sadness, emptiness, numbness, or hopelessness
Loss of interest or pleasure in things you normally enjoy
Significant guilt, shame, worthlessness, or feeling like you are failing as a parent
Persistent irritability, anger, or feeling unusually restless
Feeling disconnected from the baby or having difficulty bonding
Persistent doubts about your ability to care for your baby
Anxiety or worry that feels difficult to control
Recurrent panic attacks or intense physical symptoms of anxiety
Repetitive, unwanted, or frightening thoughts or mental images
Persistent catastrophic “what if” thoughts about something happening to you or your baby
Compulsive checking, researching, or seeking reassurance to feel safe
Avoiding activities, places, or situations because of fear
Significant changes in sleep or appetite that are not simply explained by the baby’s schedule
Exhaustion or a noticeable drop in energy that feels beyond ordinary new-parent fatigue
Difficulty concentrating, remembering things, or making everyday decisions
Difficulty functioning at home, work, or in your relationships
Feeling unable to enjoy your life or connect with the people around you
Thoughts of death, self-harm, suicide, or feeling that your family would be better off without you
Thoughts of harming your baby, particularly when they feel persistent, distressing, or difficult to control
You do not have to experience every one of these symptoms to deserve support. If something feels significantly different from your usual self, is interfering with your ability to function, or is getting harder to manage, it is worth talking with your doctor, midwife, therapist, or another trusted healthcare professional. You do not have to wait until things become unbearable to ask for help.
And Then There Is Postpartum Psychosis
Postpartum psychosis is rare, but it is a psychiatric emergency and requires immediate medical attention.
Symptoms can include hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, severe confusion, disorganized thinking, extreme agitation, or dramatic changes in mood or behavior. It can also involve mania, including an unusually elevated or energized state with little need for sleep and behavior that feels very unlike the person's usual self.
A person experiencing psychosis may not recognize that something is wrong or may not be able to accurately judge what is happening around them.
If you or someone you love is experiencing these symptoms, this is not a situation to manage alone or simply wait out. Seek immediate emergency help by calling 911 or going to the nearest emergency department.
If you are having thoughts of suicide or harming yourself, you can also call or text 988 for immediate crisis support.
Seeking help does not mean that you have failed.
It means something is happening that deserves care.
The Goal Is Not to Get It Right. The Goal Is to Stay Responsive.
If there is one idea worth carrying into parenthood, it is this:
Parent with intention, but leave room for discovery. Your child is not a plan to follow. They are a person to get to know.
Your child will change. Your family will change. Your circumstances will change. You will change.
There will be seasons when the parenting approach that felt right last year no longer feels right this year. There will be days when your capacity is different from what you wish it were. There will be developmental stages that feel natural to you and others that require considerably more effort.
That does not mean you are failing.
It means you are parenting a human being rather than following a formula.
We can recognize that parenting is extraordinarily difficult while also recognizing that we do not have to be perfect at it. We can listen to experts without handing over our intuition. We can seek information without allowing ourselves to become flooded by it. We can ask for help without interpreting the need for help as evidence that we are not capable.
Most importantly, our children do not need us to have anticipated every version of parenthood before we became parents.
They need us to keep meeting them as they grow.
The work is not to force reality to match the picture we carried into it. The work is to stay grounded enough to notice what is actually happening, to ourselves, to our children, and to our families, and flexible enough to respond.
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