The Truth About Being a Parent

We start a good portion of our articles about how much work and how hard parenting is. That is because it is the truth. Parenting is a ton of work, and it is not easy. There are going to be days where you’re going to continue to ask yourself why you are a parent and why you chose to have kids. Your child is going to frustrate you, and you are going to wonder what in the world you were thinking when you wanted to have a kid.

Every parent goes through these thoughts at some point. It may be immediately after having a child. It may not be until your child is a toddler. It may not be until you’re in the teen years. And for many others, these thoughts happen at every phase of parenting. Parenting is not easy. If you don’t have kids yet, stop looking at social media posts from happy parents, and search for articles about the bad sides of parenting.

If you’re currently in a position where all you have are negative thoughts about parenting, you need to work on getting out of that mentality. Focus on the small things that make you happy. Focus on making your child happy. If you only focus on the negative, then you’re not going to be happy. If you’re in a place where you simply can’t find anything you like about being a parent then you should seek out a professional for help.

There are definitely people out there who actually really enjoy being a parent. They love to give of themselves and simply serve their children to give them what they want. For those people, they never seem to have problems being a parent. They do have issues and they get frustrated, but they bounce back into being a good parent much faster. Unfortunately, many of us don’t have that quality - we have to work at it.

As a parent, you will experience days where you simply don’t want to be a parent any longer. You will wonder if your child will ever listen to you. Will they ever stop whining? Will they ever stop trying to annoy you? Will they ever sleep through the night? And hundreds of other questions that are currently bothering you. The answer is yes to many of these, but there are some things that may not change in your child.

Being a parent requires you to find a balance between taking care of your child and taking care of yourself. If you don’t naturally love being a parent, you need to figure out how to be a parent the majority of the time, but also make sure you take time to do things that make you happy as well. Spending time every week on yourself will make parenting easier - it may not make you love it, but it will be easier.

Parenting is hard. Read that again - parenting is hard. Stop reading the articles and posts out there about how parenting is great and it’s for everyone. Parenting is not for everyone. Parenting will require you to sacrifice the majority of your free time. You’ll have another person that you will love, but they will frustrate you to no end. Talk to other parents about the truth about how hard parenting is - don’t simply think it’s as easy as it may look from afar.

Parenting is worth it for many people, but it’s not easy. Make sure you know how hard it will be. Kids are pretty amazing, but it’s still a lot of work.