Look, I'm going to tell you something that every parenting influencer and their perfectly curated Instagram feed won't: parenting in 2024 can be absolutely EXHAUSTING. And you know what? That's totally normal.

As a therapist who works with parents daily (and yes, I'm a millennial parent too), I'm here to spill some tea about what's really going down in homes across America. Spoiler alert: we're all just trying not to lose our minds. 🫠

The Mental Load Is Real

Here's the thing about modern parenting expectations: we're not allowed to just keep tiny humans alive. We’ve also got to:

• Process our own childhood trauma
• Make sure we don't pass on the terrible body/relationship/self-worth messages we got
• Juggle work-life "balance" (is that even a thing?)
• Manage everyone's emotional well-being
• Try to remember if we actually ate lunch today

And unlike our parents who could just say "go play outside until the streetlights come on," we're expected to spend WAY MORE time focused on our kids than any generation before. According to researcher Suzanne Bianchi, full time working parents spend MORE hours per week providing direct care for their children, than stay at home parents did in 1975. By more than 150%.

The Permission Slip You Didn't Know You Needed

So here it is: You have permission to:

• Not have all the answers, or even most of them
• Feel overwhelmed sometimes (or a lot of times), and ask for breaks
• Miss the simplicity of your pre-parent life (and the money)
• Love your kids AND want them to please just leave you alone
• Accept that perfect parenting doesn't exist

Remember: We're the generation that's rewriting the parenting rulebook. It's messy, it's hard, but we're doing it with more awareness and intention than ever before. And somehow, between the chaos and the cuddles, we're raising some pretty amazing humans.

Keep going, you're doing better than you think. ✨

And for those moments when you need backup, there's no shame in reaching out to a therapist. We get it, because we're living it too.