It’s back. Can you feel it? That pre-pandemic parenting pressure.
It hit me last week. Unable to sleep, thoughts kept popping up in my head about whether I should sign my kids up for certain activities. Do we want to do scouts? It’s such a commitment. Is my son too old to try a new sport? How much is too much? Will they miss out on valuable friendships and experiences if we do too little?
After about an hour of tossing and turning I realized I hadn’t wrestled with these thoughts for over a year. And while the pandemic had plenty of challenges, it gave us a whole year free of parental pressure.
Is your kid over-scheduled? They get the break they need.
Is your kid uninvolved in sports and activities? So is everyone else.
Too much screen time? Do what you need to survive.
Living off chicken nuggets? Who cares? They’re fed.
Struggling with progress in school? There are a whole bunch of other kids in the same boat.
Now don’t get me wrong…lockdown, school closures, and COVID-19 brought along their own sets of worries. But we were given a full one-year reprieve of the social pressure of parenting – and I didn’t realize how nice that was until it came back.
I don’t have any words of wisdom on how to deal with it because I’m right there with you. And advice like “do what’s best for your family” is wise, but doesn’t magically make the pressure go away. But as life begins its slow return to normalcy and we decide what things to put back on our (and our kids’) plates, let’s try our best to cling to the pressure-free feeling we got to experience this past year. Let’s stop projecting today’s reality too far into the future. Living in today was easy during COVID because we didn’t have any other choice. We held all future plans loosely because we didn’t know what the future would hold.
The pandemic took away any illusion of control we thought we had over our lives. And while we are autonomous beings who make wise choices and plan to the best of our ability, many of us are guilty of mistaking planning for controlling the outcome. The truth is, we don’t have complete control of anything. Not our lives, not our homes, not our kids. We have influence – sometimes incredibly strong influence – but never complete control.
So let’s keep that in mind when those feelings of pressure come to try and rob us of our sleep. When we worry that not keeping up with other kids/not signing up for the activity/signing up for too many activities will throw our kid off of the ideal future we’re trying to help them achieve.
Their future is unwritten. We aren’t the ones writing it. Our job is to raise them to write their own, while teaching them that God has the ultimate control and that His plan is better than ours, anyway.
And that’s a truth we can truly rest in.
