‘Perhaps parenting is about accepting the mayhem’

Being a parent is tough. It's always been tough; bringing other humans into the world and trying to raise them as best we can. But we also parent under increasingly high pressure, isolated and with little support. There are a multitude of 'right' ways to parent and heavy judgement on those who do not parent in the 'right way'.

The context we parent in makes it tougher – with evidence showing that families and children were disproportionately impacted by austerity even before the Covid-19 pandemic , and we are seeing this impacting our children's mental health.

Being a psychologist to people who parent can be tough, too. As well as service pressures and increased demand for those services, the amount of information and advice parents receive has dramatically increased. Parents bring their own parenting challenges and concerns about their children with an added layer of anxiety about how much they've already got wrong. By the time they reach support, they are often in despair, with less and less access to preventative support for children and families.

Being a psychologist and a parent is also tough. We have all this information about lifespan development, we know the impact of parenting on brain development, and we understand how people operate – we should know what we're doing, surely? But this really means is that we know exactly what is at stake. This raises the pressure of being a psychologist and a parent even higher.

Children can be so… complicated. They are ever-present. And they really don't want to hear our clever psychological ideas. It's complex, isn't it? Parenting.

Yet, despite all that complexity and pressure, the solutions offered to parents somehow seem to get simpler. There are just so many solutions that come at us from multiple directions. So many parenting strategies and techniques presented in directive ways with one common message underneath: "Do this, then this will happen" or 'just be X parent, and you'll get Y outcome with your child'.

I'm not dismissing the importance of these goals. But the way they are presented can leave us with the impression that there are optimal parenting strategies and approaches, that must be urgently undertaken to guarantee an optimal outcome for our child or children. This, in turn, is dismissing and damaging the uniqueness of us, our children, our family, the context in which we live and the lifelong nature of our parenting journey.

Why, when parenting is so complex, are we attracted to quick fixes and simple solutions? Perhaps it's as simple as the reason we all learn about when studying anxiety. When we feel that something is stressful or overwhelming, we try and bring it under our control. We try and make it neater, more predictable. A coping strategy that might leave us feeling calmer for a short period of time.

Parenting – particularly in the circumstances we are in now – is stressful and overwhelming, which makes simple solutions extremely appealing. But, when that quick fix solution doesn't quite apply to our child or our unique situation, or when the problem is more complicated than the strategy allows, we are faced with the familiar feeling of being overwhelmed yet again. Left with the mayhem of parenting. But rather than face the mayhem head on, we look for another solution to contain it. The more these solutions fail us, the greater a sense of failure we feel.

Perhaps parenting is not about looking for solutions outside of us at all. Perhaps it's about accepting the mayhem, understanding what we bring to it ourselves and then finding our own solutions. The ones that feel right for us – and our family. Finding solutions that are based on, not only modern parenting strategies and solutions, but who we are, the family we have, the situation we are in and the history that we bring to our parenting.

Our own experience of being parented has a far greater impact on our parenting than any advice we read. So, we can add another layer of complexity to parenting, that of our own experiences as children. For me, that's a particularly relevant one – as the child of a psychologist who is an expert in attachment.

I may have left home years ago, but to many of you I will always be 'PO Svanberg's daughter'. Just as becoming a parent brings back to life the long-forgotten childhood songs we heard in our early years, it also brings up the unconscious messages (helpful and otherwise) that we internalised too.

For me, one of the messages I heard and internalised in my teenage years was that attachment is not only one of the most important determinants of our adult development, but that it is a relationship. Not a series of things to do, but a changing relationship between two or more people. That seems to have been forgotten in our perfectionist culture, where ideas of success and failure are paramount.

Parenting is not something that we do. Being a parent is someone we are. We parent our child, who is also a someone – not an outcome, or a measure of our success, just… a human.

When we remember that - that we are two (or more) humans going through the world together - we can let go of the idea that perfect solutions exist at all. It becomes about just showing up as we are, and meeting the child or children that we have, as who they are. Figuring out how to muddle along together, showing ourselves as much compassion and understanding as we aim to show our child, and accepting that the mayhem, the mess and the mistakes are not a problem to solve, but part of the rich tapestry of family life. 

In the words of one attachment expert (who happens to be my dad), 'You're going to f*ck them up in some way. You might as well do it your way.' I can't find a simpler solution than that.

- Dr Emma Svanberg is an award winning Clinical Psychologist, author of Parenting For Humans (Vermilion, 2 March 2023), founder of The Psychology Co-operative and co-founder of Make Birth Better CIC. Emma also facilitates a parenting community on Facebook called The Village – A Parenting Community For Humans.

Dismantling parenting 'fairytales' to forge a new path

'Parenting For Humans' reviewed by Caroline Boyd, who is the author of Mindful New Mum: A Mind-Body Approach to the Highs and Lows of Motherhood (published by DK).

The appetite for parenting books seems limitless, with some big US publications in the last year, such as Dr Shefali Tsabary's The Parenting Map and Good Inside from Dr Becky Kennedy. In the UK, Dr Emma Svanberg's Parenting for Humans is a welcome addition, with a focus on deeper reflection on the relationship we have with ourselves.

As a psychologist supporting parents in this self-discovery journey, it's encouraging to see Svanberg shed more light on the stories we internalise about our role as key to flourishing as people, as parents. In doing so, she writes, we come to understand that 'our role as parents is not to mould our children but to hold them – to support them in discovering their magical selves and their own unique way of being…whether they are 5 months or 50 years old'.

This book is a helpful guide for parents who have already embarked on their healing journey and would like to continue this sometimes painful, yet often transformative, self-reflection process. Readers are encouraged to reflect on the powerful ideas and stories that influence their parenting role. These include current contexts such as loss of community in Western cultures, and dominant narratives promoting independence over interdependence.

Svanberg leads readers through reflection on those reductive, heteronormative parenting fairytales - which have us believe we must be perfect and so must our kids – which also shape our ideas of the 'fantasy' parent. She encourages the reader to spread out their map, to examine it, to navigate potentially unchartered territory as they reflect on their baby and child parts, and any family members or caregivers from their own experiences growing up. Given that this journey can be triggering for some, Svanberg is keen for readers to enlist the support of a tour guide, drawing on Compassion Focused Therapy's 'Perfect Nurturer'. In the event of overwhelm, they are invited to pause and visualise their resting place, and to draw on local or online support if needed.

While debunking those parenting fairytales, Svanberg uses playful metaphors to explain complex concepts such as attachment and attunement. For example, parenting styles experienced by the reader are likened to Goldilocks' porridge bowls. Did the reader have a too salty porridge bowl of authoritarian parenting, a sickly sweet bowl of permissive parenting or the 'just right' (or perhaps good enough) bowl of authoritative parenting?

Emma describes attachment styles as different dances: readers can wonder whether they were led to the beat of the more secure, steady waltz, an Irish dance of avoidance or an Argentine tango of anxious attachment.

This process of exploration and deconstruction is accompanied by some pertinent reflective questions. Svanberg's overarching hope is for readers to use parenting as a unique opportunity to re-evaluate those old dance moves and well-worn scripts. How can they rewrite some of these, enlisting their partner/ co-parent to join them in reviewing their map, to forge a new path with their child?

Svanberg offers some useful parenting tools, number one being the repair. And ultimately reassurance that no one's got this sussed, no one's got the answers – freeing us up to muddle through.