4 Common Reasons Parenting Is Difficult

Most parents have good intentions. Few of us bring children into this world with the express purpose of sucking the joy out of their lives and making them miserable. But it happens. It happened to some of us when we were kids. So why is parenting so hard, despite our best efforts to do it right? At the heart of many of our issues is the all-too-common reality that many of us are low-joy people from low-joy families. Here is a quick look at four characteristics of low-joy parenting.

1. Fear of Failure

There is a major difference between fear-based parenting and joy-based parenting. Fear-based parents worry about messing up our kids. We worry what others will think of us. We can find ourselves trying to keep everyone happy, including our kids, only to discover that no one seems to be happy.

The fear of failure tends to make us angry, anxious, and avoidant. I (Marcus) can’t tell you how many con-versations I avoided with my kids until I got so angry that I finally said something I regretted. More than once I had to go apologize for snapping at my kids when the situation could have been resolved much earlier and with less distress if I hadn’t been so avoidant.

…avoidant parenting is fear-based parenting, and it doesn’t produce joy-filled kids.

Anxious parents are often clingy. They can’t stand to see their children upset with them. Such parents often believe that the worst thing that can happen is for their kids to get angry at them. They then avoid conversations that might stir anger. They appease again and again, but it doesn’t work. Their kids still end up angry. The point here is that avoidant parenting is fear-based parenting, and it doesn’t produce joy-filled kids.

2. Lack of Skills

As parents, we often feel overwhelmed. It can feel like we are piloting a plane we have no business flying because we were never properly trained how to read all the gauges and use all of the controls. When we lack parenting skills, we often go to one of two extremes.

We under-parent. When we under-parent, we like to play with our kids, but we don’t know what to do with the problems they face. It is not uncommon in families for one parent to be “the fun person,” while the other, by default, becomes “the problem-solving person.” It is easy to think that the fun person is the better parent, but that is often not true. Many times, the fun parent disappears when things get hard, leaving the other parent to handle the problems. It isn’t that the other parent doesn’t want to have fun, but they get abandoned to deal with the hard stuff so often, it becomes their role.

We over-parent. When we over-parent, we micromanage our children and become so focused on the problems we forget to have fun.

Chris and I don’t point this out so that couples can fight over who is guilty of which extreme, but so that both can grow in their ability to work together.

Most of us picked up parental training by watching other people—especially our parents and grandparents. That is great if they were highly skilled and deeply loving people. However, if they lacked relational and emotional skills, chances are we don’t have those skills either, be-cause no one modeled them for us. In such settings, we become reactive parents. We have learned what we don’t like and how we don’t want to parent, but we do not develop important habits that help us raise mature children. A lack of healthy examples is the core reason for a lack of skills.

3. Unresolved Pain

Unresolved pain can lead to a wide variety of parenting missteps.

Triggered parenting. Often, parents with unresolved pain get triggered and stop acting like adults. Triggered parents don’t act like themselves—that is, they stop functioning like the caring, well-intentioned people they are and turn into someone others would hardly recognize. There were times I (Marcus) got triggered and felt angry as a parent. Most of the time, I remembered to excuse myself and calm down before I dealt with the issues, but now and then I would scold my child in the heat of the moment. It never produced good fruit. I always had to go back and ask for forgiveness and repair the relationship. I simply wasn’t the same parent when I was triggered.

Many parents with unresolved pain are so focused on their own issues they don’t give their kids the attention they need.

Distracted parenting. Many parents with unresolved pain are so focused on their own issues they don’t give their kids the attention they need. Distracted parents are usually addicted to something—work, wine, TV, social media, novels, or darker attractions like porn and drugs. These addictions take priority over their children so that they are often out of touch with what is going on in their child’s life. We have talked to many people who had to parent their parents when they were children. In one extreme case, a little girl we know lived with a mom who was regularly high and strung out on medications, which left the girl to not only get herself dressed, fed, and off to school on time, but to take care of her mom as well. It became the girl’s job to make sure Mom was okay. The girl was only seven.

Reverse parenting. Reverse parenting happens when we expect our kids to take care of us, instead of the other way around. Many parents with unresolved pain use their kids and expect them to adapt to their needs rather than sacrificially caring for their children. Some parents live through their kids’ achievements in sports, music, beauty pageants, and more.

4. Broken Bonding Patterns

If we were not raised with enough joy in our own family, we probably developed a broken bonding pattern that makes it difficult to form joyful bonds with our kids. Three of the most common fear-based bonding patterns are dismissive, distracted, and disorganized.[1]Those can be experienced on a spectrum (like one through ten). They can also overlap, but it is helpful to understand them individually first.

Dismissive bonding. A dismissive bonding style is like Teflon—nothing sticks. People with dismissive attachment tend to float from relationship to relationship and have trouble with commitment. They can be present with you but not really engaged.

Distracted bonding. A distracted bonding style is like Saran Wrap—such people tend to be clingy, and it can feel like no amount of bonding is ever enough. This attachment pattern develops when children’s needs are not being met on their terms. Just like a child who doesn’t get fed regularly begins to feel a desperation about the next meal, so a child who doesn’t get connection at the times they need it will feel a similar desperation that creates this distracted bonding pattern.

Disorganized bonding. When the child wants to bond with Mom or Dad, but the parent is scary for some rea-son, the child will learn to be afraid to bond. They instinctively realize they are not safe and build a narrative around that feeling that says, “I want to be with Dad, but he can be mean. I’m not sure what to do.” “I want to be close to Mom, but she gets really angry. I guess I’ll stay away.” It can also happen when the child sees that Mommy or Daddy is afraid. They think, “If they are afraid, maybe I should be afraid too.” This can also work the other way around. Mom and Dad can have these feelings toward their kids. Disorganized attachment is the feeling that I want to be close to you, but I’m afraid of what will happen if I risk it.

[1] Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999), 67–120.