Becoming a Parent: What’s Left Out Of The Conversation
Written by Dr. Komal Gupta
Parenthood is a deeply complex journey that invites you to reflect on your own personal history, to navigate changing relationships and to adapt to shifts in identities. Along the way, you often get confronted with ingrained cultural, familial and personal expectations about what it means to be a “good” parent. These expectations are often internalized without much awareness and can give rise to painful conflicts and in some cases, challenges with families. Because these struggles are rarely spoken about openly, many parents are left feeling isolated, ashamed, or overwhelmed when their lived experience does not align with idealized images of parenthood. In this piece, I will explore several aspects of parenting that are often left out of the conversation and essential to acknowledge.
It Can Bring Up Complicated Emotions
Becoming a parent can stir up intense and often unexpected emotions. Some emotions are easier to admit to both yourself and others while some feelings can be harder. For example, you might be more willing to acknowledge feeling love, anxiety, guilt or excitement rather than envy, anger, dread or hate. The emotions that are more difficult to own up to often carry a sense of shame, specific fears and/or confusion, especially when they do not align with cultural or personal ideals of what a “good” parent should feel. Making space for your full range of feelings and thoughts are important because it helps you better understand your reactions to your child’s needs, behaviors and emotions. Your emotional reactivity is often not random and is shaped by your temperament, epigenetics, early relationship experiences, cultural expectations, and unresolved wounds.
It Can Activate Memories From Your Childhood
As you begin to consider the kind of parent you want to be and grapple with the challenges of raising a child, it is common to reflect on how you were parented. This reflection can bring warmth and appreciation for certain aspects of your upbringing, but it can also bring up deep-rooted fears, unresolved pain, or longing. You might experience fear, frustration, and disappointment about repeating patterns from a parent with whom you had a strained or painful relationship with and maybe a sense of pride identifying with a parent/caregiver you idealized and felt close to. At times, your child’s behaviors or emotional needs might bring up reminders of your own early experiences and automatic ways of coping. If you can approach these moments with curiosity rather than judgment, it can help with becoming more aware of how the past continues to shape your present and to possibly heal painful, unresolved wounds.
It Can Change Relationship Dynamics
At every stage of parenting, roles may evolve and new responsibilities arise, requiring ongoing negotiation. You and your partner(s) might find yourself pulled in multiple directions, confronting complicated feelings about your interdependency (e.g., financial, emotional, physical, social, household etc.) in raising a child. Differences in parenting styles can lead to tension and frustration, especially when opportunities for open communication, negotiation and connection feel limited or compromised. Cultural and family expectations about each parent’s role can place added pressure on your relationship, influencing how you navigate this shared journey. Learning to have difficult conversations and addressing barriers to communication and connection can assist with weathering these changing relationship dynamics.
There Is Often Little External Validation That You’re Doing It “Right"
For many parents, it can be difficult to assess the impact of their parenting in real time. Living in a society that values clear outcomes and measurable success, it can feel uncomfortable and possibly unsettling to sit with the uncertainty and ambiguity of the parenting process itself. In some families and cultural contexts, “doing right” by your children is often judged by visible markers such as career achievements, educational milestones, marital status, or having children. These external standards can become deeply internalized, and if your child’s path does not align with these expectations, it may activate feelings of shame or a sense of failure. Recognizing how these cultural and familial narratives shape your experience can be an important step toward compassion for yourself and towards your child in your parenting journey.
It Can Bring Up Grief
It is natural to have expectations about what parenthood will look like and what your child might be like. However, no matter how much we plan, life often unfolds in expected ways. You may find that you are not the parent you once envisioned, and your child’s personality, strengths and path may differ greatly from your hopes or assumptions. These gaps between expectation and reality can bring feelings of grief for unfulfilled wishes. Grief can also occur for other reasons such as shifts in your own identity as you adjust to parenthood, for unmet needs in your childhood that will never be fulfilled, for changing relationships, for your relationship with your child not being what you had hoped, and for your child being exposed to risk or threat due to systemic oppression.
Summary & Reflection
Parenthood can bring deep love, meaning and growth but it can also simultaneously bring up internal conflict, interpersonal challenges, grief and emotional struggle. When you give yourself permission to name and to feel the painful aspects of parenthood, you give yourself the opportunity to heal, to grow and to deepen connection with yourself and your child.
Which aspects of your parenting experience would you want to explore and to feel less isolated with if you knew you wouldn’t be judged or shamed?
