10/07/2024 by Therapy For You

Parenting under pressure: Strategies for overcoming parental stress

Whether you've recently welcomed a new family member into the world or your children are growing up fast, parenting can often be as stressful as it is rewarding.

Looking after a child is a huge responsibility, so it's completely understandable to feel overwhelmed from time to time. In fact, in small doses, stress can be a helpful tool to keep your mind focused and your children safe.

However, if these feelings and emotions have become a daily struggle, it might be time to take steps to better manage them. To help you get there, this blog explores parental stress in more detail, the impact it can have on your wellbeing, and strategies you can try to reduce its influence.

What is parental stress?

Parental stress is a particular type of pressure that occurs when you feel unable to handle the demands of parenthood.

Similar to the strains you encounter at work, at home and in other areas of your life, it is a natural response to the challenges you face day-to-day.

What can cause parenthood stress?

Interrupted sleep schedules
High societal expectations
Financial worries
School performance
Child health concerns
Time management

There is no rule about what parental stress feels like or how it is triggered. For some, the difficulty of balancing work and home life could cause an overly tight feeling in their chest.

For others, dealing with their children’s bad behaviour could raise their heart rate and lead their bodies to shake. Other signs and symptoms of parental stress may include:

Heightened feelings of irritation
Low self-esteem
A newfound difficulty relaxing
An inability to concentrate
Headaches
Muscle tension or pain
Nausea and dizziness

As you can imagine, this makes it difficult to identify when you or your partner are experiencing the stress of parenthood. If this is something you are concerned about, it can be useful to speak to a mental health service.

Why is it important to manage stress as a parent?

Whether these symptoms are new to you, or something you have experienced for months already, the effects of parental stress can influence you, your children and your wider family. But by managing the way you feel, you can:

Create a supportive family environment

When you or your partner feel stressed, it’s natural to become more irritable, impatient and low, especially if this has been your experience over a long period.

To resolve this tension and nurture a supportive family environment, taking steps to relieve stress levels can encourage a more relaxed and patient approach to parenting that allows positivity to flourish.

Form strong parent-child relationships

Living with stress at any stage of parenthood can create obstacles in nurturing a bond with your child, making it harder to prosper as a family.

Through the active management of parenthood pressures, you can cultivate strong and resilient relationships with your children, and focus your full attention on being present for your loved ones.

Improve your mental health

The stress of parenthood does more than create distance between parents and children. With time, it can also become a weight on your emotional wellbeing, and allow difficulties like insomnia, anxiety and depression to set in.

To establish a happier, healthier mindset, reducing stress is an effective way of coping with the day-to-day challenges of being a parent and feeling good in your daily life.

Strengthen relationships with your partner

Caring for your children can be as joyful as it is stressful. Without the right support and guidance, it has the potential to become a strain on your relationship and lower both your moods.

Taking steps to manage depression within your couple allows you to strengthen your bond together and share the important responsibilities of parenting more effectively.

How can I overcome parental stress?

However parental stress has emerged in your life, it’s important to remind yourself that just because you feel this way, that does not make you a bad parent.

Parental stress is a common mental health problem, and is something that can be addressed with the right support and advice. To help you get started, here are a few exercises you can try to take strides toward a clearer, calmer mind.

Practise challenging your negative thoughts

One way to reduce the amount of stress on your shoulders is to challenge the negative thoughts on your mind.

This isn’t about repeating positive affirmations or cherry-picking your good experiences. It’s about looking at evidence that supports and disproves your thoughts to gain a more balanced perspective on your situation.

First, write down the negative thought that you are currently thinking of. If there is more than one, choose the most prominent and rate how much you believe it.

Next, take a moment and think about what evidence you can gather to both support and disprove this thought. During this process, it’s important to filter out any subjective opinions or viewpoints.

With all of your evidence-based notes gathered, the final step is to revisit the initial thought and re-rate how much you now believe it, having assessed your situation from both sides.

To show you how this works in practice, after reflecting on the evidence above, the parent in our example went from thinking “I’m a bad parent, I never do enough for my children,” to believing “Although I’m not perfect, that doesn’t make me a bad parent. All the effort I put into parenting and the love and attention I give to my child tells me I'm a good guardian.”

For many mums and dads, this is an excellent way to get a broader perspective on a stressful situation and break free from the grip these unhelpful thoughts can have.

Over time, as you practise this exercise again and again, it will become faster, easier and a more effective way to de-stress and drown out your negative thoughts.

Create a plan of action to tackle your problems

Sometimes, our source of stress as a parent stems from a particular scenario. If this is the cause of your frustrations, Problem Solving is another practice that can help you better cope with parenthood stress.

The way it works is simple – instead of blindly searching for the perfect solution, you write down and assess every available option to determine the best path ahead:

Begin by identifying and writing down the issue you’re currently facing
Next, list all possible solutions to your problem, making sure to consider every option – however farfetched
From here, write down the pros and cons of each approach; think about the resources required to make it happen, the likelihood of success, and how easy it is for you to implement

With this table created and your options laid out, it can become significantly easier to make a verdict on how to proceed.

To help ensure you follow through with your decision, write down the next steps involved, who’s responsible, and what hurdles could lay in your way.

From here, you can review whether your chosen solution worked. If not, consider revisiting your list and trying something else.

Make time for yourself

Taking care of your children, whatever their age, is a full-time responsibility.

Even if it doesn’t feel like you’re actively doing anything parent-related in a given moment, chances are you’re thinking about where they are, what they’re getting up to, and what you need to do later on.

This can make it hard to leave time for yourself on a given day, week or month, wearing down your mental health and making it hard to manage the pressures of parenthood. Incorporating self care into your schedule can go a long way to keep stress at bay:

Go for a stroll in nature with your children
Incorporate music into your regular parental regime
Ask your partner to take over while you unwind in the bath
Write down one thing you are grateful for in bed

Need help managing stress as a parent?

Achieving a brighter, healthier, and clearer mind is possible with the right steps. However, finding the time and energy to implement these exercises can be challenging, especially if you’re a busy or single parent.

By working with our mental health team at Therapy For You, your local NHS Talking Therapies provider in North East and South East Essex, we can get you on the path to a calmer, stress-free mind.

Through our first-of-its-kind online CBT course for parental stress, as well as our wide range of other treatment options and mental health support, we can help you develop valuable techniques to cope with stress – all in a way that suits your preferences and unpredictable schedule.

For more about Therapy For You and the chronic stress support we can provide, get in touch with our mental health professionals today.

Crisis
link