Why Do I Keep Asking ‘Am I Not a Good Mom?’ What I Learned From My Son’s Teacher
The crinkle of my conference folder was the only sound as I walked back to my car after meeting my second grader’s teacher last fall. A half-spilled iced coffee sat in the cup holder, my leggings had a smudge of peanut butter on the knee from breakfast, and I couldn’t stop turning the same question over in my head: Am I not a good mom?
Milo had gotten three behavior referrals in a month for talking out of turn and pushing a classmate who stole his favorite blue crayon. His reading scores were below grade level, even though I’d cut screen time to 30 minutes a day, quizzed him on sight words every night, and joined the parent-teacher association to show I cared. I’d left the conference feeling raw, like every mistake I’d made as a mom was laid out on that little table covered in construction paper art.
On the drive home, Milo kicked the back of my seat and asked for a stop at the frozen yogurt shop. I mumbled that we’d see, and he went back to clicking the top of his water bottle, unphased. I thought about all the things I’d admitted to the teacher that morning: I yell when he drags his feet getting ready for school. I let him eat cereal for dinner twice a week when I’m too tired to cook. I forget to pack his extra sweatshirt for recess more often than not. I’d cried a little in the teacher’s office when I said it, and she’d pushed a box of tissues across the table and said something that stuck with me.
She said that 9 out of 10 moms who come in here asking about their kid’s behavior start with some version of that question: Am I messing this up? Am I a bad mom? And the truth is, most of the time, the problem isn’t the mom. It’s that we’re asking a kid who’s wired to move, build, and explore to sit still for six hours a day and do worksheets that don’t fit how he learns. Then she gave me three small things to try, no big overhauls, no new expensive programs, just small shifts.
First, stop making him read the assigned 20 minutes of a chapter book right after dinner. Instead, let him do 10 minutes of jumping jacks or a run around the block first, and let him read whatever he wants – even Lego instruction manuals, even comic books about farting dinosaurs. Second, when I feel my temper rising, instead of storming out of the room (which Milo told me made him think I was leaving and wasn’t coming back), I just say out loud, “I need one minute to breathe before we talk about this.” Third, instead of writing down every time he got in trouble or forgot his homework in the little notebook I kept, write down one small good thing he did every night before bed, even if it was just “he shared his cookie with the dog.”
I tried them the next day, mostly because I was out of ideas and had nothing to lose. The first thing that surprised me was how much the little phrase changed things. Before, when I’d storm off, Milo would end up crying under the kitchen table and we’d never actually fix whatever started the fight. Now, when I say I need a minute, he knows I’m not leaving him, he’s not getting abandoned, we just need a minute to calm down. Two weeks ago, he spilled a full glass of iced tea all over my work laptop right before a deadline. I opened my mouth to yell, then said the line, leaned against the counter for 10 seconds, and by the time I was done, he’d already grabbed a roll of paper towels to help clean up.
The reading thing worked even faster. I’d been fighting him for months to get through 20 pages of a boring chapter book about a cat that goes to camp. When I let him read his Lego Star Wars instruction manuals, he started sitting on the couch reading for 40 minutes straight, just because he wanted to. He started sounding out the weird names of planets and characters out loud to me, proud that he could figure them out. Three months later, his reading score went up 15 percentile points.
I still ask myself the question sometimes, though. Last week, I forgot to turn in his field trip permission slip by the deadline, and I had to beg the office to let him go, running into school with the form 10 minutes before the bus left. This morning, I yelled at him because he spent 15 minutes chasing the dog instead of putting his shoes on, and we were late. I sat in the pickup line yesterday watching the other moms, all of them looking put together, with their homemade snacks and organized backpacks, and the question popped right back up: Am I not a good mom?
But now, I don’t sit with that question for hours like I used to. I don’t cry in the shower about it anymore. I just think of the three small things, and I think of what Milo said to me last month, when I told him I was sorry I yelled that morning. He looked up from his Lego and said, “It’s okay mom, you said you needed a minute after, that’s enough.”
It’s not perfect. We still have bad days. I still forget things, I still lose my temper more than I want to. But I’ve stopped looking for that perfect checklist of what a good mom is supposed to be. The answer doesn’t have to be yes or no, most days it’s just somewhere in the middle. I’m showing up, I’m trying small things, and that’s enough for now.
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