I Don’t Know How to Be a Parent: What to Do When You Feel Out of Your Depth With Young Kids
Last Tuesday, I sat on my kitchen floor at 6:17 p.m., surrounded by crushed Cheerios and a half-built wooden block tower that had just been kicked across the linoleum. My four-year-old, Milo, was screaming so snot ran down his upper lip because I’d cut his peanut butter sandwich the wrong way—diagonal, not straight down the middle, a rule I’d somehow missed in the 48 hours since he’d last cared about sandwich shape. My phone was buzzing on the counter with a work email, the washing machine was beeping from the basement, and the only clear thought in my head was: I don’t know how to be a parent.
The irony isn’t lost on me. I worked as a lead preschool teacher for seven years before Milo was born. I led evening parent workshops, sat through hundreds of conferences, and handed out more printed tip sheets than I can count. I remember one mom crying in the hallway after pickup after her three-year-old bit a classmate, convinced she’d already failed at this whole parenting thing. I leaned against the cinder block wall with her and said all the calm, textbook lines: biting is normal for this age, it’s how they communicate when words fail, consistent gentle redirection works, this isn’t a reflection of you. I meant every word of it, too. Back then, I thought if you just learned the right scripts and followed the routine, you could handle almost anything.
Then I had Milo, and all those scripts dissolved in the face of a toddler who screamed for 45 minutes straight because I handed him his blue cup instead of his green one, even though he’d asked for blue 10 seconds earlier. I tried every trick I’d ever taught. I got on his eye level, said “I see you are so, so mad that you got the blue cup,” in my softest teacher voice, and he screamed louder and threw the cup at my head. I did sticker charts for morning dropoff, read social story books about big feelings, stuck to the exact same bedtime routine down to the number of books and the order of songs. Half the time, none of it worked. More nights than I’d like to admit, I’d hide in the pantry after he fell asleep, eating a stale granola bar and scrolling my phone at 9:30 p.m., typing “is it normal to not know how to parent” into the search bar.
A few months ago, we went through a two-week stretch where Milo refused to walk into preschool without clinging to my leg so tight his knuckles went white, saying his tummy hurt and begging me not to leave. I tried every transition tip I’d ever given other parents: a special secret handshake, his favorite dinosaur packed in his lunch, a full run-through of the day’s schedule over breakfast. Every morning, I still pried his fingers off my jeans and walked out to my car with his cries echoing down the hallway, and I’d sit in the driver’s seat crying too, convinced I was doing permanent damage. If I were any good at this, I thought, I’d know how to fix it.
His lead teacher pulled me aside halfway through that second week, while Milo glued himself to my hip and stared at the classroom fish tank. She didn’t hand me a pamphlet or recite a script. She just nodded at him and said, “By 9:05 every day he’s over by the sensory table lining up plastic dinosaurs. He’s fine 10 minutes after you leave. Some kids just need 10 minutes to be mad about the transition. You don’t have to fix the feeling before you walk out the door.”
That sentence unknotted something I’d carried since we brought Milo home from the hospital. I’d spent so long thinking good parenting meant having the right answer for every behavior, every meltdown, every weird phase, right that second. All those scripts I knew were built for a classroom: 12 kids, two teachers, a hard stop at the end of the day, no sink full of dishes or rent bill due or three hours of broken sleep under your belt. None of them were made for real, messy life with one specific kid who changes his mind about sandwiches every other day.
I keep a cheap plastic kitchen timer on my fridge now, the kind you twist and it ticks loud enough to hear across the room. If either of us is too upset to talk without snapping, I set it for one minute, lean against the fridge where he can still see me, and we don’t say anything until it dings. I don’t force myself to name every emotion or pull out a calm lesson in the first 60 seconds. Sometimes he kicks the baseboard while we wait. Sometimes I check my text messages. When the timer goes off, we can talk, or we can just make a new sandwich.
I also stopped trying to teach the lesson in the middle of the meltdown. Back when I was teaching, I would have corrected the block-kicking immediately, talked about gentle hands and respecting our things while he was still screaming. Now I don’t. I wait until 45 minutes later, when we’re sitting on the back porch eating popsicles after dinner, and say, “Earlier today, when you were mad about the sandwich, you kicked your blocks. That can break them, and it scares me a little when you throw things when you’re mad.” Last week, he thought about that for a second, licked his popsicle, and said “I was really mad.” That was the whole conversation. He heard me. He couldn’t have, 45 minutes earlier, when his brain was too flooded with feeling to process anything beyond the wrong sandwich.
Last week, he poured his entire cup of apple juice directly onto the couch cushion just to see what would happen. Old me would have launched into a 10-minute speech about choices and consequences and taken away weekend TV. New me just grabbed the paper towels, handed him a handful, and said “Juice goes in cups, not couches. Help me wipe it up.” We blotted the cushion for three minutes, threw the paper towels away, and he went back to playing with his trucks. It hasn’t happened again.
I still do occasional parent workshops at the preschool now, and I don’t hand out nearly as many rigid tip sheets as I used to. I tell people that if a recommended strategy makes everyone more miserable for three days in a row, they can just stop doing it. Sticker charts work great for some kids, but if fighting over who gets a sticker every morning makes dropoff worse than the original slow goodbye, there’s no prize for forcing it. I tell them they don’t have to respond to every meltdown before their own heart stops racing. It’s okay to say “I need a minute” and step just out of kicking range. That’s not abandoning a kid; that’s showing them big feelings don’t require an immediate, perfect fix.
Milo still has random meltdowns about sandwich shape. Last week he insisted on wearing his yellow rain boots to bed for three nights in a row, and I just let him, because I didn’t have the energy to fight that battle, and I still don’t know if that’s the “right” call according to any parenting book. Some nights after he falls asleep, I sit on the couch and look at his toys scattered across the living room and still think, I have no idea what I’m doing.
That thought doesn’t sit in my chest like a failure anymore, though. Last night, after a meltdown about turning off his tablet before dinner, he waited out the timer with his arms crossed, then climbed into my lap and handed me a half-eaten goldfish cracker. “I was mad,” he said. “I know,” I said. We sat there for a minute while the pasta boiled on the stove, and then he wiggled down and went back to stacking blocks.
I don’t think anyone actually knows how to be a parent, not really. You don’t learn it from a book or a workshop. You just learn one specific kid, one wrong sandwich cut and one rain boot phase at a time. I still don’t have most of the answers. Most days, that’s enough.
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