How to Relax as a Parent When You’re Running on Empty
The kitchen was still littered with dinner plates. My daughter was crying because her drawing had a crooked line, and her brother was kicking the wall softly, testing how much I could tolerate before I snapped. I could feel my jaw clamped tight, my shoulders somewhere up around my ears. And in that precise moment, a clean, clear thought showed up in my head: I need to relax.
Which is funny, because nothing about that sentence actually helped me relax. It was more like a reminder that I was failing. There I was, a grown adult, and I had to stand in the dark kitchen and tell myself to unclench my teeth.
I used to think that relaxing as a parent was a matter of finding the right moment. You know—when the kids are asleep, or at school, or at their grandparents’ house, then you can finally exhale. Then everything gets quiet, and you lie on the couch with a cup of something warm and feel human again. That was the plan.
The reality is different. On the rare afternoon that both kids were safely occupied, I would sit down, pick up my phone, scroll aimlessly, and feel the exact same tension in my neck and shoulders. The house was quiet. There was nowhere I needed to be. And yet my mind was still hustling through a mental checklist: did I sign the permission slip, what time is soccer practice, why did the teacher email me again, and is it normal for a seven-year-old to refuse to wear socks for three straight days?
So I’ve had to rethink what relaxation actually means right now. Because the full, luxurious, spa-day version isn’t available in this season of life. What I’ve slowly learned is that relaxing as a parent is less about finding a perfect block of time and more about doing small things to lower the temperature in my own body—while life is still loudly happening around me.
That sounds a little airy, but it’s been the most dirt-ordinary, practical shift for me. For example, my daughter crying over a crooked drawing used to be a trigger. I would feel my pulse spike. The rational part of me knew it was about the drawing, but my body was treating it like a threat. One day, in the middle of a very low-stakes crisis over a broken crayon, I remembered something a friend told me about pressing her feet into the floor and unclenching her jaw. It sounded so daft that I tried it. I stood there, crooked drawing in one hand, and pressed my feet down like I was trying to squash a grape under each toe. I let my jaw go slack. I counted to four.
And nothing terrible happened. The tears still took another five minutes to run out. But my shoulders dropped maybe ten percent, and that small change meant I could sit there and listen instead of getting sucked into the panic. It didn’t fix my daughter’s problem, but it stopped me from making it worse.
The other lie I’ve carried around is the idea of future relaxation—the belief that I’ll be able to unwind someday soon. This weekend. Next month. When we finally get past the bedtime battles. But that imaginary future never quite arrives. Something always comes up: a toothache, a school closure, a surprise request to bring snacks for nineteen children at 6 a.m. the next day.
So I had to reverse the entire approach. Instead of waiting for a break in the storm, I started taking breaks that are so small and so stupid-sounding that they barely count as breaks. I call it the “three-minute rule.” If I notice I’m grinding my teeth, I don’t decide to wait until bedtime to relax. I just tell myself: three minutes. That’s all. Three minutes of not solving a single problem.
What does that look like? Sometimes it’s standing at the kitchen window with a cup of water that’s gone lukewarm, looking at the neighbor’s hedge. Sometimes it’s locking the bathroom door and not explaining why. Sometimes, when things are truly wild, I just sit on the bottom step of the stairs and stare at the wall for 180 seconds. It’s not restful exactly—I can still hear the children—but it feels like drinking air when you’ve been underwater.
The strange thing is that I forgot to relax for years. I was so deep in the logistics of parenting—the school forms, the teeth brushing, the endless sandwiches—that I treated relaxation as one more task on the list. I would think: okay, kids are asleep at 7:45, so I’ll relax from 8:00 to 8:30. But then it was actually 8:47 and I hadn’t moved from the hallway, and I felt like the day was still pressing on my chest.
The problem, I think, is that I was aiming for a kind of calm that doesn’t exist in a house with young children. It’s a calm that belongs to empty houses and childless weekends. And the more I wanted it, the more distant it felt.
So I’ve settled for something smaller. A friend of mine uses the phrase “lower the bar until you can trip over it.” That’s been my parenting relaxation motto. My goal isn’t to be a serene parent. My goal is just to avoid being the parent who yells because the toast fell with the butter side down. On a good day, I accomplish that. On a bad day, the toast falls, everybody cries, and it’s fine—because we’ve got another chance tomorrow.
I also had to confront something uncomfortable. A lot of my tension wasn’t actually coming from the kids. It was coming from my own belief that I had to be a certain kind of parent. I remember one night, after a particularly rough bedtime, I sat outside on the back step in the cold. The stars were out, and the house was quiet. I should have felt peaceful. Instead, I was running through all the ways I’d failed that evening: said the wrong thing, rushed the bath, lost my temper over a missing stuffed rabbit.
Nothing about that moment was relaxing, yet I was alone and the children were asleep. That’s when I realized that relaxation is less about the external conditions and more about the relationship with my own thoughts. It’s hard to relax when your brain is rehearsing a list of everything you did wrong that day.
So sometimes, my relaxation practice is not a breathing exercise at all. It’s telling myself a true but simple sentence, like: They’re okay. Everyone’s okay. Nothing is broken that can’t be fixed. It’s a dull sentence. It doesn’t sound like wisdom. But it’s the only thing that lets my body believe it can put its guard down for a minute.
These days, I’m not great at relaxing. Let me be clear about that. There are still weekends where I snap at everyone by breakfast, and evenings where I lie in bed too wired to sleep. My daughter still cries over crooked drawings. The kitchen still piles up.
But I’ve started to notice something. When I allow myself those silly three-minute moments, or when I press my feet into the floor and unclench my jaw, the day feels slightly less heavy. Relaxation isn’t this big mountain I’m supposed to climb. It’s more like a handful of small stones that add up to a path.
I’m still walking it. I’m just not pretending I’ve reached the end.
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