It’s Not All Coming From You

The pressures we absorb as parents — and how they begin to feel like our own

Lately, I’ve been writing through a few different threads in parenting — the moments where something doesn’t quite add up, the reality of capacity and how much of it is biological rather than behavioural, and what it actually asks of us to stay alongside a child in a more natural way. Alongside that, I’ve also been exploring how much of what shapes our parenting doesn’t stop at the school gate — how those expectations are part of a wider system we’re all moving within, and how easily they begin to feel like our own.

And sitting underneath all of that, there’s a question I keep coming back to: how do we begin to trust what we’re sensing as parents when there is so much else mixed in with it?

Because not everything we feel is the same. Sometimes it’s a clear, grounded sense that something needs our attention, and sometimes it feels just as real in the moment but is coming from somewhere else entirely — from expectation, from comparison, from something we’ve absorbed without realising. These don’t arrive separately; they arrive together, layered and convincing, and often indistinguishable at first.

I remember noticing this in a very simple way in the early days after we chose not to send my daughter to school. She would begin something with real enthusiasm — a project, a page, something she had chosen — and then move on before it was finished. And I could feel something in me tighten. Not because anything was wrong, but because something in me felt that she should continue, that something was being lost if she didn’t.

It took me a while to see that what I was feeling in those moments wasn’t only coming from me.

And since then, I’ve been noticing how easily these things become entangled — how a genuine sense that something needs attention can sit alongside something else, and how difficult it can be, at times, to tell the difference between them.

For me, this has been part of a deeper shift — not just learning to trust myself as a parent, but learning to recognise what in me is actually mine.

And over time, this starts to shift something quite fundamental — because if so much of what we’re feeling has been shaped by what we’ve absorbed, it raises a different kind of question: what can we actually trust?

I’ve recorded something exploring this more fully — a short video reflection on the different kinds of pressure we absorb as parents, and how those pressures can begin to shape the way we respond, often without us realising. Not as a method or framework, but as a way of beginning to notice what might already be happening, and to find a more grounded place to respond from.

If you’d like to go further into this, you can access the full video here:

It’s designed to be listened to slowly — not something to take notes on or fully understand, but something to sit with and notice what resonates.

If you do listen, I’d be interested to hear what it brings up for you.