The Expectations Gap: On The Unbearable Weight of (Mindful) Modern Parenting and Managing

Parents, like managers, are emotional shock absorbers. in an increasingly emotionally immature world. They must remain calm in chaos, mediate conflict, and regulate others’ feelings — while suppressing or managing their own. With technology, their lives blur, and the people they care for are exposed to different stresses nearly all the time.

In many homes, parents reply to work messages during school events, text with kids and problem-solve with them during work meetings, and check class portals in the glow of early morning emails. The boundaries between parenting and performance have quietly dissolved — accelerated and intermediated by technology. The mental partitioning is stressful.

In our April 2025 post On the unbearable sadness of being young (at work), we looked at how it seems that young people are collapsing under the pressure of always having been and being watched, judged, and ranked.

This companion piece looks at the parents on the other side of that gaze and technological-looking glass — curating, producing, and performing love as a reward for achievement, which brings recognition. In this piece, we suggest that more involvement does not necessarily equate to greater presence and does not appear to lead to better emotional outcomes for either party.

Perhaps if some members of the younger generation do not feel that they are ever enough — or are rejected, as the recent New York Times piece suggested, the ultimate heartache for all of us — it may be because they were raised within a system that made us feel the same.

Like promoting well-being and engagement at work, the way forward may lie not in doing more but in rebuilding what was once intuitive: emotional scaffolding, shared play, and honest, imperfect connection.

Daven Morrison, Shabnam Kazmi, and I share our thoughts below. As always, we acknowledge that we are merely vehicles for the thoughts of others and approach every topic with the bias of our respective vantage points as single and paired parents.

What We Demand from Kids, What They Demand from Us, and What We All Really Want

All of us now live in an age of expanded expectations as the set of comparisons and best (and worse) practices expands with every bloink of our cell phones.

We expect more from our children — emotionally, socially, and academically — than we ever did before. And schools seem to demand more of it – good grades are no longer enough. In the push to have well-rounded candidates, higher education institutions turned the teenage years into a competitive sport.

We don’t ask them to just be, but to succeed, to excel. To be resilient but sensitive, ambitious but balanced, independent but close to home. We ask them to adapt to climate uncertainty, political instability, and rising living costs while remaining optimistic and self-assured. We had wanted them to be better than us.

Perfectionism, Pressure, and Economic Fear

We also wanted them to have a better life. The angst is understandable. The quest to be perfect parents is closely tied to the very real imperative to ensure that children will be financially secure in an increasingly uncertain and unequal world.

To do this, many of us engaged in a freer, more open, and more progressive kind of parenting, but not always anchoring ourselves in what worked (or failed) in our own childhoods. In our efforts to spare our children the weight we carried — of silence, conformity, and harshness — we may have left them floating in a world of boundless choices and psychological pressure, without the emotional infrastructure to support them. We allowed ourselves to be floated into a version of parenting where everything was external: metrics, milestones, status.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera suggests that too much freedom can be dizzying — that meaning requires weight.

As they progress to adulthood, our children live with the unbearable weight of lightness: the expectation that they can be anything, fix everything, and feel good while doing it.

At the same time, society and children expect more from parents, too. Increased presence, cultural, social, and political awareness, psychological fluency, and concern about climate change. We live with the unbearable mindfulness of parenting: the pressure to manage not just behavior, but meaning, emotion, and memory.

The result seems to be, well, not great. A recent New York Times piece reported on how rejected some young people feel. There is no worse heartbreak than we can think of, for all of us.

A Changing Parenting Landscape

To better understand the structural backdrop of these emotional pressures, let us begin with some numbers. Many parents now carry the mental, financial, and physical load of parenting on their own — at least part of the time.

In 1960, approximately 9% of children in the United States lived in single-parent households. Today, that figure is closer to 25% — one in four children grow up in a home with one parent, most often a mother. And 64% of Black children live in single-parent homes, the vast majority led by women. (U.S. Census Bureau, 2022).

This makes the U.S. the country with the highest rate of single-parent households among all OECD nations. It also means that many parents, especially single moms, are doing more with less: less time, less income, less support, and often, less room for error. While carrying higher emotional demands. Single parents also sometimes need to work harder to expose children to different toolkit of skills and perspectives. They also do not have the backup of a second parent to back them up when they are experiencing stress, impairment, or illness.

Even in two-parent households, the pressures of modern parenting are overwhelming and can require careful coordination (a good podcast here about Sally and Matthew Hamm, Occupational Medicine physicians who worked together as U.S. Air Force Flight Surgeons and share four children. They discuss how to coordinate, communicate, and connect).

One notable cultural shift shaping these dynamics is the growing expectation of intensive parenting. The idea that good parenting means constant involvement, optimization, and protection has created a cultural trap. Children are rarely alone, and we are rarely off duty. Events that used to come and go in the course of childhood can become huge deals, such as ceremonies for 5th-grade graduation.

Regardless of the familial constellation, parents hover because we care, but also because we are afraid of failing and falling behind. The irony is that when we push, we raise expectations for engagement and validation, seemingly at all times, while exhausting ourselves in the process.

According to a 2023 survey by the American Psychological Association, 70% of U.S. parents reported feeling overwhelmed by their responsibilities. The KFF/CNN Mental Health in America survey (2022) found that 42% of mothers with children under 18 reported symptoms of anxiety or depression. Rates of parental burnout have surged, especially since the pandemic, with women and single parents reporting the highest levels of emotional exhaustion.

In our book on Compassionate Management of Mental Health in the Modern Workplace, we also discussed how parenting can be a significant inflection point in personal and professional lives, and increase the risk of mental distress.

This is the part of the parenting story we rarely say out loud: we are not okay either.

The Goldilocks Parenting Moment: Too Much, Too Little, Never Quite Enough

Parents are now expected to be not just caregivers, but chauffeurs, emotional coaches and emotional first responders, academic strategists, project managers, nutritionists, social secretaries, and public relations managers. Many of us feel we are being asked to parent with perfect emotional attunement while managing a world that is more chaotic, expensive, and isolating than ever before.

We are expected to attend every school event, respond promptly to every class update or concern, manage our children’s relationships and feelings, ensure they have sufficient extracurricular enrichment to complement their college applications, and then drive them there and back — often while juggling full-time jobs.

This is a sharp departure from past norms in many families. Few of our own parents attended every recital, tournament, or curriculum night — heck, many of those probably did not exist. Play was more unstructured. Afternoons were ours. Failure was expected, even necessary.

Today, many children are on structured schedules from age three, and by middle school, some families operate like logistics companies — tracking piano, robotics, therapy, language class, and club sports, often in different towns, with snacks and gear loaded in the backseat like mobile command units — when not hovering like the so-called helicopter parents.

Like professionals, some kids have coaches, for example, college coaches, who help with applications and provide advice to a small but significant share of children, putting those whose parents cannot afford this kind of support at a disadvantage.

Childhood has become a full-time operation, and parents have become middle managers of their kids’ futures as well as investors calculating the ROI of a private preschool. (Our podcast with working parents advocate Verena Hefti explores these tensions as we increasingly parent at work and manage at home).

This also can increase the divide between working parents and stay-at-home parents. Failure to be intimately involved with school and extracurricular activities brings disdain from more physically present parents and, again, the sense of being a “bad parent.” This is particularly stressful for working mothers, as most parent associations are still managed by women.

This means that parents are rarely off duty. We drive, respond, coach, feed, and troubleshoot — all while managing our own work and lives, and the more we do, the more risk of neglecting ourselves, our partners, and our professional obligations.

Modeling Health: What Our Kids Actually See

One of the key responsibilities of parents is to “set a good example.” Yet in managing everything — schedules, emotions, logistics — many parents give up the very things that model a balanced, healthy life. Time for sleep, movement, and rest is sacrificed, and children notice. Over time, this self-neglect becomes a template, not just a side effect.

And when eldercare responsibilities kick in the stress amplifies, often for years and with profound impact, which we wrote about here. Time and energy for parenting one’s children compete in priority with providing care for older parents as well as other loved ones managing health issues.

One constant across generations is that cultural and generational gaps increase the stakes when alignment is the constant goal — when it is no longer acceptable to hold different opinions, and failing to act in accordance with these opinions will be a measure of failure. This is the situational “good parent” trap. What is good parenting when there are concepts we grew up accepting are considered outdated, unacceptable, and even unkind by our young adults? How do we bridge the gap so that we solve for all parties’ optimal outcomes in any given situation?

With increased movement across borders and diversity within families, the complexity of decision-making has grown exponentially, often leaving one or more people frustrated. And now, thanks to social media and Zoom, unsolicited advice and opinions come pouring in, from all over the world.

In making room for our children’s growth and promoting comfort and well-being, perhaps we under-invested in our own. As a result, some of them might have inherited not just our genes, but also our fears, hopes, and shame, and a form of emotional inheritance we did not intend to impart. And often, we forget to equip them with psychological resilience to manage a world that feels, to many of them, already broken.

The Emotional Ledger

At the same time, we seem to be less skilled at accepting shortcomings in ourselves and in others, and it can feel like there is no room for nuance, no space for failure, no forgiveness for parents who tried and fell short. Parents get canceled, too. As a result, they might feel overextended and under-acknowledged — even those who gave more (time, love, money) than they ever received, and still feel they failed. Many of us raised our kids with more warmth and presence than we were given.

We gave our children more choices, language we did not have or know, and affirmation we did not receive. But they live in a world of relentless comparison, economic precarity, and climate anxiety. They are told to “find their purpose” while navigating loneliness, rising student debt, and shrinking safety nets. They are to be expressive, authentic, and adaptable — but the world still demands and rewards compliance, image, and constant availability.

At the same time, children face growing pressure in another realm: the digital world. Participants in this virtual playground are expected to lay bare all their choices, achievements, and activities for constant viewing and judgment on social media, making it impossible to live authentic and imperfect lives in private. Mistakes are magnified, resilience is shortchanged, true growth is stunted.

Perhaps our hopes and aspirations for them were not altruistic, but the product of our unfulfilled dreams. In parenting our kids as if we were managing them, we may have created young adults who will need to be parented by their managers.

So children and young adults seem increasingly anxious and disappointed that the world — and in some cases, their families — did not live up to the promise. And many of them blame us — not always for what we did, but for not preparing them better for the world as it is.

Each side wonders if the other is being unfair. And again, the distortion hall of mirrors on social media makes both parties feel that the “Joneses” have it better. We manage to keep up with each other’s dishwasher and car purchases, but increasingly also fall short in terms of happiness quotients.

New Accounting Standards

Modern parenting involves teaching children the language of psychology — words like boundaries, anxiety, self-regulation, and trauma — hoping it will serve them well in a complex world. We encourage them to express their feelings, advocate for their needs, ask questions, and call out injustice, inadequacy, and harm. All aspects of healthy growth and development.

But the result is a new dynamic: one in which children and teens now apply that same language to us. Parents are being analyzed in real time by individuals who are not mental health professionals, but play them in cars, kitchens, texts, and on social media — often on TikTok and Instagram. The aggrieved parties tell the world of our emotional unavailability or the ways we failed to model self-awareness. Sometimes fair criticisms, but often delivered without the skill for these powerful terms in dialogue, or the pacing that experienced clinicians refine over careers.

The degree of exposure on social media is beyond comprehension for prior generations. There, teens and adult children share stories about their upbringing, critique the emotional intelligence of their families, or explain their “generational trauma” to large audiences.

In some cases, these reflections can be healing and lead to important conversations. In others, they flatten the story of what it meant to raise a child under financial, emotional, or systemic pressure in a world that feels harsh and unstable. The generational tables have turned. In trying to prepare our children for a more emotionally aware world, we have also opened ourselves up to new forms of feedback — ones that can feel rushed, harsh, or even manipulative.

When our children have their own, so the adage goes, they might come to appreciate what we are experiencing. “Wait until you have your children, only then will you understand how difficult this is.” That is not good enough. We do not have the luxury of waiting decades to receive the empathy and grace we need now. It is like receiving a test grade of C-minus that may, eventually, be changed to an A — years later.

From Balance Sheets to Emotional Bonds

In our pursuit of giving our kids the best and raising well-rounded, high-achieving persons, we have often emphasized measurable outcomes — grades, accolades, milestones — over the immeasurable aspects of emotional connection. Exactly as we do in the workplace when we reward outcomes and not processes or traits demonstrated even when the project fails.

This focus on performance can overshadow the importance of attunement, where parents are present, responsive, and supportive without overstepping. To foster resilience and well-being, we can try to reintroduce play, use humor to collect data on what we value, establish clearer boundaries, and, however different young people may seem to be, they are just as perfect and imperfect as we are. Below we share a few ideas from our respective disciplines.

Focus on self-soothing: attunement and the emotional cost of performance.

One of the most crucial but overlooked aspects of raising children is teaching them to self-soothe — not just to calm down in the moment, but to develop the ability to navigate distress without collapsing. And for that, they need attuned parents. Someone who sees their world clearly, responds without overreacting, and offers a secure base to explore from and return back to. Parents who respect their space and text before calling.

This is the foundation of secure attachment. But in high-pressure cultures, this emotional dance between parent and child is increasingly disrupted by performance expectations. What begins as sensitivity can morph into surveillance. Parents become so focused on outcomes — grades, goals, recognition — that their presence shifts from being a source of safety to a source of stress.

Psychiatrist Paul Holinger and developmental researcher Virginia Demos have written extensively about the role of affect in this relationship. Their work emphasizes the power of facial expressions, tone, and rhythm in co-regulation between child and caregiver. Here is a synthesis from a psychoanalyst reflecting this work:

(The) quality of interactions in the primary infant-caregiver relationship contributes to the very experiencing of affects in the newborn and can either make or break the infant’s later capacity to bear and to modulate feelings, especially those that are undesirable or painful.

How do we understand what is going on?

Most of us can recall moments of relative peace that are shattered by news or events that create anxiety. 9–11 is one most of us can recall. Now consider the anxious person who intrudes into our day. The anxiety is contagious. We feel it, too. It is normal.

Part of what is happening to parents is there is a collective anxiety when we are there together on the sidelines, at the recitals, or awaiting final grades that is contagious. Shared news of success in other children can make things worse.

But what happens when the parent’s own anxiety is part of the emotional feedback loop? When attunement becomes over-identification or projection? When our own fear of failure begins to mirror back in our children?

In a culture where intellect and achievement are valued, emotional regulation — the ability to experience emotions such as shame, sadness, and fear without losing equilibrium — becomes a vital skill. But both children and parents are often penalized for showing anything other than optimism or “positive energy.” We encourage kids to power through. We do the same to ourselves. And then we wonder why no one feels at ease.

How do we tone down the anxiety — wash ourselves clean of the internal demands driven by external hysteria?

One way is to consider the metaphors we live by.

Pick the scaffold or the blender.

The ability to always be connected via the phone to children, in addition to the work-from-home movement, means that parents are constantly toggling between roles. However, unlike dolphins, they cannot sleep with one eye open, one side of the brain awake, living in two worlds simultaneously. In the modern workplace, so do we. We toggle between work and home personas, parenting and pitching, soothing toddlers between meetings and switching on professional smiles for Zoom.

COVID didn’t start this blur — it just erased the last boundaries. Homes became offices, classrooms, and studios. The constant context-switching took and continues to take a psychological toll: exhaustion, distraction, and burnout — and worsening mental health outcomes for kids and youth.

While research suggests that clear boundaries — physical and temporal — are critical, some blending now seems inevitable and potentially valuable. In a pandemic piece here, we saw two options:

1. Rebuild scaffolding — routines, rituals, schedules — to protect sanity.
2. Embrace the blend — normalize real life at work, and stop pretending.

Both strategies require cultural shifts. Managers must model and protect boundaries. But we also need to drop the pretense of perfection and let more of our full selves into our working lives. Like dolphins, we might just learn to be present in two worlds — without sinking in either.

Another aspect of blending the world is the use of AI for better parenting. Used well, AI can help surface better questions, different framings, sharper perspectives. Here, too, there might be no going back… we can only move forward and trust that our human creativity and longing for growth and community can be rekindled in the feeling of “village” that is so deeply embedded in the human experience.

How do we design and use modern tools for this modern world of parenting? How do we reconcile the desire to return to kinder, gentler parenting with the increasing use of technology?

Find different ways to learn each other’s buttons so as NOT to press them.

Can we embrace imperfection? Can we reset the dialogue between parents and children to anchor it on kindness, shared experience, and love? Perhaps some humor like we used to see in the older TV shows like The Brady Bunch that created empathy and space for blundering through parenting and lightened the task.

In our work around the importance of humor to gather data and defuse tension, we wrote about stress kits, 21-day stress test and getting out of meeting cards, and ways managers can offer up opportunities for more transparency on what really upsets individuals as well as provide some playful escape. While systemic changes are necessary, individuals can and should take steps to understand and mitigate their own stress responses — at work and in families. By doing so, they not only improve their well-being but also contribute to a healthier work environment.

For example, in personal and familial relationships, we think we know what causes shrugs, withdrawals, or eye-rolls, but we rarely can be certain because we do not have ways to surface this precious information without leading to more shrugs, withdrawals, or eye-rolls. So, for your family or young people in your lives, what might those be?

For parents, as we need to detox from our constant connectivity and cellphones do we need Out of Office buttons for parenting to give us some recharge time? Being able to take off the parenting hat and rejuvenate ourselves could be a self-care tool. The anonymity that people find when traveling alone can be refreshing to the soul, offering a chance to simply be and not do. Perhaps instead of complimenting each other’s achievements or gossiping about shortcomings we could take turn supporting each other!

Move from concerted cultivation to concerted connection.

This pressure is not just felt, it seems to even be designed into systems, which rewards parents with the means to pay in human and financial capital. We enroll our kids in recreational soccer, and soon, it will be elite travel leagues. Piano lessons become juried competitions. Every interest is tracked, scheduled, and ranked. What starts as joy becomes résumé-building.

As pressure builds, space to simply be shrinks. We are not just losing spontaneity; we are losing play. And play is crucial; it is where bonding happens. Where kids (and parents) can lose themselves, take turns, regress, and recover. It is where laughter lives.

Neuroscience often attributes the left hemisphere with the control of language, logic, and planning — characteristics we associate with parenting today. But play lives in the right hemisphere: metaphor, music, movement, emotion. It is how children connect without outcomes. When we neglect that side, we lose not just fun, but the capacity to relate with ease and presence.

Burnout in parenting does not always manifest as collapse, but can manifest as a sense of joylessness, stemming from the exhaustion of continually showing up and doing everything “right.” But inside, we are depleted because we have been parenting from pressure, not connection.

The challenge can be framed as rebuilding the lost routines and patterns of our earliest of bonding moments with our children. We knew then what was upsetting them and what we could do to take away their fears. A smile, a teasing look, a silly face; all with the intention of being closer and more of a solid base for them. How do we do this?

One way back to moments of connection can include play. As such, playing with this challenge as a rigid unassailable ideology can be helpful. It would be important to consider the excessive pressure of the achievement world, even if it is dogmatic, as an ideology. As such, it would be essential to question and reframe it. This is what we are proposing here.

“Too much self-awareness destroys not just spontaneity, but the quality that makes things live.” The Messenger and the Emissary”. Iain McGilchrist

How can we possibly want to suffocate the living and real relationship we have with our children?

Open up different conversations — also with fellow parents

In many parts of the world, it is time for graduations and reunions. We can and should congratulate parents and each other and ourselves but we could also be more open and “authentic” about asking and talking about what it cost us and them to get to this point. What did we lose in sleep, friends, identity, health, and sex?

And we forget that for every kid walking across a stage, others did not make it or did not get accolades. Not because they were not loved or raised well, but because luck or life intervened. Can we congratulate those parents too?

We can also change dynamics at reunions, where kids are often a common topic. Besides making those of us who don’t have kids feel bad, these conversations often turn around grades, schools, and jobs.

If we feel that our kids do not “make the grade,” we might change the subject instead of perhaps finding a way to connect with each other around what our kids are passionate about, times that make us laugh together. Something human, emotional, immeasurable and priceless.

Narrowing the Gap

One of the side effects of constantly managing kids is that it can obscure a core goal of parenting: to raise self-sufficient adults. In doing so much — anticipating, planning, guiding — we risk preventing children from learning how to do these things for themselves.

The answer is not to walk back every expectation. Nor is it to vilify a generation for being emotionally articulate. But it may be time to admit that we have all internalized an impossible standard. And we are all living with the emotional fallout.

We can loosen the grip of performance, both at home and at work. We can question the idea that love means constant optimization. And perhaps most importantly, we can give each other the gift of grace because we will all disappoint one another.

And that we all need more honesty — not about how to do more, but about how much is already being asked.

Perhaps what our families need is not better performance, but better presence. Or an honest discussion about whose Joneses we are keeping up with.

And if we are lucky, we will also forgive each other, and try again.

References

Holinger, Paul C. What Babies Say Before They Can Talk: The Nine Signals Infants Use to Express Their Feelings. Fireside, 2003.

Demos, Virginia. “The Affect of the Affects: Commentary on the Contributions to the Special Issue of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 5, no. 4, 1995, pp. 611–620.