I don’t have children.
I want to say that at the start, plainly, because it matters. I’m not writing this from the inside of parenthood. I haven’t been woken at 3am by a small person who needs something only I can give — or had to strip a bed and scrub projectile vomit off the wall above it at 2am while running a temperature myself. I haven’t felt the particular weight of being someone’s whole world.
But I have friends who are parents. And I have sat across from them at dinner tables, watched them over the years, had long conversations with my partner Roger about what we notice in the people we love — and I want to say something that I think gets left out of almost every conversation about parenting.
The most loving thing you can do for your children is not to give them everything.
What I See From the Outside
The parents I know are some of the most generous people I’ve ever met. Not generous in the abstract — generous in the daily, grinding, relentless sense. They give their time, their attention, their energy, their sleep, their quiet, their weekends, their plans, their sense of self. They give and give and give, often with a kind of cheerful determination that masks — but only just — how little is left over.
And what I notice, watching from the outside, is this: the giving doesn’t stop when the children are asleep. It doesn’t stop when the door closes. It carries on in the mind — the planning, the worrying, the mental load of keeping a small human alive and loved and developing well. There is no clock-off. There is no moment when the job is done and the person underneath gets to come back to the surface.
This is not a complaint about parenthood. It’s an observation about what it costs — and about how rarely that cost is acknowledged, let alone addressed.
It Didn’t Always Look Like This
I’m a Generation X child. We were not constantly entertained by our parents.
Our parents had their own lives — their own friends, their own evenings, their own conversations that happened in the kitchen while we played outside or read in our rooms or stared at the ceiling wondering what to do with ourselves. They loved us. They were there when it mattered. But they were also, unapologetically, people with needs of their own.
We were bored sometimes. We figured it out.
I think about that often when I watch friends who are parents now — the relentless pressure to be constantly available, constantly present, constantly meeting every need before it’s even fully formed. The standard has shifted enormously, and not always in ways that seem to be making anyone happier. Not the parents, certainly. And I wonder sometimes whether the children are better served by a parent who is present but depleted, or one who occasionally closes a door — and comes back fuller for it.
The Myth of the Selfless Parent
Somewhere along the way, self-sacrifice became the gold standard of good parenting.
The parent who never misses a school play. Who is always available. Who puts their own needs last — not occasionally, not in emergencies, but as a permanent operating principle. Who has no edges, no reserves, no quiet corner of life that belongs only to them.
That parent is held up as the ideal. And the parent who admits to needing something for themselves — time alone, a night out without guilt, a morning that isn’t immediately claimed by someone else’s needs — is quietly made to feel like they’re falling short.
I sometimes wonder whether this idea has served anyone well. Not because parents shouldn’t give generously to their children — of course they should. But because a person who has given everything away has nothing left. Not for their children, not for their partner, not for themselves. You cannot pour from an empty vessel. It’s a cliché because it’s true.
What Boundaries Actually Look Like for Parents
I want to be careful here, because I’m aware this is easy to say from the outside.
I’m not talking about grand gestures or dramatic restructuring. I’m not suggesting parents announce a new set of rules or withdraw into themselves. I’m talking about small, quiet acknowledgments — to themselves and gently to the people around them — that they are a person, not just a function.
It might look like this:
Saying “I need twenty minutes” and meaning it — not as a luxury, not as something to feel guilty about, but as a basic requirement for being a functioning human being.
Letting the house be imperfect rather than running yourself into the ground keeping it spotless, because the children will not remember whether the kitchen was clean. They will remember whether you were present.
Telling your partner honestly when you’re depleted — not after you’ve pushed through and collapsed, but before. While there’s still something to work with.
Having one thing — just one — that is yours. A walk. A hobby. An hour on a Sunday morning that nobody can claim. Not because you’ve earned it, but because you’re a person and people need things that belong to them.
The Guilt That Gets in the Way
I know what the response to all of this is, because I’ve heard it from people I love.
But the children need me. But there isn’t time. But I’ll feel guilty.
The guilt is real. I’m not dismissing it. But I want to gently offer something that Roger and I have talked about often after an evening with friends who are parents — something that strikes us again and again.
The parents who seem most at peace aren’t the ones who have given the most. They’re the ones who have kept something back. Not selfishly. Not at the expense of their children. But with the quiet understanding that they matter too — that their wellbeing is not separate from their children’s wellbeing, but deeply, directly connected to it.
Children who grow up watching a parent honour their own needs learn something that no curriculum teaches: that it’s allowed. That you can love someone completely and still have a self. That care doesn’t have to mean disappearing.
A Note on Asking for Help
One thing I’ve noticed — and again, I say this with love rather than judgment — is how hard many parents find it to ask for help.
Not because the help isn’t there. But because asking feels like admitting something. Like confirmation that they’re not managing, not coping, not the parent they’re supposed to be.
But asking for help is not a confession. It’s not failure. It’s one of the most honest things a person can do — to say: I have limits, and I’ve reached them, and I need someone to stand alongside me for a while.
If you’re a parent reading this and that resonates: you don’t have to be doing it alone to the degree that you are. The boundary isn’t just between you and your children. It’s also between you and the expectation that you should be able to carry all of this without support.
What I Want to Say, Simply
You are not just a parent.
You were a person before your children arrived. You have needs that are real and legitimate and not in competition with your love for them. Taking care of yourself is not taking something away from your children — it’s modelling for them, every day, what it looks like to be a whole human being in the world.
The most loving version of you is not the most depleted version of you.
That’s what I want to say. Not as someone who knows what parenthood costs from the inside — I don’t, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But as someone who has watched people I love give everything away, and wished, quietly and often, that they had kept a little more for themselves.