KDKA interview: Honest talk about the pressure parents feel to do it all

If you’re a parent, you probably have days when you’re struggling to handle everything — raising your kids, keeping bills paid, managing your household, working at your job and hopefully taking care of yourself, too. And yet even as you juggle so much, you may hesitate to ask anyone for help. During a recent “Talk Pittsburgh” segment on KDKA-TV, panelists Muffy Mendoza, Brea Schmidt and Gregg Behr discussed the pressures that parents face — and how we can help one another.

“We’ve been long told a story that parents are supposed to do it on their own,” Mendoza said. “But the reality is that we expect two parents — sometimes one — to do a job that used to be done by an entire community. And I think in America, a lot of things have shifted to make it so that communities don’t really act like communities anymore. So when you’re in your home, it’s really easy to feel isolated and to feel as if all the support you have is within those four walls. It’s a lot of pressure. It’s a lot of pressure to try to be the best that you can be, because you put your kids first. But you also have to worry about yourself.”

Schmidt pointed out that social media can magnify the sense that everyone else is thriving while you’re struggling. On social media, “we look around at people’s handpicked highlight reels of what their life looks like,” she said. “I think we get easily influenced by the things that we see on social media and then feel that pressure that we have to look that same way all the time.”

One way to take the pressure off ourselves and our kids: Being real and letting your kids see that everything isn’t effortless.

“We want to demonstrate to our kids, like, ‘We’ve got it together. You can have it together, too,'” Behr said. “You don’t want to let your kids down. But actually, it’s really healthy, and the science tells us it’s really healthy, to demonstrate vulnerability — that I can’t do everything, that I don’t have all of the answers. That’s actually a really constructive part of growth for a child to recognize that my dad or my mom’s not perfect. I don’t need to be perfect. And there are caring people around me who are going to help me figure out what I need to do and how to do it.”

For more of this conversation, check out the full video right here: