If You Love Them Best When They're Asleep...You're Not Alone

The Secret Thoughts of Good Parents

A Renewed Perspective by Renewed Journey Counseling Services

Mom peeking into her son's room while he is asleep

Can we admit something among parents?

There is a particular kind of love that happens after your children fall asleep.

You walk past their bedroom, peek inside, and there they are sleeping quietly, looking peaceful and innocent. The same child who, approximately four hours earlier, couldn't find the shoes that were directly in front of them suddenly looks like an angel.

You stand there thinking, "Look at my baby. I love you so much."

And somewhere deep inside, another little voice whispers, "Please don't wake up."

That doesn't make you a bad parent. It makes you a parent who has completed another shift.

Parenting is one of the few jobs where you can love someone more than life itself and simultaneously need them to go to bed.

Both things can be true.

Loving mother holding her happy baby

Nobody Really Warns You About This Part

Before you have children, people warn you about the obvious things. Babies don't sleep. Diapers are expensive. Daycare costs approximately the same as a small mortgage. Teenagers will eventually think you're embarrassing simply because you exist.

What nobody adequately explains is the mental load.

One day, you'll spend twenty minutes helping your child look for a water bottle that's sitting in their hand. You'll hear someone scream, "MOM!" from upstairs with enough urgency to suggest an arterial bleed. You'll drop what you're doing and yell back,

"WHAT?"

Silence.

So you walk upstairs.

"What happened?"

"I forgot."

There are moments in parenting when you briefly understand why people disappear and start new lives under different names.

And then they hug you.

And you're back.

That's parenting.

Parenting Was Already Hard. Then Somebody Added Wi-Fi.

Previous generations worried about peer pressure too, but their competition was mostly other children within a reasonable bicycle ride.

Today's parents are competing with the entire internet.

Your child has friends, classmates, TikTok, YouTube, gamers, influencers, celebrities, musicians, group chats, Discord servers and an algorithm that knows more about their interests than some relatives do.

You aren't simply trying to teach your child what your family believes anymore. You're trying to teach them how to think critically while thousands of other voices compete for their attention.

And those voices are available 24 hours a day.

Remember when a parent could end a debate with, "Because I said so"?

That phrase has apparently been discontinued.

Today's child may respond, "Actually, Google says..."

Google.

The same source they consulted twenty minutes earlier to determine whether cereal technically qualifies as soup.

Still, here we are presenting our rebuttal.

Welcome to the Era of Yes

Modern parents are also navigating what sometimes feels like The Era of Yes.

Everybody gets something. Everybody should feel included. Everybody gets a trophy. Everybody gets a great gift at the White Elephant exchange. Nobody should ever feel left out, disappointed, bored or uncomfortable.

Those intentions often come from a beautiful place. We want children to feel valued. But there's a problem.

Life never agreed to those terms.

Eventually, somebody doesn't make the team. Somebody doesn't get invited. Somebody else gets promoted. Someone gets the scholarship. Someone hears "no." Someone falls in love with a person who doesn't love them back.

Disappointment isn't evidence that childhood has failed.

Learning to tolerate disappointment is part of preparing for adulthood.

Our job isn't to eliminate every uncomfortable emotion our children experience. Our job is to help them learn that uncomfortable emotions can be survived.

That's a very different kind of parenting.

Young student working on a science project for school

And Then There's the 9:47 P.M. School Project

Every parent knows this conversation.

It's 9:47 on a Thursday night.

"Mom, I need poster board."

"For what?"

"My project."

"What project?"

"The solar system."

"When is it due?"

"Tomorrow."

You slowly turn around.

"When did your teacher assign this?"

"Like...three weeks ago."

Three weeks. Twenty-one sunsets have occurred since this assignment was announced, yet somehow at 9:47 p.m. it has become a family emergency.

Now you're building Saturn with Styrofoam while your child is concerned that you're being negative.

These are the moments when parenting philosophy meets reality.

Do you rescue them?

Let them experience the consequence?

Help a little?

Help a lot?

Teach responsibility?

Protect the grade?

There isn't always a perfect answer.

That's something parents need permission to hear.

How Much Help Is Too Much Help?

Modern parenting sometimes feels like standing between two warning signs.

One says:

DON'T BE TOO STRICT.

The other says:

DON'T BE A HELICOPTER PARENT.

Somewhere in the middle, we're supposed to produce emotionally intelligent, resilient, confident, academically successful, socially responsible, financially literate human beings who eat vegetables voluntarily and call their grandparents.

No pressure.

We're told to encourage independence but make sure they don't fail. Monitor technology but don't isolate them socially. Hold boundaries but validate feelings. Encourage achievement but don't pressure them. Give them freedom but know exactly where they are.

Then there are the smaller decisions that somehow feel enormous when you're raising an actual child.

Do we get the braces in middle school or wait until high school? Do we let them quit the sport they begged to join? Do they need a phone yet? How much allowance? When can they date? Is that outfit okay? Do I check the phone? Do I let them walk to school?

And speaking of walking...

Apparently, 1.5 miles is now an expedition.

"Can you order me a Lyft?"

A Lyft?

To school?

It's close enough that birds could get there before the driver accepts the ride.

We Want Them to Have More Than We Had

This is where things get complicated, because so much of modern parenting comes from love.

Many parents remember what they didn't have and quietly promise, My children won't experience that.

Maybe you grew up without much money, so you want your children to have nice things.

Maybe nobody attended your games, so you attend everything. Maybe your parents were extremely strict, so you want your children to feel heard. Maybe affection wasn't common in your house, so you make sure your children hear "I love you."

That's beautiful.

But sometimes, without realizing it, we can overcorrect.

We wanted them to have a voice and accidentally gave them veto power.

We wanted them to have confidence and became afraid to let them fail.

We wanted them to have what we didn't and forgot that some of what we didn't have taught us how to work, wait, improvise, recover and appreciate.

The goal isn't to recreate our childhood.

And it isn't to eliminate every difficulty from theirs.

The goal is to take what was good, heal what wasn't, and raise the next generation with a little more wisdom.

The Memories They Keep May Surprise You

This is one of the strange gifts of having children long enough to hear them talk about their childhood.

They remember things you completely forgot.

One of my sons once reminded me about a school event when he needed to dress like a leprechaun. He didn't want to be the only child who showed up without a costume.

Now, I need you to understand something.

I am not a seamstress.

There was no sewing machine coming out.

There was no hidden fashion-design talent waiting to reveal itself.

There was felt fabric.

There was a hot glue gun.

And there were two glue sticks.

That was the design department.

I cut that felt, figured out something resembling a vest and hot-glued that thing together like somebody's employment depended on it. Was it professionally constructed? Absolutely not. Would it have survived a washing machine? We will never know, because nobody was foolish enough to try.

But he had a leprechaun vest.

And years later, he remembered it.

I didn't.

That's the part that stayed with me.

What had become one more forgotten task in the enormous blur of raising children had become a memory of love for him.

He didn't remember whether the seams were straight. He didn't remember that his mother had no idea what she was doing.

He remembered:

My mom made sure I wasn't the only one without a costume.

That's what children keep.

Presence Has Never Required Perfection

Parents spend enormous amounts of energy worrying about the things we get wrong.

We remember the morning we yelled.

The game we missed.

The birthday cake that leaned suspiciously to one side.

The permission slip still sitting on the counter after the bus left.

The conversation we wish we'd handled differently.

But children aren't keeping the same scorecard.

They remember Saturday pancakes. Riding in the car together. The ridiculous nickname nobody else understood. Being picked up after a terrible day. The way Grandma's kitchen smelled. Dad sitting in the bleachers. Mom with a hot glue gun trying to manufacture leprechaun formalwear at the last minute.

Love hides in ordinary moments.

And that should be incredibly freeing for parents.

Your children don't need you to manufacture a magical childhood.

They need a relationship with you.

Sometimes Being the Parent Means Being Unpopular

Presence doesn't mean permissiveness.

There will be times when loving your child means becoming temporarily unpopular with your child.

You may have to say no.

You may take the phone.

You may insist they apologize.

You may let them experience a consequence.

You may refuse to rescue them from something they're capable of handling themselves.

You may even hear the classic:

"Everybody else's parents let them..."

Apparently, everybody else's parents have been raising children without rules since the beginning of time.

We still haven't met these people.

Being present means being emotionally available and willing to parent.

Children need warmth and boundaries.

They need affection and accountability.

They need to know, You can be angry with me and I will still love you.

That's security.

Working mom frustrated with her tasks

You Will Get Some of This Wrong

You will.

So will I.

So did our parents.

That's because children aren't raised by parenting experts.

They're raised by human beings.

The goal isn't never making a mistake. The goal is creating a family where mistakes can be repaired.

"I shouldn't have yelled."

"I wasn't listening."

"I was wrong."

"I'm sorry."

"Can we try that conversation again?"

Those sentences don't weaken parental authority.

They teach children what accountability looks like.

A child who sees repair learns something enormously important:

Relationships can survive mistakes.

That's a lesson they'll carry into friendships, marriages, parenting and adulthood.

Loving Mother

What Will They Remember?

Twenty years from now, your child probably won't remember whether the kitchen counters were spotless.

They may not remember how much you spent on Christmas.

They probably won't remember whether the birthday decorations matched.

But they'll remember whether home felt safe.

They'll remember whether they could tell you the truth.

They'll remember whether failure meant losing your love or simply trying again.

They'll remember whether you listened.

They'll remember whether you showed up.

And occasionally, they'll remember something you don't remember at all.

A conversation in the car.

A hug after a terrible day.

A ridiculous green felt vest held together with hot glue.

Something small to you.

Something enormous to them.

So tonight, when you walk past your child's bedroom and see that beautiful little person sleeping peacefully, enjoy it.

Tomorrow they may lose the hoodie they're currently wearing, announce at 10:00 p.m. that they need supplies for school, ask you to DoorDash food while standing twelve feet from a fully stocked refrigerator, and explain that walking 1.5 miles constitutes unreasonable hardship.

And you'll parent them again.

Imperfectly.

Lovingly.

Exhaustedly.

You'll say yes sometimes.

You'll say no sometimes.

You'll wonder if you're getting any of it right.

And somewhere in the middle of all that ordinary chaos, you'll create memories they'll carry for the rest of their lives.

That's parenting.

Messy. Funny. Frustrating. Beautiful.

And sacred.

Kitchen Table Truth

Your children don't need a childhood impressive enough for social media. They need one secure enough to become a foundation. Long after the toys disappear and the pictures are stored away, what remains is the quiet knowledge: When I needed them, my people showed up.

Renewed Reflection

Children don't need perfect parents. They need parents who keep showing up: sometimes with wisdom, sometimes with boundaries, and sometimes with nothing more than felt fabric, a hot glue gun, and two glue sticks. Years later, they may not remember how well you did it. They'll remember that you did it for them.

You don’t have to be a perfect parent. You just have to keep showing up. ❤️

Parenting can be beautiful, exhausting, hilarious, frustrating and sometimes all four before breakfast.

If parenting has started to feel heavier than you expected, counseling can give you a place to talk about the parts nobody puts in the family pictures: the worry, guilt, frustration, changing relationships, difficult behaviors, and the constant question, “Am I getting this right?”

At Renewed Journey Counseling Services, we support parents, children, teens, and families through the real-life challenges of growing up and raising the people who are growing up.

Sometimes the best thing you can give your child is a healthier, supported version of you.

Ready for a little support on your parenting journey? Contact Renewed Journey Counseling Services to connect with one of our therapists.

And remember: felt fabric, a hot glue gun, and two glue sticks may be enough to become somebody’s favorite childhood memory. 💚

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