Today, I’m talking about mom guilt. Specifically, the kind of mom guilt that shows up in the summer.

You know what I mean:

Wondering why your kid is still melting down when summer is supposed to be fun.

Thinking you must be doing something wrong if your kid is complaining, bored, or grumpy.

Stick around as I challenge these thoughts and encourage you to embrace the “good enough” summer.

You’ll Learn:

• Why summer isn’t actually easier than the rest of the year
• Where summer mom guilt comes from
• Why doing less is actually good for your kids
• How to have a “good enough” summer

Read the full show notes here.

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Related Episodes:

• Check out our curated Calm Summer Mama podcast playlist on Spotify
• Get the Stress-Free Summer Toolkit
• Episode 2.22: Creating Good Summer Vibes | A Calm Parenting Guide
• Episode 77: Summer Sibling Squabbles
• Episode 128: Encouraging Boredom
• Episode 13: Dealing with a Grumpy Mood

Free Resources:

Get your copy of the Stop Yelling Toolkit!

In this free guide you’ll discover:

✨ A simple tool to stop yelling once you’ve started (This one thing will get you calm.)

✨ 40 things to do instead of yelling. (You only need to pick one!)

✨ Exactly why you yell. (And how to stop yourself from starting.)

✨A script to say to your kids when you yell. (So they don't follow you around!)

Download the Stop Yelling Toolkit here

Connect With Darlynn:

• Book a complimentary session with Darlynn
• Learn about the different parenting programs at www.calmmamacoaching.com
• Follow me on Instagram @darlynnchildress for daily tips
• Rate and review the podcast on Itunes

Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlyn Childress.

And today on the podcast, I want to talk about mom guilt,

but specifically the type of guilt that shows up

in the summer, not the school year type of guilt, because

summer guilt is a little bit different than school year guilt. So in the

school year we feel bad, like our kids are watching a lot of TV or

we forgot permission slips or we're not spending enough time with them.

We have different kinds of guilt around the school year.

But summer guilt is a little bit different because it's a

little more emotional. It's like thinking, I have all this unstructured

time, all this potential for connection and fun, and

I'm still watching my kids melt down. I'm still watching them be

grumpy, so I must be doing summer wrong. Like, this shouldn't

be happening, right? If you're thinking this, my kids

are bored and they're complaining all the time and they're fighting and they're

grumpy that you might be thinking, I must be doing something

wrong. This should be easier. And because it's not easier, then something

is wrong with me. And I want to challenge that whole

premise today because I think we put too much pressure on

ourselves to make summer perfect. And it's

actually backfiring. Not just on us because we feel burned out,

but also on our kids. And so let's get into it. I

think a lot of us start the summer with this lie. Or

maybe it's a fantasy that summer is going to be the season where everyone is

relaxed. There's going to be slower mornings and more connection and fewer

schedules and more joy. And the truth

is that summer can bring more of those things. But

somewhere along the way, a lot of us have picked up on an unspoken

expectation that summer should also be smooth. Smoother.

That because there's no homework and no school drop off stress. That

the, the emotional dynamic in our house is supposed to

be better. And really it doesn't end up that way.

A lot of us still have meltdowns. We still have kids who

are grumpy. We still have kids who are saying that they're bored every

15 minutes and that unstructured time actually

creates more dysregulation and more big

feelings and more problems in a family. So

we think that, oh, this unstructured time is going to make us more

relaxed, but really it tends to make us more

stressed. And we also end up spending a lot more time with our kids and

we don't have as much Break from them. And so we end up

feeling quite burned out in the summer, and then we make

ourselves wrong for that. So the truth is that summer

is more challenging for families. And I want you to feel

okay with the fact that that's going to be. That's true, and

that's real. For if that's happening to you, if you're getting to, like, you know,

this end of July and you are feeling so burned

out and making yourself wrong for that, I want

to normalize, first of all, that the. The summer

is more challenging. The other thing is that you are having

a summer with your actual children. So

meltdowns, moods, boredom, arguing. There's. They're not

a proof that something is broken in your family or that you have ruined

the summer or that the summer is a problem.

The truth is that meltdowns, grumpy moods, boredom,

they're proof that your kids are kids and they're in a body and they

have a nervous system and they're having a life. And that doesn't

pause just because it's summer. So a kid having a hard

moment on a beautiful sunny day, beach day, pool day, lake

day, that's not a referendum on your parenting.

It's just a hard moment, having a beautiful

day or a fun activity planned or a great experience.

That does not mean that your child's going to be

in a great mood. Your child is always learning

how to be a human, how to be a person. So even

if the circumstance is great, they may still be struggling

with something internally. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with them. You.

You have not done anything wrong. It's just part of being a

kid or being a person, actually, we go

through all the effort of getting the snack bag and getting the

extra clothes and the sunblock and all of those

vacation plans or special going to the fair or going

to the lake or going to the beach. You put in a lot of effort

whenever you do an activity like that with your kids. And

we are trying to make it fun, right?

But there is another thing that's happening for us,

is that we are actually trying to be good moms. And

I put that in quotation marks because there

is a myth that there is a sort of a

type of mom that is a good mom. And it's a cultural

idea that a mother, her worth is measured

by how smooth she can make her children's experience, that if the

day goes well, you did a good job. If the day goes sideways,

then you must have made a mistake, you messed up the schedule. You messed up

the snack. You were not calm. You didn't put the socks on properly.

Remember I talked about this with Dr. Angelle. Close. And

like a few episodes ago. One of the things that stuck with me is how

much of modern motherhood has become intensive. This

idea that a good mother is. Is endlessly available,

endlessly resource and able to engineer her

children's emotional experience so that they don't

have bad feelings, that they don't have hard feelings. And then you add

summer into that with this idea that we have to have curated

photos of families on vacation looking blissed out.

It's easy to internalize that. If I were doing this right,

my kids would be happy right now. But

being happy is not what childhood is.

It's not even what being a person is. Kids

are going to be bored, they're going to be grumpy, they're going to fight with

their siblings. None of that means you failed to create the conditions

for a good summer. It means that you have children and children have

big unregulated nervous systems and they're still under

construction. Right? Your kids are not done growing. Their

bodies aren't done growing. That means their nervous systems are not done.

Learning to regulate. I want you to think about good enough.

Like the good enough mom or the good enough summer.

I want you to start to lower your expectations a little

bit. Instead of thinking of things being

perfect or things being great, even I want

you to start thinking about things being good enough. Like can this

summer be be good enough? Can this car ride to camp

be good enough? Your children, they don't need you

to create some sort of perfect expectation. What they

actually need from you is to be present with them

when they have struggle, when they

have a hard moment. They are looking for

support from you, for emotional guidance and

practical guidance. They are looking for modeling of how to pivot when you

are having a rough day or rough experience.

Your kids aren't looking for you to bulldoze the path and make it

perfect and idyllic. Well, actually maybe they are wanting

that. But let me tell you that even if you,

even if your kids want you to make their life easy and perfect, if you

try to do it, A, you're going to feel circle super bad because it's not

possible. And B, you're not

helping your kids grow in their own

ability to self regulate, self, soothe,

self, manage to pivot from hard

moments, to be able to overcome

uncomfortable circumstances like boredom or frustration

or sadness or any of that. So your job as a

parent, it's not to create a frictionless

childhood. Your job is to be there

to help your children when the friction comes.

So when your kid is bored on the porch and you

don't go in and swoop in with activity, you're not

being a bad mom. Okay? When your kids argue over

whose turn is to go on the trampoline and you let them work it

out instead of playing referee, it's not like neglect,

it's what they're supposed to do.

Your kids are supposed to have hard days, hard

moments, conflict, and you are not

there to smooth it out. So I want to make sure that

you're not feeling like your job is to smooth out all the

rough edges in your kid's life and create this picture perfect summer,

picture perfect childhood, picture perfect life.

When you do that, if you prevent boredom, if you

diffuse every mood before it lands, if you solve

all their sibling conflict, if you keep the whole day sort

of emotionally tidy, you're not protecting

your kid, you're quietly teaching them that they can't

handle their own experience without you managing it

for them. Think about it from your kid's perspective.

If every time they they're bored, you produce an activity,

they don't learn that they're capable of generating their own ideas.

If every time that they're grumpy, you rush to fix the mood, they

don't learn that their moods were gonna go, that their mood will pass,

and that they don't require rescuing.

If every sibling squabble gets adult

refereed and you always work through every

problem with them, they don't learn how to compromise and work together

and create solutions on their own over time. If

kids have had an environment that's over managed when they grow

up, your kid might end up not trusting their own ability

to cope. They may look outside of themselves for someone to

fix that discomfort instead of looking inward and

finding their own resources. I know that you want your kids to grow up to

be emotionally healthy. And that means that they get to have

hard times and boredom and frustration

and annoyance and you telling

them no and all of those different experiences.

They are entitled to frustration and

to struggle. Because with you as their

mom, with you as their parent, you're going to help them

overcome that struggle. And it's in that overcoming, in

that kind of tension, that friction when they are

struggling through, that's where growth happens. That's where they

actually build something within them

that they learn confidence, they learn emotional regulation,

they learn emotional resilience

when you are just good enough, when you create a slightly

messy, occasionally grumpy summer.

That is one that is actually helping your children grow

and develop. So here's how I would

reframe a few things for you. If you are kind of like

in burnout, if you're feeling really discouraged, if you are

kind of done and you are feeling bad about yourself, I

want you to think about these couple of turnarounds.

The first is around meltdowns. So a meltdown

is not a sign that you have done anything wrong or that

there is anything wrong with your kid. It's their nervous system

releasing some pressure. So your job isn't to prevent

meltdowns or fix meltdowns instantaneously. It's to

stay steady nearby, let them move through that big feeling cycle,

help them come back to baseline. You are not

failing if your kid melts down. Meltdowns and big feeling cycles do

not mean that you have failed. What they mean is that your

child is having a hard moment. And I'm going to tell you right now

that in the summer, your kid is going to have more

meltdowns because the schedule is different, the structure

is different, sleep is different, how you eat is different.

That's just a reality. Your kids are going to have more big

feelings, more meltdowns. So if you

normalize that, if you think, okay, this is normal,

nothing's wrong, that's your first turnaround. The second is,

my job is to help my child manage this emotion,

not to try to fix fix it or get out of this emotion.

Now, obviously sometimes you need to, like do a well timed snack

or a distraction or any of those sort of,

you know, parenting tricks. That's fine. Like the new thing where you yell

Jessica or whatever. When a kid is having a meltdown,

I'm not against having distraction because

sometimes we just have to like shift their mood. I want you to

not feel that you are a bad mom or that something has

gone wrong, or when your kid has a meltdown, I want you to feel like

it's normal and you can handle it and they can handle it and that

there's no problem. Okay,

Grumpy moods. I also want to normalize that grumpy moods

don't always have to have an explanation of why your

kid is in a grumpy mood. Nor do you have to create a solution.

So sometimes kids are grumpy, sometimes I'm grumpy,

sometimes you're grumpy. Sometimes it has to do with something going on.

Other times it's just kind of like we're in a funk and that's okay.

And I think Sometimes when our kids are in a grumpy mood, we make it

seem like they're depressed or they I've done something wrong or they're not liked

at school or there's they're going to grow up to be a bad kid or

be unliked or something like that. And really

grumpy moods just, you know, happen and you can just wait for

them to pass. Okay then. Other thing that happens a lot is

boredom. So we have meltdowns, we have

grumpy moods, we have boredom. When your kid says,

I'm bored, a lot of us have an instinct to offer a solution,

right? We kind of see ourselves as like camp counselors, especially in the summer.

And I want you to hold that instinct

back. I want you to avoid jumping right in when

your kid is bored and letting them stop struggle a little bit. You can

say, yeah, boredom is normal. That's okay. It's okay to be bored. I think you

can handle it. I'm not worried about you. I'm pretty sure you can figure this

one out. So boredom, it's an on ramp, if

you want to think of it like an on ramp to creativity and to self

direction. If you kind of smooth it over all

the time with like, you know, well time tv, well

time snack, well time activity. If you run your home like

a preschool or, you know, a summer camp,

your child is missing the opportunity of being

in that boredom, being in that discomfort and then getting to the other side of

it and finding an activity, finding something that's satisfying so that

they can kind of get into that activity or that time of play.

So don't be afraid of boredom. Don't try to fix boredom. Try

to normalize it as much as you can. And what happens is your kids will

eventually get to the point where they may genuinely want you

to give them some ideas. So if you let them struggle a little

bit and let them get to the end of their discomfort around

boredom, they may be ready to pivot. So if you offer, hey, do you want

to go outside and collect some rocks and paint them or something like

that, or do you want to sit and read a book with me? Or

I'm happy to play tic tac toe with you, some sort of

activity that, or you can offer them an idea like, why don't you go do

a stuffed animal party? Or you know, why don't I have a big box from

a delivery? You know, you can paint it and, and make a little house for

yourself. Like, you probably have good ideas as a parent, but

try not to rush into those ideas until your child

seems really over the discomfort of the boredom and

they're ready for your solution. Okay, the

last thing I want to talk about is arguing. If you have more

than one child in your family, sibling conflict is

inevitable. It is not evidence that your kids

don't like each other, that there is, you know, some major problem in your

family that I don't want you to be thinking that anything has

gone wrong because your kids argue or fight

a lot. Now, of course I want your kids to be safe. I want them

to learn how to be in relationship with each other. That's the whole point

of being in a. Not the whole point of having a sibling, but it is.

A major benefit of having a sibling is that you learn to negotiate,

advocate for yourself, repair with someone

if you know you've hurt them, that

this relationship that your kids have is actually

very good for them. But if you are

constantly intervening, you may be taking that idea,

that opportunity away from them, and they might not be able

to. And they may not be getting the

benefit of having a sibling. So what I want you

to think about is that what I'm actually asking you to do

is less. So I think that should be encouraging.

Instead of trying to do more this summer, I want you to

think about being able to do less this summer. I want

you to intervene less, referee less,

solve problems less, plan less.

If you are really out of bounds in your family and you're feeling

really kind of that your family is really overwhelmed

and overstimulated, that happens a lot. Especially this

last week of July, these last two weeks of July, that's the time

to set up some boundaries, put some kids to bed

early, get back to maybe less dessert, less

sweets, less activity, and rein it in a

little bit. Create kind of a container for that nervous system so that it

gets a little bit boundaried and isn't so out of

bounds. So if you're starting to feel like your family's out of bounds,

I do want you to set up some structure and get back to some of

your old routines. But I don't want you to feel like you have to plan

more activities or do more problem solving.

So your job this summer and all the time is to not

make things picture perfect, right? Your job

is to be that steady, warm presence in your children's

life, that you are there to help them

instead of smooth everything out. I want you to help them build the skills

and tools that they need in order to grow up to be resilient.

And you can do that by not making

everything perfect, you can do that by not problem

solving or pre problem solving or over functioning,

overthinking everything, that in reality

your child needs a little bit less

planning. Now, practically when the guilt shows up, if you notice

yourself thinking like, I should have prevented this or I should have done

something better, shoot, I missed this cue. I didn't pay attention.

Instead of beating yourself up about that, that's your cue to offer

yourself some compassion and let yourself know, like, summer is hard.

I've been at this for several weeks. This is way more time as a family

that we're used to. This is way more time that my siblings are, the kids

are spending together. This is just a lot of time.

There's a lot of friction. We have been outside of

our routine, outside of our structure, and all of this is

normal. So giving yourself a dose of

compassion and normalizing the struggle will help

you feel less guilty. And you can also sell yourself on

the idea that conflict is good, boredom is

good, friction is good. It doesn't mean anything's gone wrong.

It actually means that you're doing the job that you need to do,

which is to create a little bit of struggle for

your kids. You don't actually need to create it. It just is

inevitable. What I want you to do is stop preventing all of that

struggle. So here's what I want you to take away from

this. As I've been saying, meltdowns, grumpy moods,

boredom arguments, they're not signs that you're failing at

summer. They're signs that summer is

exactly mixed, imperfect, and

supporting your children in their development. Your

job has never been to engineer a friction free

childhood to make your kid's childhood perfect or

problem free. I know you want to trauma proof your kids right. You

don't want them to experience experienced trauma. And I get that.

But discomfort is not traumatic. Boredom

is not traumatic. Having disappointment is

not traumatic. So this week would love to invite you

to think about a good enough summer

and normalize that for yourself. Like, what would it look like to

be a good enough summer and look back at the last six weeks, week,

seven weeks, and ask yourself, has this been a good enough summer? Can I

get myself off the hook? Can I take the pressure off of me?

I would love to see you take the pressure off of yourself

and create a good enough summer and be a good

enough mother, which I know you are because you're listening to

this podcast. You're taking time to

grow as a parent, to connect with your kids, to overcome

your own trauma and to set boundaries to follow through

on those boundaries. All of the things that are in the connected parenting

process, I know you are taking them seriously. You're doing them.

And I want you to give yourself a lot of credit and

remind yourself that nothing has gone wrong. If my kids are

unhappy, that actually probably something is

going right. All right. I hope you have a great week, and I

will talk to you next time. Happy Summer.