There’s no way to be a perfect parent

When I was knee-deep in the early years of parenting, Facebook was in its infancy and Instagram and TikTok weren’t even on the horizon. I was stuck in the revolving door of work and parenting, and nothing about my personal life was Instagram-worthy. Dishes piled up, laundry was rarely folded, and Whole Foods did a fair amount of the cooking for me. And none of my life was online.

Somewhere between 2006 and now, parenting became a crash course in achievement, with social media grading us at every turn. With perceived perfection as the end goal, as measured by child success, and pictures to prove it cross-posted on Facebook and Instagram, kids and parents alike unknowingly entered a relentless pressure cooker.

“Parental achievement culture, and the chronic stress that comes with it, is real, if only because the resulting anxiety and churning stomach juices is real,” said Jessica Lahey, author of “The Gift of Failure.” “However, much of that stress comes from us, from the media we consume, the parents we hang out with and the childhood milestones we focus on, and it can really warp our thinking.”

The nature of childhood changed as parents did their best to ensure that their kids were front-loaded with everything they needed to succeed in childhood. Free play was replaced with adult-directed activities and story time was swapped for reading practice. Even preschoolers became mini-achievers, with their early reading success a marker of exceptional parenting.

It was a recipe for burnout.

It’s no surprise to me that researchers at the Ohio State University College of Nursing confirmed that parents are, indeed, facing burnout. In a 2023 survey of more than 700 parents nationwide, 57% of parents self-reported burnout.

Parent burnout is strongly associated with both internal and external expectations. These include whether a person feels like a good parent, perceived judgment from others, whether they have enough time to play with their children, their relationship with their spouse, and keeping a clean house.

I could live in a house littered with toys and unfolded clothes and throw a pizza on the table when work ran late without an online spotlight, but parents of young children today face impossible expectations. They have to work, create perfect learning conditions for child success, play with their children (but make sure the play involves education), cook organic everything from scratch on the daily, and make sure to update the sizzle reel often.

One other concerning finding from the survey is that parents of children with mental health disorders reported higher levels of burnout and a greater likelihood of using harsh parenting practices, including insulting, criticizing, screaming at, cursing at and/or physically harming their children. These can result in a cycle of increased mental health issues for both the parent and the child.

The researchers suggest engaging in positive parenting practices, including setting realistic and clear expectations, creating healthy boundaries and following predictable routines. Those are great starting points, especially for parents with young children, but there are other steps you can take as well:

Monitor your social media use

Social media has some benefits: It keeps us all connected, it’s fun, and it’s a healthy escape in small doses. But it also has downsides. Comparison culture is fueled by endless scrolling, we don’t always see the story beneath the story, and frequent use can correlate to feelings of low self-esteem.

There are two social media tricks that can be life-changing for adults: Mute accounts (you’re the only one who will know!) that leave you feeling stressed and set a time limit using your phone settings. You’re better off binging your favorite show on Netflix than jealous-scrolling and feeling defeated as a result.

Embrace ‘good enough’

While perfection across contexts has long been a norm in our society, we would do well to tap into the work of Dr. Donald Winnicott. The pediatrician made a splash in the field of parenting in the 1950s when he introduced the concept of “the good enough mother.” Noting that perfectionism is often counterproductive, Winnicott cautioned that no child seeks perfection from parents; they simply seek connection, physical needs and emotional safety.

I suggest updating that language to “the good enough caregiver,” but otherwise the principles hold up. To attempt perfection in child-rearing is to set kids up for a lifetime of stress and disappointment. Human beings are not perfect. Rather, doing our best on any given day is a far more realistic portrayal of how the world works.

Reframe your thinking

Lahey suggests stepping back from monitoring for signs of perceived achievement. “Our kids need to know we love them no matter what grade, point or score they bring home,” she said. “Our children are more than the sum of their accomplishments and we — their parents — are not measured by those things either.”

Lahey cautions parents to remember that parenting is a long-haul job with peaks and valleys and that kids can and do learn from their mistakes along the way.

Quit the competition

One thing that will always remain true is that all children learn and grow at their own developmental paces. Milestones are simply goalposts to monitor for the extremes, but they are flexible. No two children are the same.

You have the choice to step back, decrease the classes, sports and other activities you feel are essential because of external expectations, and find the right pace for your family. I often encourage parents to use a whiteboard calendar to write down every single thing they have to do in a week and then step back and remove at least two things. Small changes can reap big rewards, including decreased parental stress and burnout.

You can quit the competition, and your kids will be better for it.

Dr. Katie Hurley is the senior clinical advisor for The Jed Foundation, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, and the author of several books, including “No More Mean Girls: The Secret to Raising Strong, Confident, and Compassionate Girls” and the forthcoming “Fiona McPhee, Please Listen to Me!”

Just how bad are ultraprocessed foods? Here are 5 things to know

When you open a bag of nacho-flavoured chips or cheese puffs, you probably know that you’re about to indulge in an unhealthy snack.

The dead giveaway? It’s the yummy, spicy, cheesy, neon-orange dust that coats each morsel and gets all over your fingers. Ditto for a frozen pizza and chicken nuggets.

But what about a granola bar? An applesauce pouch? String cheese? Flavoured yogurt? Surely these foods — snacks that millions of children and adults eat every day — are not bad, right?

Well, it turns out that many fall under the category of ultraprocessed foods — depending on their exact ingredients. This type of food has been studied a lot lately, and the results aren’t great.

Ultraprocessed foods represent a relatively new way of categorizing foods. Proposed in 2009 by researchers at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, the system, called NOVA, is based not on what kind of food it is — meat, grains, vegetables, etc. — but rather on how processed it is.

NOVA separates foods into four groups, starting with natural and minimally processed foods in the first category to ultraprocessed foods, which use industrial formulations and manufacturing techniques, in the fourth.

“My operating definition for ultraprocessed (foods) is you can’t make it in your home kitchen because you don’t have the machinery and you don’t have the ingredients,” food policy expert Dr. Marion Nestle told CNN Medical Correspondent Meg Tirrell on the Chasing Life podcast recently. Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of nutrition, food studies and public health, emerita, at New York University.

Ultraprocessed foods contain additives such as flavour enhancers, colours and thickeners — basically ingredients you wouldn’t usually use in your cooking. It makes them shelf-stable, easy to prepare (just heat and serve) and in many cases hard to resist. (The food industry pushes back on the NOVA system, saying there is no agreed-upon scientific consensus on the definition of ultraprocessed.)

Due to a confluence of historical, regulatory and economic factors, Nestle said, food companies in the 1980s “did a lot of work on trying to figure out what flavour and texture and colour combinations would be most attractive to people and started producing foods that would make them lots of money.”

She said tens of thousands of new products have hit store shelves since then. “Most of them fail, but the ones that win, win big,” Nestle said.

Before you reach for that can of soda, bag of chips or frozen dinner, why not learn more about what you’re eating? Here are five things to know about ultraprocessed foods:

Ultraprocessed foods are linked to bad health outcomes

Eating a lot of ultraprocessed foods isn’t healthy.

“Now there have been more than 1,500 observational studies — all of them demonstrating a consistent finding, which is that eating ultraprocessed foods is linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, certain cancers, bad outcome from COVID-19, overall mortality,” Nestle said. “Any bad health problem you can think of that’s related to diet is related specifically to ultraprocessed foods.”

The most recent study, published Wednesday in The BMJ journal, analyzed more than 30 years’ worth of data and found that eating ultraprocessed foods was associated with a 4% higher risk of death by any cause, including a 9% increased risk of neurodegenerative deaths. Other studies have linked ultraprocessed foods to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, cancer and mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression.

Nestle pointed out that these studies have been observational and not designed to prove causation — that ultraprocessed foods caused these bad health outcomes.

“You can do that when you have a controlled clinical trial,” she said. “And guess what? We have one.”

Ultraprocessed foods cause weight gain

That one randomized, controlled clinical trial showed that ultraprocessed foods actually caused people to gain weight.

These types of studies are not easy or cheap to undertake, which is why they are not done more often. To conduct this one, Dr. Kevin Hall, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, had 20 volunteers spend four weeks living at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

For two weeks, they ate a diet made up of 80% healthy ultraprocessed foods (think yogurt and whole wheat bread, not chips and soda). For the other two weeks, they ate a diet that contained no ultraprocessed foods. The diets were matched, among other things, for calories, sugar, fat, fibre and macronutrients. Participants did not know what exactly the study was measuring.

“We basically just asked people, you know, just eat as much or as little of the food that you’d like,” Hall told Tirrell. “You shouldn’t be trying to change your weight, (you) shouldn’t be trying to gain weight or lose weight. Just eat to the same level of appetite as you normally would.”

Researchers found that when the participants were on the ultraprocessed diet, they ate about 500 calories more per day than when they were on the minimally processed one. This difference in calories translated quickly to the scale. Participants gained on average 2 pounds during the two weeks on the ultraprocessed diet and lost 2 pounds on the minimally processed one. And their blood work showed lower markers of inflammation when they were on the latter.

“If you’re not familiar with nutrition research, you have no idea what an important finding this is,” said Nestle, who was not involved in the study. “Five hundred calories is huge.”

Hall said it’s unclear what drives people to consume more calories when they are on an ultraprocessed diet. “One of the things that we’re really interested in now,” he said, “is to figure out what the mechanisms were.”

Ultraprocessed foods are hard to avoid

Ultraprocessed foods are everywhere, and most of us consume them without even realizing it — even when you think you are eating something relatively healthy, such as baked potato chips or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, researchers found that ultraprocessed foods make up more than half of American adults’ diets. For U.S. children, that percentage is even higher, at 67%.

Ultraprocessed foods are cheap and convenient

Yup, that’s right: Truly eating “clean” costs more.

“To actually create the minimally processed menu, it was about 40% more expensive than the ultraprocessed menu,” Hall said. “That doesn’t even account for the time that it takes to make the foods, right? So, all those factors probably play a huge role in … the foods that we choose to eat in the real world.”

Not all ultraprocessed foods are bad

Some ultraprocessed foods can provide important nutrients, such as whole wheat bread and yogurt. And others, in Hall’s study, were shown not to increase caloric intake.

“The snacks were neutral in terms of how many calories (the participants) ate,” Hall said. “Which goes to show that not all ultraprocessed foods necessarily drive this effect.”

Hall’s team is conducting a new study to tease out which ultraprocessed foods are harmful and which are neutral, or even healthy.

Americans may soon get more help sorting through the health effects of ultraprocessed foods. The US Department of Agriculture and the US Food and Drug Administration will soon issue new Dietary Guidelines, which are updated every five years. Nestle said that the scientific advisory committee guiding this process has been asked to consider the connection between ultraprocessed foods and poor health outcomes.

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 Deciding on Your Focal Point
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What is the focal point in your room?  What is your best tip to find harmony and balance through your home?