Parenting Myth #1: I Should Have This Figured Out By Now
False. Believing we need to know everything is the fastest way to missing what matters most.
Summer strips parenting down to its core.
No school bell. No separation. Just long days, short fuses, and the quiet pressure to enjoy it all.
But what makes this season especially heavy isn’t the logistics.
It’s the mental weight—the invisible standards we carry without question, and the belief that it wouldn't feel this hard if we were doing it right.
In this five-part series, The Myths Making Parenting Harder Than It Has to Be, we’re naming those beliefs for what they are: myths. I can’t make the work lighter, or the chaos quieter. But if we can drop the pressure that doesn’t belong to us, we might just move through this season with more clarity—and a little less self-doubt.
Let’s start with the one we rarely say out loud, but almost always feel:
Shouldn’t I have this figured out by now?
There’s an invisible pressure baked into modern parenting: if we care, we’ll study. If we study, we’ll get it. And if we get it, we’ll do it “right.” That mindset turns curiosity into credential-chasing. It treats uncertainty like incompetence.
It makes parenting feel less like a relationship and more like a test.
And it’s counterintuitive to the truth—
The parent who thinks they’ve figured it all out is the one most likely to miss what matters.
Parenting isn’t about mastering a fixed set of objectives.
It’s about staying responsive in a relationship that evolves in real time.
There’s no algorithm for raising a human.
No parenting expert who knows our kid better than we do.
And no version of us that’s supposed to have this all figured out.
We confuse love with certainty.
We think if we’re doing it well, we’ll feel steady.
We’ll know what to say. We’ll trust every instinct.
But a lot of parenting is trial, error, and repeat.
It’s showing up unsure, but still showing up.
And that’s not failure. That’s presence.
Even if today we were voted parent of the year—responsive, patient, attuned—we’ve never parented who our child will be tomorrow.
Kids are shape-shifting constantly.
Their needs, moods, interests, fears—they evolve at full speed.
This means that even if we’ve finally found our rhythm, we can’t count on it to hold.
It’s like being a freshman on repeat—only we never know when the first day of school is coming.
We finally figured out how to help our toddler fall asleep without the twenty-minute meltdown—and then boom, they start skipping naps and bedtime becomes a cage match.
Our 12-year-old opens up about school one night like we’re best friends, and they respond to every question the next week with a shrug.
Just when we think we’ve cracked the code, the code rewrites itself.
That doesn’t mean we’re failing.
It means we’re parenting.
Parenting isn’t a job with mastery. It’s a bond with momentum.
And momentum only comes when we stop waiting to “arrive” and start letting ourselves adapt.
So why does this myth feel so hard to shake?
Because we’re bombarded with information, and we mistake access for expertise.
Because we’re scared—of messing up, missing out, or making the wrong call—and knowing “enough” feels like protection.
Because opinion is everywhere, and judgment is baked into the culture.
And sometimes, it’s easier to chase certainty than sit with nuance.
But our kids don’t need parents who know everything.
They need us to stay soft when things get hard.
To learn out loud.
To not confuse confusion with failure.
The more pressure we feel to have it all figured out, the less present we become. The more we fear mistakes, the more rigid our parenting gets. And rigid parenting isn’t responsible—it’s reactive. It trades connection for control.
It makes us more focused on managing appearances than nurturing trust.
We stop being honest about what we don’t know.
We start pretending we’re steady—even when we’re not.
That doesn’t make us strong. It makes us stuck.
Let’s let ourselves be in process. Let our parenting be alive. That doesn’t mean chaos or neglect. It just means we don’t have to pretend we know what we’re doing when what we’re really doing is learning as we go.
That kind of humility isn’t weakness—it’s the foundation of trust.
Because if we can be honest about our uncertainty, our kids learn they can be too.
And if we can model curiosity instead of defensiveness, they’ll learn to do the same.
We don’t need to be sure of everything. We need to be steady enough to stay close—and humble enough to keep learning.
We don’t need to be the experts.
We need to be in the room—with our eyes open, our egos quiet, and our willingness to adjust intact.
That’s not inadequate parenting.
That’s parenting wide awake.
Other Parenting Myths:
I love this and maybe our kids feel the same. Just when they think they have our code figured out. It gets rewritten because we in turn are evolving, growing, learning parallel to them. It’s a beautiful journey - especially travelled together.
Oh so true…20 years into parenting and it’s still a mystery sometimes!