Why It Matters to Prioritise Yourself as a Parent

by Suzie Booth, Counsellor/Psychotherapist, (MSc. MBACP Accred).

There’s something quite significant about choosing to spend time on yourself as a parent. Not in a grand, dramatic way, but in a quiet, often uncomfortable one.

Because for many parents, anything that is for them tends to sit right at the bottom of the list.

There are always other things that feel more urgent. More important. More deserving of your time and energy...

Children who need you. A home that needs managing. Work. Relationships. The endless, invisible list that runs constantly in the background.

So even pausing for a moment to reflect on your own experience, how parenting actually feels for you, can feel unfamiliar. Sometimes even indulgent.

And yet, it matters.

Because parenting isn’t just something you do. It’s something you live inside of. It shapes your days, your energy, your relationships, your sense of self. It affects how you feel when you wake up in the morning, and how you feel at the end of the day. It touches almost every part of your life.

And so often, the focus is entirely on the child.

How they are doing. What they need. How to support them.

But much less attention is given to the parent.

To you.

To your experience of carrying all of this.

Over the years, both in my work as a psychotherapist and in my own experience as a parent, I’ve seen just how significant that gap is. Parenting is something most people choose. It’s something they want. And yet, it still has the capacity to completely turn their world upside down.

Not because something has gone wrong.

But because of how much it asks of you.

And that can be confusing.

Because when something is both deeply wanted and deeply challenging, it doesn’t always feel easy to talk about. It can feel like you should just be grateful. Like you shouldn’t struggle. Like this is simply what parenting is, and you should cope.

So a lot of the experience stays internal. Unspoken. Unprocessed. Carried quietly.

And over time, that can start to feel heavy.

What I want to offer here is something simple, but important:

Your experience of parenting matters.

Not just how things look from the outside. Not just whether your child is doing well.

But how it feels for you to be in it. Because when we don’t make space to understand that experience, we tend to default to self-judgement.

We assume: “I should be coping better” “Why am I finding this so hard?” “Other people seem to manage”

And without somewhere to pause and reflect, those thoughts can start to feel like facts.

Taking time to look at your experience, even briefly, doesn’t fix everything. But it does begin to shift something. It allows you to step slightly out of the constant doing, and into noticing.

To begin to understand what you’re carrying. To recognise the impact it’s having. To see yourself more clearly.

And from that place, something important starts to grow:

Understanding. Compassion. A sense that maybe this isn’t about failure.

But about the reality of what you’re holding.

And that is where change begins.