Supporting Shattered Mums & Dads With Nutritional Therapy

It’s all too common for parents to feel exhausted whilst trying their best to be the perfect mum or dad. Mum-of-two Catherine Morgan signed up to a new course in search of her own waning mojo

- Catherine Morgan

I cannot describe the true exhaustion that I feel as a mum,” says Emma, a working mum-of zone. “I have never experienced anything like this and I did nightshifts, on calls, and worked [as a midwife] for 27 hours in a row.”

Emma’s experience may sound extreme, but she isn’t alone. I have had enough ‘I’m so tired’ conversations with too many mums to know that parental exhaustion is a very real issue. So when Emma says that, sometimes, going to work makes for a far easier day than being at home, I nod in agreement. Modern parenting, it seems, is taking its toll.

Understanding the cause

Research on parental exhaustion was once exclusively concerned with parents of sick children. But now, there is growing interest in parental burnout within families of healthy children as well. Last year, a Belgian study published in Frontiers in Psychology reported on the experiences of five exhausted mothers.1 The women were all aged 30 to 42 and had two children; two worked full-time, one worked part-time, one had stopped working, and the other was on sick leave.

For these mums, exhaustion was found to be “rooted in a tendency to over-invest one’s parental role, with a desire to be perfect and an overwhelming sense of responsibility for one’s children’s future, which would leave no respite”.