Parenting Guilt Explained: Why You Feel It (and What to Do Instead)

Added: 2026-04-29

[00:00:00]Eating disorders don't always look the way we expect. As parents, sometimes the hardest part isn't noticing something feels off. It's figuring out what to do next.

[00:00:12]Early support can make a real difference. But finding help is often confusing, slow, or disruptive.

[00:00:20]That's why I'm excited to tell you about Equip, a virtual eating disorder treatment program that helps your child recover at home with a full care team and support for you as parents every step of the way. Equip treats all eating disorders, works with all ages, has no weight list, and is covered by insurance in all 50 states. If you're worried about your child and don't know where to start, visit equip.alth/goodside.

[00:00:47]health/goodside to learn more about Equip's eating disorder treatment. That's equip.alth/goodside.

[00:00:57]I can't tell you how many parents I've sat with who start a sentence like this.

[00:01:03]I know I shouldn't feel this way, but and what comes next is guilt. Guilt about working too much or not working enough. Guilt about losing their temper.

[00:01:14]guilt about not doing enough or somehow doing too much. And here's what I've noticed. Most parents don't actually talk about guilt directly. We talk about behavior or school or about screens. But underneath all of that, there's usually a parent wondering, "Am I screwing this up?"

[00:01:37]Welcome to the In Between Years, a podcast from Good Inside for anyone raising, caring for, or loving a tween or teen. I'm Dr. Cheryl. The in between years are that stretch when kids are no longer little but not yet fully grown.

[00:01:53]Friendships shift, emotions get bigger, identity is forming. So many moments that can leave parents wondering, "What does this all mean?"

[00:02:04]This topic of guilt is why I wanted to talk to Dr. Julie Frogga. Dr. Julie is a psychologist who specializes in maternal mental health and she has spent years studying the emotional lives of parents.

[00:02:18]Parental guilt is incredibly common, especially in the tween and teen years.

[00:02:24]But it's also incredibly misunderstood.

[00:02:27]We treat it like a signal that something is wrong. instead of asking what is this actually telling me?

[00:02:37]So, guilt is an emotion that arises when we feel like we've done something bad or wrong, right? Um, and in the science of emotions, guilt serves a very specific purpose. It's what researchers call a self-conscious emotion. It's an emotion that makes us think twice. You know, it's the reason that we may not, you know, yell at our children even when they're driving us crazy. Guilt isn't random. It actually has a job. It slows us down, makes us think twice. In small doses, it can help us be the kind of parent we want to be. But that's not how most parents experience it. For so many parents, what happens is we experience kind of an inordinate amount of guilt where we're feeling guilty even when we haven't really done anything wrong or bad. We just feel like we have. I did something wrong is not the same as I feel like I did something wrong. Let me give you a small, very real example.

[00:03:43]Your kid leaves for school and you realize they didn't eat breakfast. And instantly your brain goes to really you couldn't even make toast. And then just as quickly you start negotiating with yourself. They'll be fine. They'll eat lunch. It it's not a big deal. And maybe you move on. But that little moment is enough for a lot of parents to trigger a sense of guilt. So many of the times, whether or not we feel guilty because we didn't get up early to make our kids a homemade breakfast, or maybe it's something that doesn't have anything necessarily to do with our kids, but maybe we decided to watch an extra episode of Netflix after work instead of go for a yoga class. Um, those aren't the things often times that we're talking with other parents or our friends about. And so it leaves us kind of sitting with the emotion so much so that the bad feeling convinces us that what we're feeling is actually true. And when guilt stays inside, it gets louder.

[00:04:46]Not because it's true, because it's unchallenged. But if we had shared that at a time if it's really causing us some distress, right, with another friend, our partner, um another parent, and they're like, "Yeah, I've been there. I so get it. A lot going on." H chances are we just feel less alone in it. And I think anytime we feel less alone in an emotional experience and validated, it really helps to take the potency away from it. This is why a 30-second conversation at the bus stop can feel weirdly life-changing.

[00:05:17]You say to someone else, "I totally forgot breakfast this morning." And then that parent says, "Same."

[00:05:25]And suddenly you're not a bad parent.

[00:05:28]You're just a parent. But here's where it gets a little more complicated.

[00:05:34]Sometimes what we call guilt isn't actually guilt.

[00:05:38]>> Might also be empathy, right? You're having some empathy for her that she's having the experience that you know is her mom is going to be hard on her. This is a huge shift in mindset. And I want you to try it every time you feel that sense of guilt. A lot of what parents call guilt is actually them saying to themselves, "I feel bad that my kid feels bad."

[00:06:05]I do this more than I want to admit.

[00:06:08]Have guilt because our children are going to feel quote unquote bad or uncomfortable with something as if we're responsible for that, you know, uncomfortable or, you know, prickly emotion. um as if it's our responsibility to completely take it away. That belief right there that your job is to prevent your child from ever feeling uncomfortable, that's where guilt blooms. Because if you think that's your job, you will fail constantly.

[00:06:45]And when guilt takes over, it doesn't just sit quietly. It starts to shape your decisions. If I'm a child and if let's say I feel really sad about something and I tell my parents or their, you know, my caregivers and maybe they were never given any tools to deal with sadness, maybe it's really hard for them to kind of work through or even regulate that emotion and they say something like, "Um, you're making a big deal out of nothing. Just brush it off."

[00:07:18]You know, when the child says, "Oh, but I still feel so sad." They're like, "Oh, just need to get over it right away. Why are you, you know, you know, don't kind of be a negative person or a negative Nelly?" And the child hears that over and over and over again. But imagine that because the parent didn't have any tools to deal with their own sadness that there's never a repair um or that kind of misatunement as I would call it.

[00:07:46]What does a child learn? A child learns that in order to stay in the good graces of my parents who I love and need so much or my attachment figures, I have to push my sadness down. They do this unconsciously without realizing it. And instead, guilt will rise to the surface.

[00:08:05]So guilt turns into overgiving. You say yes to things that stretch you too far.

[00:08:12]You override your instincts. You stop holding boundaries you actually believe in. And then over time you don't just feel guilty, you feel exhausted.

[00:08:24]There's another layer here because for many of us guilt didn't start in parenting. You know, we feel guilty about something. So we say yes then when we need to say no. We don't set a boundary when we really want to. In simple terms, if growing up your feelings weren't really held, you may have learned to turn those feelings inward. So instead of feeling sad, you learned to feel guilty. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, you learned to feel like you were failing.

[00:09:01]So here's a question that can change everything.

[00:09:05]Did I actually do something wrong or do I just feel like I did?

[00:09:11]>> Great distinguisher is just asking yourself that question. Hey, have I really done anything wrong here or I do I just feel like I have, you know, to kind of use that as kind of your own emotional litmus test, so to speak.

[00:09:25]>> Most of the time, we're not dealing with huge mistakes. We're dealing with normal everyday ones. It's kind of a benign wrong, you know. It's not a catastrophic wrong. It's not like this is going to really scar my child forever wrong, you know, and to kind of be able to distinguish between the two because I think most of the things that fall under parental guilt even when we have, you know, in this case maybe didn't keep our word about something is not a catastrophic wrong. Making this distinction has the power to entirely change how you parent because guilt is useful sometimes.

[00:10:08]Sometimes it's pointing to something real, a moment where you do want to repair. Three simple steps to an apology with our kid. Let's say that we lost our cool with them, you know, because they wanted to go to the mall. The first step would be just to own our behavior. Hey, you know what? I'm really sorry that I snapped at you when you asked, you know, me to take you to the mall. Two is to acknowledge kind of their experience with some empathy. We want to step into their world. Yeah, I know when I did that that probably didn't feel great and I'm sorry.

[00:10:44]Three is to make the repair or offer to make the repair and to say, "Is there anything you'd like to talk about? We also don't have to address it right now, but I want you to know that I'm here if you have any feelings or any thoughts that you want to share with me. And again, I'm I'm really sorry. I I take full ownership for, you know, losing my cool with you. Repair doesn't have to be big. It can be three sentences. I'm sorry that probably didn't feel good.

[00:11:15]I'm here if you want to talk. And that's it.

[00:11:19]>> Less is more. you know, you don't have to explain everything that's going on in your world um in order for your child to know that you take responsibility for your behavior and the impact that it had on them. Less is more. Not just in apologies, but in how much you feel like you're supposed to carry. Here's what I want you to take with you. Guilt isn't the enemy. Guilt is information.

[00:11:52]Sometimes it's telling you, "Hey, repair this." And sometimes it's telling you you're holding yourself to an impossible standard. We're not going to not have an emotion, but the more that we can notice it and then work through it in different ways, you know, um then we're equipped to handle it differently.

[00:12:14]Sometimes you're going to feel guilt.

[00:12:18]That's not a sign you're failing. The question isn't whether guilt shows up.

[00:12:23]It's what you do next. Let's end by zooming way out. Okay, deep breath.

[00:12:35]This in between time feels like a lot because it is a lot. If you remember one thing, let it be this.

[00:12:45]They act like they don't need you. They still need you. I'll see you next week.