More and more, I’m drawn to a quieter kind of parenting – and it’s not always easy.Illustration by Sarah Farquhar
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Recently, I found myself frantically checking my phone between loading the laundry and refereeing a sibling dispute over a blue marker. There was no emergency. Just a compulsion, a tiny, anxious tether to the digital noise that hums through our daily lives.
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In this moment – as mundane as any other – it hit me: our kids are growing up in a culture of overwhelm, and parents are often swept up in the same tide.
Our modern society has never had more access to information while having so little time to reflect on it than it does today. Conflicting parenting advice floods my social feeds, wellness tips interrupt my inboxes and algorithms track every click. The promise of optimization is everywhere: sleep better, parent better, work smarter, scroll less and achieve more. For parents, especially mothers, this “do more, be more” culture often cloaks itself as empowerment, when in truth it can quietly erode our peace and subject us to constant comparison and guilt.
I became a project manager of our household and a productivity machine in every other area of my life. Meanwhile, I scroll past curated lives on social media and wonder if I’m falling behind. The tension between “being present” and “doing enough” is constant and exhausting.
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But what if the most important thing I can offer my children isn’t a perfectly curated life, but a steady presence and calm? Young children aren’t developmentally equipped to regulate their emotions without their parents and the constant stimulation of modern life doesn’t make it any easier to learn. Many parents didn’t grow up with strong models of emotional regulation and it is hard to offer what we never fully received. Slowing down enough to model calm can feel almost impossible.
More and more, I’m drawn to a quieter kind of parenting, one that chooses intentionality over intensity. It’s not always easy. There’s guilt, of course, and a persistent worry that by opting out of certain expectations, I’m somehow letting my children down.
Yet when I ask myself what I want my kids to remember about their childhood, it won’t be the perfectly colour co-ordinated chore charts. It’s the small, anchoring moments of connection, such as reading the same bedtime story for the fifth night in a row, wrapped in mommy’s cuddles, or laughing together and listening to funny stories from school. It’s sitting with them when the day has left them fragile and being a home base when the world is scary.
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In many religions, there’s an ancient practice called “keeping vigil.” It’s the act of staying awake in watchfulness, sometimes in silence and sometimes in prayer, during moments of waiting or transition. I’ve started to weave this idea from my faith into my parenting. I’m resisting the need to solve or accelerate my children’s discovery of the world and simply bear witness to my children as they become who they are.
This is quite hard for those of us who are Type-A perfectionists. Presence and rest without guilt becomes a form of resistance. Slowing down doesn’t mean giving up. It means giving more patience and more grace.
It forces us to sift through the noise of expectations, peer into the quieter places where real connection grows. It often asks us to do less while trusting that less can be enough.
Sometimes that means releasing the pressure to have a spotless home or accepting that my plans will be derailed by a sick child. It may mean saying no to another extracurricular, even if everyone else’s kids are doing it. It might mean deleting an app and stepping back from comparison.
Lately, when I catch myself reaching for my phone in an anxious loop, I pause and remind myself that this imperfect and noisy moment is the one I’ve been given. My children don’t need a perfect version of me. They need a healthy and present me.
I can’t shield my kids from every algorithm or anxiety. What I can do is build a home that offers something deeper than control: trust, resilience, faith and love without performance.
And, just maybe, that will be enough.
Laura Vazquez Santos lives in Toronto.
