How to Manage the Unnecessary Anxiety of Parenting

Parents, have you ever felt torn between expert parenting advice and your own motherly or fatherly instincts?

Recommendations that once felt like hard rules can completely reverse over the years. When advice changes, parenting can feel confusing and overwhelming. Parenting anxiety can be a real challenge.

So many parents rely solely on experts and forget the powerful intuition they already have. When advice constantly changes—from peanut butter rules to sleep positions to breastfeeding recommendations—it can create stress, anxiety, and fear that you're not doing motherhood or fatherhood "right."

In this episode, we share how to balance expert guidance with parental intuition, reduce stress, eliminate parent anxiety, and make confident decisions for your children—without the mom guilt or dad guilt.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL LEARN:

• How to stop feeling overwhelmed (even when expert advice changes)
• How to confidently trust your own instincts (even when it feels scary)
• Practical ways to use expert information without letting it control you

Intentional parenting doesn't come with a manual—but you do have intuition, wisdom, and unique knowledge of your child. When you combine that with research and expert insights, you make grounded decisions that benefit both you and your kids.

00:00 Introduction and Free Resource Announcement

00:28 Navigating Conflicting Parenting Advice

02:18 Trusting Your Parental Instincts

04:11 Balancing Expert Advice and Intuition

07:14 Practical Examples and Personal Stories

10:18 Conclusion and Next Episode Preview

When you finish listening, we’d love for you to connect with us on social media!

Follow us on Instagram and like our page on Facebook to keep the conversation going. It’s the best way to get quick tips, encouragement, and resources to help you make time for what matters most—your family.

Get our FREE resource, "30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids", by going to: parentsmakingtime.com/freeresource

Parenting is hard. Intentional parenting can seem even harder. Motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, and all that goes with those important aspects of life can make it difficult to prioritize tasks, embrace intentional living, focus on present parenting, and build family bonds. We're here to help ease your parenting anxiety so that you can stop feeling overwhelmed, find joy in your parenting journey, and build family bonds that last for generations. Here at Parents Making Time, we are all about that parent-child connection, self-care for parents, and helping you overcome mom guilt and dad guilt. If you have a question or would like to share an experience about your own parenting, please feel free to reach out to one of us! Please note, we may use your question and/or comments as a part of a Q&A Parenting Advice segment on one of our episodes.

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Transcript

Jennifer: [00:00:00] Hey, before we get started today, I wanna remind you of a free resource that we've created for you. It's called our 30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids. This is a list of quick and easy things you can do to have meaningful connection with your kids in about 30 seconds or less. You can get that by going to our website at parentsmakingtime.com/freeresource. Go there today so you can start building lasting memories one micro moment at a time. 

Anthony: As you're making parenting decisions about your own children, you've most likely heard something from your own parents like that's not what they told us to do. And it's true expert parenting advice hasn't just changed over the years. It's oftentimes completely flip flopped, and who knows, it may even flip back one day.

This can leave any parent confused and filled with stress, anxiety, and fear over what is the best thing for their children. Today, we're talking about how to navigate [00:01:00] through that and how to learn to trust your own instinct as a parent.

 This is Parents Making Time. The show that helps busy parents put family first without burning out. 

Jennifer: We are Anthony and Jennifer Craiker. We don't just give parenting tips. We help you become the parent you want to be.

So I recently saw a headline that said that doctors now recommend giving peanut butter to children under the age of two.

This caught my attention because when we had our kids in the early two thousands, we were told absolutely never give your child under two peanut butter. So I can remember being nervous the first time that I introduced peanut butter to our kids, and I watch them for reactions over the next 24 hours. But now they say the complete opposite.

They say that early introduction is the key, and that withholding it actually increased allergic reactions. I didn't know this, but apparently they started changing this recommendation back in 2015, and then over time they followed that [00:02:00] and they've actually seen a 43% decrease in peanut allergies. So this got me thinking about all the expert advice I've heard over the years and how it was.

Always different than the advice I knew my mother had received. And that confusion and stress and even anxiety can be caused by that, especially during those early years of parenting. 

Anthony: Yeah. Now we wanna preface the rest of this episode with we are. Not putting ourselves above the experts about these things.

We're not experts. We're not telling you what advice to follow or not to follow. Our purpose here is to point out that there is room for your parental instincts, even with all the expert advice that's out there. 

Jennifer: So the mistake that parents often make is that we don't think we know what our children need.

We discount our own parental intuition. Even the National Institute of Health has articles that recognize the value of parental intuition, and we need to recognize that as well. 

Anthony: Yeah, mom and dad really do [00:03:00] know best a lot of the times, even if it might conflict with conventional wisdom, we think that degrees or studies.

Always Trump instinct, and that's just not the case. Sometimes it does. A lot of times it does. There are really valuable things to be learned from those who have dedicated their life to research and scholarship and to learning about these topics that we haven't dedicated our lives to. So we're not discounting what the experts say.

We think those things are important. I'm grateful for the scientists and researchers who do really, really important work to help us know what we should. Due to the best care for our children, but sometimes our instincts. Will contradict even if it's just slightly what the experts say we should be doing.

And so practical app application of expert advice can sometimes be difficult. [00:04:00] We really need to dial in to our own intuition and make sure. That we are comfortable with the decisions that are being made for the health and welfare of our own children. 

Jennifer: Yeah. We get so stuck in our belief that we don't want to change.

So I can think of an example of that with our kids. It was when we had our first daughter and I was so sure I've had read so much about how breastfeeding was so much better for our babies. There are scientific articles, there are facts about that, right? It can be a very hot button issue, but breastfeeding didn't go well for me.

I wasn't good at it. I remember feeling like a failure. I felt like it was something that should have been easy and it just wasn't, and it became stressful and I just kept trying and worrying, and I just was. Was making myself unwell and my mom's best friend was a lactation consultant, and it wasn't until she sat me down and said this to me that I finally got it.

She said, Jennifer, it's okay to stop and give her [00:05:00] formula because it, that's not gonna make you a bad mom. In fact, in this case, it will make you a better mom because a happy and healthy mom is much better for a baby than breast milk. I realized then that my instinct was telling me to stop, but I was so caught up in the experts.

That I wasn't putting myself or my instinct before their advice. 

Anthony: Yeah. And. As you said, you were making yourself unwell during that time, and there are real consequences to doing this. Getting so caught up in doing the exact right thing based on what the data and science and experts say that we can cause ourself really unnecessary stress and anxiety.

It can result in decreased confidence as a parent. It can result in fear, constantly being afraid that something's gonna happen to our child, which feeds into anxiety and worry and stress, and it's this, just this vicious cycle and it can. Ultimately affect your day-to-day [00:06:00] functioning as a parent, not just your own happiness, but your ability to actually function as a parent.

Jennifer: Yeah, so what we're wanting to put out there today is to allow yourself to give yourself that room to make choices for your child. Our children don't come with a handbook. Our medical providers should be part of our team, but they're not necessarily the rule of law. They don't get to tell you everything that you're gonna do.

So we use them as our team, right? Our village. 

Anthony: Yeah. One thing I absolutely love about our pediatrician, and I'm so grateful that we were able to find our doctor many years ago for our kids. 'cause he's, he's just phenomenal. One thing I love about this doctor that we've had for years is that when he shares his thoughts, it's a conversation with us.

It's not directions or directives. In fact, even when the kids get older. He starts including them in the conversation and he always tells them, this is between you and your [00:07:00] parents what you do, but here are my thoughts and here's what I think would be best. 

Jennifer: Yeah. He really does enable us to use our parental instinct and intuition, but gives us the knowledge to help us make those choices.

Anthony: Yeah. He empowers us to do 

Jennifer: it. Exactly. I feel like we learned for ourselves over these various experiences and more than we've just shared when our kids were small, that we had to find a balance between expert advice and parental instinct. And another example that I think of how we learned this had to do with sleeping.

When we had children, we started having children in the early two thousands. And I can remember my mom telling me that, you know, she always put her babies to sleep on their stomachs. And somewhere in the 1990s that changed. And you know, we now were being told only back, never stomach. But we learned and we recognized like our babies were sleeping so much better the times that they were actually on their tummies.

And actually. Things have changed even since then. When we were doing it, they were like, oh yeah, put a wedge behind their back or have them sleep on an incline. I was [00:08:00] reading in preparation for this episode, they, that's a no-no. Now, like you can't do those things anymore. Those are dangerous. Even remember shopping for the bumper pad?

Yeah. Bumper pads are a big no-no. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Yeah, no bumper pads anymore. We realized that our babies were sleeping better and your baby's sleeping is really important. We didn't go all. We were still cautious. We, we thought about it, we weighed the expert's advice, but we found ways.

There were times I can remember having our infants sleeping on the couch next to us for a nap when they were really small, maybe on like the nursing pillow. But I'm right next to them. And they were just sleeping so soundly. 'cause they were up on their tummies. And then as they got older, you know, they, they, they can roll.

And I had friends that would tell me they would get up in the middle of the night when their babies would roll and they would roll them back. And that just led to exhaustion for our friends. But we found ways to use the advice in a practical way that worked for us. So while we were careful about it, we found ways to allow our babies to sleep well, but still take precautions.

That [00:09:00] took advice from those experts. But like I said, we had those friends, they were exhausting themselves, trying to live by the experts. 

Anthony: And as we learned this lesson when we were young about not solely relying on what the experts say, but also trusting our own intuition. That's been beneficial because that lesson has carried over into parenting our kids when they were in their elementary school years and their teenage years, you know, into adolescence and early adulthood.

Yeah, there's expert knowledge and there's practical knowledge, and both are really valuable, and you've gotta learn to stop stressing over parenting based on what the experts and the research says currently, and find what works for you and your family. Listen to the experts, learn from the experts, learn from the data and the science.

But trust your instincts and make the decisions that are best for you and your [00:10:00] situation. Each child is different and each. Family situation is different. And so there is room for instinct and intuition in parenting. And at the end of the day, both you and your children will be happier if you do so. 

Jennifer: Yeah, for sure.

So if you liked what you heard today and you got something out of that, please if you haven't already, leave a rating or review for us wherever you've listened to us. And share this with a friend. We want others to feel empowered in their parenting as well. 

Anthony: And in our next episode, we'll be talking about a simple but powerful shift that can help you avoid parent burnout by getting your kids involved in age appropriate chores.

We'll share how to move past the guilt, how to make chores feel much more like teamwork instead of tension. And why letting your kids pitch in isn't just helpful. It actually builds responsibility. Confidence and connection. If you're tired of doing everything yourself, this episode is going to feel like a breath of [00:11:00] fresh air.

So tune in for practical tips to lighten your load and strengthen your family. Until next time, make time to become the parent you want to be.