Parenthood and Decision Fatigue
The amount of decisions in parenting can feel so constant. From big life decisions like where your children go to school or pre-school, to smaller every day decisions like what to have for breakfast or dinner, and what snacks to prepare for a family day out.
Sometimes it feels like you are never not deciding on something. Sometimes the feeling of always deciding in daily life makes each decision itself feel harder to make, and make you feel very mentally exhausted.
This is called decision fatigue, and many people, especially parents, experience it in life.
Without a village, this is experienced much more often. When you have less people to turn to for support or help, all decision making and mental processing is on one or two people at all times.
This means that one or two people never truly have a break from deciding things or mentally weighing things up on a daily basis.
You don’t experience your little humans going to their grandparents for dinner on any night of the week, or to stay over, you don’t go over to a family member’s house for the day or enjoy time with a circle of friends where organisation and practical decisions are shared across more people.
It is always you, deciding what to have for dinner, when you will do certain activities, how to fit things into your day, what snack to make or pack for an outing, and what is the best plan at any given time.
It can also feel harder when there is no one to turn to for perspective. Sometimes you just want to ask someone what has worked for them in the past, whether a product is worth looking into buying, or how they handled a particular developmental stage with their kids. Without other people to bounce ideas off of, every decision requires more research, more reviewing, more energy and it can all feel much harder.
There can also be a feeling that decisions are a bit heavier when you do not have a village. When there are less people there for you and your family, there is pressure in feeling every decision being on your shoulders. There is no one else sharing any of the responsibility, reassuring you when you need it, sharing their take on things or maybe helping you think over everything. Smaller decisions can feel bigger because there is no wider network helping with the mental load of any of them.
It is completely normal that without external support and extra people to turn to and to help you with decisions, there is more exhaustion and overwhelm sometimes. Your brain is more tired because it is doing more in there without any breaks.
When you have been running for a long time on no real time buffer between decisions, no matter how small any given choice is, things can feel tiring, foggy and you can lose some clarity.
It makes all the sense in the world to feel like this sometimes, when you are always mentally “on”, and always processing something.
It is okay to feel the absence of support and a consistent circle around you to make it all feel lighter, even if you are confident and great at researching, assessing, and have a really strong intuition. All parents get mentally tired, especially with no support network around them.
Be gentle with yourself this week.