It's Not You, It's the Emotional Labor

The unseen emotional labor of parenting doesn't just fatigue us. It actually blows our willpower fuses. But we shall return to ourselves!

By the end of this summer, I had been wondering why I had no willpower. No way to keep myself off Instagram late at night. No discipline to wake early before the kids to meditate. I’m a professor during the schoolyear, so although I have some summer expectations (writing, publishing), I’m largely supposed to be “off.” Was it just the effects of summer freedom that caused me to be so lax with structures I maintain during the schoolyear? Had I broken my disciplinary self with too much pool time? (Is that even a thing? Broken by the local pool?!)

I was bemoaning this to two friends, when my friend Isha said, “Willpower is a muscle. It gets fatigued.”

I thought maybe she was being overly generous with me. What kind of willpower (the slacker asked herself rhetorically) had I really been exerting this summer. For three months, I haven’t had to wear real pants?

Then my friend lent me the book, Willpower. And in it, I read this study, friends! This illuminating study!

Researchers asked a bunch of people to squeeze a hand exerciser for as long as they could, and then watch a sad Italian film. The subjects were told that their facial expressions would be recorded. Some subjects were asked to suppress their feelings during the film—their faces should remain stoic. Others were asked to amplify their feelings. A third group got to watch the film normally. The film was “a documentary about the effects of nuclear waste on wildlife.” So, like, really sad footage of giant sea turtles and the like.

After showing the film, the researchers had the subjects squeeze the hand exerciser again. The film didn’t affect the control group’s ability to squeeze the exerciser—those folks who could feel their feelings however they wanted. But it impacted the other groups: Both the people who had to suppress their emotions and the people who had to amplify them quit squeezing much sooner than before.

“It takes more than just physical strength to grip a hand exercise and keep squeezing it against the force of the spring,” writes Rov F. Baumeister and John Tierney in Willpower. “After a short time, the hand grows tired and then gradually starts to feel muscle pain. The natural impulse is to relax, but you can will yourself to keep squeezing—unless your mind has been too busy suppressing other feelings.” Like the feelings you get while watching sea turtles flap aimlessly in the desert, searching for the sea.

Anyone who has kids knows that a significant bulk of the job is managing your feelings. Amplify your somewhat nonexistent excitement about the stuff they love (like the tiny flying pig they just purchased for 75 cents. “That’s awesome!”) Suppress the strange, unnamed feelings you don’t want them to see (like the fact that the Barbie film stirred up residual rage re: your dumb college crush and his aloof, self-centered guitar-playing. Focus instead on the jokes. “Wasn’t it funny!?”)

This is tiring! This takes work! We parents do this all day long when our kids are around.

I mean, sure, we also have genuine connections with our kids, and can sometimes be real with them about how we’re feeling—which can be good for them to see. (E.g. “Mom feels sad because someone died. Grief is real and okay.”)

But also, there’s this: “Yes, I’m super interested in your recapping of your dream about spider fairies! Yes, I’m very sympathetic to the pain you now feel after you chose to balance the family’s 64-ounce thermos on your head and then it fell on your toe!”

And there’s also this, “No, I’m not suddenly stricken with August-Scaries re: my concerns about your future teacher. No, this furrowed brow isn’t existential dread about the shortening of days and the impending Darkness of Winter. Nope. Mom is good.”

When our kids are around most of the time, which is the case for me in the summer, we aren’t just nourishing their bodies and encouraging their minds and managing their screen-time and corralling their chore-doing while also juggling our domestic and paid labor. We’re also engaging constantly in emotional regulation that, if we had a quiet house, we wouldn’t need to do.

Here are the authors of Willpower about those poor movie-watchers: “The effort to control their emotional reactions depleted their willpower. Faking it didn’t come free.”

This is kind-of blowing my mind: that having to suppress certain emotions and amplify others taxes our willpower. Which means it makes us less able to spend that willpower on other things that might also matter to us (like getting off Instagram at a reasonable hour.)

So, hooray! It’s not us. We’re not weaklings by the end of the summer. We’re also not lazy or undisciplined. We’re just tired. Tired from the very well-meaning and sometimes necessary emotional labor of parenting.

I will continue to protect my kids from certain Big Feelings they don’t need to see—and that I want to keep to myself. I will continue to amplify the faint thread of emotions that I want to show them so they’re affirmed and supported.

But all of this means that, when we get a little more space (hopefully this fall) to feel our real feelings—or to even find those feelings—we’ll return to some equilibrium.  

Cheers to Back-To-School, friends. May your kids haul their backpacks with ease. May the August-scaries transition into golden September beauty. And may you have a big fat cry on a Thursday, if that’s what you need.