Is Parenting Even Hard?

In 2025, tough questions must be asked.

A discourse has sprung up in my Notes feed about whether parenting is hard. Lirpa Strike thinks a Redditor with a PhD should’ve gotten more back pats instead of being outshined by her younger, baby-bunching sister. Having babies is so “expected,” and “normal.” Shit, anyone can do it!

People all over my feed have safely confessed they do not appreciate it when mothers say their job is “the hardest in the world.” Hard eye roll. Big cringe. Is it even that difficult at all? Why are you moms high-key projecting? Why are you online so much—don’t you have to get back to your super hard job?

And you know what? I’ll readily admit: parenting isn’t the hardest job in the world, even stay-at-home mothering. Not even close. I should think being a Navy Seal is a harder job, and fixing power lines, and working a deep sea oil rig, and being a hospice nurse are all harder jobs than feeding my kids sandwiches before bumming around in my sweatpants for a bit.

BUT. I have to say this for, apparently, the people who are glossing motherhood for their pronatalist agenda as well as the “childfree” types trying to tear down the value of parenting so they can feel better about whatever they’re doing with their lives.

While the childless people are complaining about sloppy mumsnet hyperbole, parents are doing life with kids, which is much harder than life without kids. It’s harder than being childless and working on a PhD. It’s harder than putting in your eight hour white collar shift and clocking out to few remaining responsibilities. It’s harder than having to answer a few inconvenient emails after hours. My husband and I sometimes joke that smart childless people could be millionaires, if only they had the improved efficiency and work ethic that comes from working around their own kids’ needs. They could be insanely productive, our paradox predicts. It’s only a joke, but it holds a grain of truth.

When parents say parenting is hard, we mean it not in the sense that you need special expertise or a high IQ to do it, but in the general sense that life is hard. In the sense that waking up at 3am for a early morning shift is hard, and caring for an elderly parent is hard, and unscrambling a billing snafu is hard, and cooking dinner when you’re really exhausted is hard. When you have kids, you add both complexity and responsibility, and those increase the difficulty of your life. You also add tremendous joy and fulfillment in a way that many other hard things can’t compare, but it doesn’t mean the hard parts aren’t hard.

For instance, I may be bumming out a Substack essay in my sweatpants, but I left out that I have been nauseous and fatigued for seven weeks straight because I’m pregnant. That’s a trial of being a mother. That’s hard. Just like changing a dirty diaper when you desperately want to sleep is hard. And teaching your kid to read when they just don’t get it is hard. Or being hypervigilant lest your two year old wander in the road during her sister’s baseball game is hard, and hearing a preschooler whine for the entirety of her timeout is hard, and having to discipline your kids for talking back is hard, and not comparing yourself to other parents is hard.

Becoming a parent is the easy part. You procreate, the baby grows (during which you may or may not have a deeply unpleasant time, YMMV), you birth the baby with some screaming and bodily fluids.

Then comes the hard part: being a good parent for the rest of your children’s life, even after the really labor-intensive, really “inconvenient” first three or four years. It’s the effort, not the blood relation, that makes parenting hard, obviously. To be sure, some parents put in too much effort, expecting to get an increasing return on the satisfaction and joy of parenting. More activities, more tutoring, more doting, better meal prep. It might make you think that “baseline” parenting is just “easy mode” (how much do you really remember about your preschool years— who’s to say?) but you’d be wrong. A lot effort and discomfort goes into ensuring your kid not only survives, but becomes a functional adult.

And here’s the kicker: you can’t quit. You can’t return a child. You can’t fail—and when they fail, trust me, it feels like you failed. Anything that requires this level of commitment, this profound level of physical and emotional connectedness, is going to be hard.

So yes, while you might see a few too many mothers pouring thousands of words and dozens of pictures into social media every day as if they have nothing better to do than panhandle for sympathy, parenting is hard. In my experience, it has breaks, it has easier stretches, especially once children become more independent. When your kid can pour her own milk, you can sleep in an extra fifteen minutes. It isn’t the hardest job in the world, but it’s still hard.