Doing the same tasks over and over can be grating, but is it worth it?

I first wrote this post back in November of 2014 when my daughter was 5 and my son was 1-1/2. When I recently reread it, I was struck anew by it. I am sharing it here with very minor editing. Enjoy!

Sometimes life is tedious. Sometimes motherhood is tedious. I can’t tell you how many times I wash the same dishes, fold the same clothes, put away the same toys, do the same bedtime rituals, prepare the same snacks and read the same books.  

I can’t tell you how many times I vacuum the same carpet, clean off the same countertop, change the same sheets and drive the same route to and from preschool. It’s a lot.  

Being home with two small children is predictably unpredictable. Every day some things are the same. Every day some things are different. It’s tedious. It’s exhausting. It’s consuming. It’s draining. But, is it worth it?

Recognizing the tediousness

I was reheating homemade potato soup for the kids’ dinner last week before we left for the evening to do some work with family. The kids were in the living room playing contently with my husband — a fact for which I was grateful. My toddler is very impatient when it comes to food and likes to orbit around me wailing while I prepare most meals. It’s delightful.  

I had on my favorite Christian station. I’m more a fan of music and less a fan of talk on the radio, but in between songs when my hands were too busy to change the station, the DJ came on. He read a story from “Guideposts” about a man who had worked on Mt. Rushmore who shared how tedious the job was and how he learned that even tedious tasks are important to the big picture.  

The woman interviewing him then related that to her own life and the tedious tasks of raising her sons and all that entailed. However, her sons are now grown and the tediousness is gone; she sits and looks at the grown men she has raised and is proud. The tedious tasks she did for them helped create a wonderful finished product.

The story hit my heart. Tears filled my eyes immediately as I realized I am most definitely in the tedious phase of motherhood. I finished cutting some grapes and buttering some bread and called the kids to the table. As we ate our dinner and chatted, my toddler son had a rough evening. He’s cutting a tooth and he can be quite grumpy about it. He’s also obsessed with raisins and wants them all the time for every meal and really only raisins would be just fine by him. I don’t agree that he can survive solely on raisins, so mealtimes are often a battlefield right now.  

During a very short respite in our dinnertime battles, I sent up a fervent prayer while the message from the radio lingered in my heart, “Lord, please let this all be worth it. Let my children grow up to be awesome people.”

Looking ahead

It’s tedious. It’s hard. It’s all-consuming. I know. I’ve said these things already, but I feel the need to say them again because they are so very true. I’d like to think that it will all be worth it. I don’t think I’d mind a small peek at the future to see my children living their lives as thriving, intelligent, caring and loving adults who I somehow didn’t manage to completely mess up.  

That look at the future isn’t possible, though. So I will just have to keep trusting that every day, every small task I do repeatedly and in the midst of chaos is worth it. I have to remind myself that the more goodness from me and from God that I pour into my children, the more goodness they’ll pour back out into the world. And this world can always use more goodness.

I see glimpses of what the future might look like for my children as they grow up. I’m not sure what their occupations will be. Right now my daughter wants to be a doctor, a paleontologist or an art teacher. Right now what I see in her is a sweet spirit full of encouragement for others. I see in her a great compassion and willingness to love with a big heart. That will serve her well in the future. She will excel at making friends and making people feel valued. She already does.

My son is younger, so I’ve not had as much time to get to know him and he can’t yet communicate to me what he wants to be when he grows up, but I see a tenacity in him. He is determined and won’t give up on something he wants. While that’s frustrating to me while he’s a toddler and what he wants is something that isn’t safe for him, this character trait will serve him well in the future as he pursues his dreams and goals. I see in him an ease to laugh and love. He laughs more easily than any child I’ve been around. I adore it. I hope he always retains that inner joy.

Reminding moms of their importance

Where are you today? Are you with me stuck in the tedious tasks of motherhood that sometimes seem to drain your very life force? Are you wondering if all the hard work will be worth it in the end? Will we one day forget this tedious phase just like we have (mostly) forgotten the pain of childbirth? I think so.  

Of course I don’t have all the answers. My journey is far from complete with my children. We have a long way to go, but I am going to keep pressing forward, putting one foot in front of the other, completing one tedious task after the next because that’s what a long line of moms has done before me and it worked out for them.  

I will also keep moving forward and doing everything I can for my children simply because they need me and I love them in an all-consuming way that keeps me moving even when I’d much rather lie down and sleep for two weeks. Tedious? Yes. Worth it? Definitely!

Being intentional in what we post on social media about our kids is important

From before they were even born, my kids have had a presence on social media. I shared on Facebook about being pregnant, their gender ahead of time and photos of ultrasounds. I didn’t share their names until they were born, because my husband and I didn’t share names ahead of time with anyone else.

And I’m not alone. Most modern parents share about pregnancy, childbirth and their children on social media. Having a baby and being a parent is a huge part of our lives, so it makes sense that it would come up on social media, which is designed around people sharing what’s going on in their lives.

It doesn’t take long, however, for social media sharing about our kids to get a bit murky. For some moms it can start even before the baby is born when people weigh in on your pregnancy decisions. And then it can creep up when moms post about how they’re feeding the baby or share a photo of the baby in his or her carseat. Someone else has different opinions and feels welcome to share them on social media in a way they probably wouldn’t in real life.

While I’ve learned to filter some of what I post about my kids to avoid dealing with controversy, I’ve also become more and more aware about how what I share about my kids affects them. Some things are OK to share. Other things aren’t.

Asking ourselves a few questions before firing off a post about our kids, even our new babies, is important more than ever as social media continues to grow and expand.

1. How will the post make your child feel if he or she reads it in the future?

I have to start here, because I think this is the most important question to ask before posting something about your child. It may be easy when kids are babies to not even think about them one day reading or being on social media. But the fact is one day they will be. If your kids one day scroll through your old posts, how will they feel about what you’re saying about them and about your feelings as a parent?

The baby days are hard. In fact, I’d say my children’s newborn days were some of the most challenging times of my life, because it’s all encompassing and utterly exhausting. Babies challenge you to the core of yourself and then some. The first baby brings a whole new normal that takes some adjustment.

Posting on Facebook about how awful it is, how irritating your baby or toddler is or even wondering if you should have had kids is not something that your child is going to feel great about reading.

I have a friend who remembers her mother saying that she was so tired after giving birth that she didn’t even want to hold her new baby (my friend). While my friend understood her mom’s feelings, that also smarted.

Parents have a need to vent and need to find support. Doing so openly on social media isn’t the place for it. One of the biggest reasons that’s true is so one day your kids won’t read through posts and think, “Did my mom want me?” “Did she enjoy any of my childhood?” Those are not questions we want our children to ask.

2. Would you share the information with a random stranger?

Of course you have your social media accounts locked down. And you aren’t friending everyone and their brother, but you are still talking to a lot of people who you aren’t close to when you are posting on social media. If you are sharing information that you wouldn’t share with a random stranger, then it might not be social media appropriate.

As a parent, especially during the early years, you deal with all of your child and his or her parts. If you wouldn’t share with a random stranger about what’s going on in your child’s diaper in detail, then don’t share it on social media either.

3. Are you OK with your child knowing this information?

I’m not advocating having secrets from your children, but the fact is there are some things my kids don’t need to know. Right now that’s mostly because of their ages, but there are also other things they don’t need to be reminded of or know about in general.

If I want to share something in any way related to my children or our family then that I don’t want them to know now, then I shouldn’t be posting it on social media — even for the fact that someone might bring up the topic with my kiddos.

4. If your child’s teen peers found the post, how would/could they use it?

Kids can be cruel. And social media has upped that game immensely. I’ve got a whole other blog post coming about our kids using social media, but we have to think about these things as well. A Pew Research Center study shows that 59% of teen boys and 60% of teen girls say they have been cyber-bullied.

While a photo of your toddler sitting on a potty chair might be cute and mark a milestone for them, their peers might use such photo in a cruel way. Take the photo, but don’t post it on social media.

I know there are girls I went to school with who would have jumped on embarrassing photos of me to do things with if they had had access. Fortunately back then those photos only existed in photo albums or my baby book and weren’t readily available online. (My parents also did well at keeping all private areas well covered in photos.)

Aside from photos, sometimes just information can be hurtful and used against your kids. Posts about how they are still wetting the bed at an older age or are scared of the dark as a 12-year-old are just asking for the wrong kid to use that information in a hurtful way. We certainly don’t want to make cyber-bullying easier!

5. Could this post hurt your child’s chance at a scholarship or job?

While you should have your social media accounts well locked down (there is a whole other post about safety on the way), we also need to be aware that the information could somehow get out because breeches happen. And, along with that, 57% employers currently are checking social media accounts of their potential employees. That number will only grow. Posts and photos that you’ve tagged of your children could show up on their accounts.

So a post about how awful your teen is at cleaning their room, being on time or doing homework is probably not in their best interest in the long run. Not only could it hurt their feelings, it could also hurt their chances for success, which isn’t something any parent wants.

6. Could a child predator use this in an unsavory way?

Nobody wants to think about that. In fact, I debated about whether to even include this question, but it’s incredibly important. Unfortunately these things need to be taken into consideration before sharing photos.

And, again, even with having your account locked down, there are still some things that aren’t appropriate to share. Information dealing with a child’s bathing suit area is not OK to share in photographic or verbal form.

Another consideration is oversharing personal information that makes it easy for a child predator to find or engage with your child. While you might have your personal social media account locked down, consider what you are posting on public social media accounts as well. It can be very easy sometimes to piece together information and track down people just by what they post on other pages and accounts.

7. Will the post add pressure to your child to be perfect or brag worthy?

Social media brings the desire for perfection and showing your best face to a whole new level. (Check out my post on how social media impacts moms.) While that’s true for parents, it’s also true for kids. My kids have each told me at different times to take a photo of something they’re doing and share it on Facebook. I usually take the photo, but I don’t always share it. It just depends on what they’re doing.

I try to be real in my social media accounts. I don’t want to show a version of myself that is perfect and certainly doesn’t exist. I don’t want to do the same with my children either. However, that doesn’t mean I have to post all the negative things or all the positive things. I am so proud of my children for so very many things. I brag on them in front of them when I can. I tell them what I’m proud of them for. I encourage them when they are struggling.

But, I never want to put pressure on them to be perfect, because I know they aren’t. That means I don’t want to be posting only big things on social media. I can tell you things about my kids that would impress you, but that’s not what is most important about them. What’s most important is the people they are and how much I love being their mom, even on the hard days. I don’t want them to ever feel I have created a social media image or any image of them that they have to be perfect to live up to.

8. Does the post betray your child’s privacy or trust?

Our kids deserve a right to privacy with us. We should be their safe place they can count on and that means not always sharing everything about them. They have fears, shortcomings and stresses that may seem cute or funny to us at the time, but they are very real to our kiddos whether they are 5 or 15.

We shouldn’t ever share something on social media that our kids wouldn’t want us to. Once they are older, ask them before sharing things that seem even remotely private or personal. Even as babies, be careful to not overshare private information.

We also don’t want to betray their trust by taking to social media to make fun of our kids for something they are doing or struggling with. We have to be careful of poking fun at our children and inadvertently becoming a cyber bully!

This post is part of Families with Grace’s Social Media Savvy series that covers a commonsense approach to handling social media as a parent. Check out these other posts from the series:

A commonsense approach to handling social media as a parent

Social media is everywhere. According to Pew Research Center, 72% of Americans use some type of social media in 2019. Even more remarkable is that number was only 5% in 2005!

To say that social media has grown by leaps and bounds is an understatement. And my generation of parents is the first to deal with social media from the time our babies were first starting to grow in our bellies and onward.

Social media is its own beast to conquer as a parent guiding our children. It has become so prevalent in our culture that even toddlers will reference posting something on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube. I’d daresay my kids’ generation should be rightly called the YouTube generation for their love of it!

While many parenting decisions lend themselves to looking at those who have gone before us and how they handled things, social media doesn’t fall into that category. I can’t tell you how my parents handled social media with me as a child, because social media wasn’t around. We are blazing a parenting trail and we need to be aware of where the trail is leading.

I don’t think social media is a big, bad evil. I use social media for my work, for my blog and for my personal life. But I do think it needs to be approached with caution and practicality. While we may fire off a post without thinking or upload a picture without a second thought, we need to be a bit more intentional.

What is coming on the blog

With all of that in mind, over the next couple of months, we are going to explore a few different topics relating to social media and parenting:

How social media impacts moms

What we should (and shouldn’t) post

How to keep our kids safe on social media

When to let kids on social media

How social media affects our kids

How you can get involved

Because we are all in this together, I’d love to hear from you about your experiences with social media and parenting. Whether you’ve done something that worked or something that failed, I’d love to hear from you to potentially incorporate your experiences into the series. I’m happy to use a pseudonym if you prefer.

You can contact me by clicking the “Contact” tab at the top of each page or by sending me a direct message through the Families with Grace Facebook page.

And if you are a fellow blogger who is interested in writing a guest post on any of the above topics (or have an additional idea that is related), please contact me as well. I’m happy to chat about how you can get involved with the series and link to your own blog.

Being firm doesn’t mean being negative.

Back in 2005, we got a Lhasa Apso puppy who we named Buckles. It was the first foray into parenthood of any sort for my husband and me.

One of the things we learned quickly as we were training the puppy is that positive reinforcement was effective. Basically, if you give a puppy a treat when he does something he should be doing then he will quickly learn to keep doing it. It worked well on Buckles. He grew into an incredibly good and well-behaved dog.

The positive reinforcement techniques also worked well for my husband and me in that they were our style anyway. Neither of us are yellers or gruff people. We were firm with Buckles as he was learning, but yelling and terrifying him wasn’t our style.

Applying positive reinforcement to our children

When our daughter was born four years later, we learned positive parenting also worked for toddlers and kiddos. Of course we didn’t give our daughter a treat every time she did something right, but we did do things like gently correct her, redirect her attention and praise her when she did something she was supposed to be doing. We continued with the same strategy for our son, who was born three years later.

Again, positive parenting fit our personalities and it worked for our kids. Just like with the dog, we were firm but focused on positive reinforcement of good habits rather than misbehavior.

Now our children are 6 and 9, and they aren’t perfect, but they are both well behaved. They both get many compliments from their teachers and other adults on their behavior. I’m thankful for that.

I won’t pretend like we are always positive, never raise our voices or get frustrated. We 100 percent do. After adding a new puppy into the mix of our family life last month, we are running a bit shorter on energy and patience around here.

But, we do our best to continue with positive parenting of both our kids and our new puppy. We strive to tell our kids what they’re doing well along with what they need to work on. We compliment them. We thank them. We recognize them.

We all love to be recognized for what we’re doing and what we’re doing well. Our kids aren’t any different. My job isn’t to make everything in my children’s lives positive or gush on with them about how awesome they are and not correct them when they need to be. But my job also isn’t to break their spirits, shame them or discourage them.

Teaching our kids about positive reinforcement

Now we are going through the puppy training stuff all over again with our puppy, Pixel. Our children are getting to see a bit of the other side of the situation. They are learning to correct, redirect and praise progress.

They’re caring, loving kids as they are helping train the puppy. Did positive reinforcement make them that way? Maybe. It certainly didn’t hurt. They have a lot left to learn. My husband and I have a lot left to teach them, but I hope they can always know we are their biggest cheerleaders, their life coaches and want them to grow into the people God created them to be!

Social media can be a breeding ground for mompetition and complaining

The average internet user spends about 2 hours and 22 minutes each day interacting with social media, according to a report on Digital Information World in January 2019. That equals equals 16 hours and 36 minutes each week and nearly 800 hours per year!

That’s a lot of time on social media. It’s definitely a newer frontier considering that Facebook wasn’t even created until 2004 (MySpace was created the year before). Twitter came along in 2006 and Instagram and Pinterest both debuted in 2010.

Social media and mompetition

While social media has a variety of pros and cons, one of the issues it’s definitely enhanced is mompetition — mom competition. When I was a kid back in the 1980s and 1990s, my mom’s biggest source of mompetition came primarily from the moms of other kids in our school.

Now, we moms compete with moms everywhere. We log onto Facebook and see how someone we’ve never met across the country has a toddler who can ride a unicycle while our toddler trips walking to her tricycle.

Or we fire up Instagram and see the happy beach family vacation a mom a state away is on while we blow up a small kiddie pool and wrangle arguing children who are trying to walk through the house dripping wet.

And don’t even get me started with Pinterest. I love Pinterest, but it can definitely be a huge pressure cooker for moms. You don’t have to be on it long to learn that every other mom on the planet has a picture perfect clean house that only takes 5 seconds a day to maintain and children who spend their summers doing intense housework, extensive schoolwork and hours of community service before spending only 15 minutes of screen time a week on educational apps.

Of course I’m exaggerating — a little. But, mompetition certainly has grown with the use of social media. Even if we spend much less time on social media than the average user, it’s easy to get sucked into the comparison game. It’s easy to feel mompetition. And it’s even easier to throw our own highlight reel up on social media and feed the fire.

Social media and complaining

Then there’s the other side of social media. There are the posts that are perpetually negative. There are the posts that poke fun at other parents or even children. Sarcasm is found in abundance on social media. Snarkiness abounds.

While I do appreciate jokes about the challenges of parenthood, some can go too far. They can keep us focusing on what’s hard about motherhood and not all the loads and loads of good stuff. They can make us feel irritated and frustrated instead of uplifted and encouraged.

The purpose of Families with Grace

And all of this is part of why I created Families with Grace. I want the FWG blog, social media outlets and general community to be a safe place to be honest about struggles. My goal is to be real. However, you also won’t find posts about how frustrating my children are or how much my husband annoys me.

Because while those feelings are real sometimes, they aren’t the feelings I have the vast majority of the time, and I don’t want to dwell on them. I also, though, don’t want to give the impression that I know everything and my family is perfect. I don’t want you to think that I always talk to my husband and children with grace and patience. I don’t. I fall short.

I do keep trying, though. That’s the journey I want us to take together. Let’s try together to be better and do better for our families — not just try impress one another. Let’s find ways to keep our priorities in the correct order: God, spouse, children.

Because no matter what someone posts on their highlight reel of social media, the real issue is whether they are doing their best for their family. If I try to deceive you into thinking my children, home, marriage and even Christian walk are perfect, I’m only fanning the flames of mompetition. I’m only working to make you feel worse.

If I try to commiserate with you about how awful everything is in my life, I’m only fanning the flames of griping. And I’m making you feel worse.

But if I share with you the lessons I’m learning through my mess and imperfections, then maybe you’ll remember that not all of us are perfect. Maybe then you’ll give yourself some grace and get some ideas for what could work in your own family. My prayer is that God will use some of my words to work in your heart.

Learning to be more like God

I love what I do. I love writing. I love being a mom. I love being a wife. I definitely love Jesus and His redeeming love. But, aside from Jesus, I don’t fully love all of those things all the time. I’m doing my best. When I fail and fall as I do, God gives me grace and pulls me up and dusts me off.

He doesn’t roll His eyes. He doesn’t post on Facebook about how annoying I am. (Can you imagine if God was on social media?!) God just loves me and gives me all the grace I need.

His example is I want to draw from in my own life as a wife and mom. That’s the image I want to portray in my life and on social media. Life isn’t perfect. It’s messy and scary. It’s beautiful and good. And it is so very much more than what shows up in our social media news feeds.

Join me on the journey to creating homes filled with grace, love and faith. Come along and learn from the mistakes I make and lessons I learn. I can’t promise you that I’ll be perfect, but I know the One who is. God never fails, He always loves and I want nothing more than to honor Him in my words whether they are coming out of my mouth, posted on my blog and typed into my social media accounts.

This post is part of Families with Grace’s Social Media Savvy series that covers a commonsense approach to handling social media as a parent. Check out these other posts from the series:

Joking about the incompetence of fathers is damaging our families

We’ve all seen the classic sitcom bit where the mom goes away for a couple of days and leaves the dad in charge. She comes home to chaos and a frazzled husband. That story line has also been used in commercials and all sorts of other ways.

The subliminal takeaway from those scenarios: dads just aren’t as competent as moms. They don’t cut it. And, eventually, they shouldn’t even try.

Complimenting dads for doing what they’re supposed to

We compliment dads for doing things like taking their children shopping or to school. My husband once got a compliment from a grandfather who had seen him taking our kids to school every morning. Why is it that dads doing what they’re supposed to be doing for their children is seen as so out of the ordinary?

I daresay it’s because of the message we get from media, and it’s time for that message to stop.

What dad should be doing

I grew up in a home where both my parents did household chores, especially once my mom started working outside of the home when my brother and I got older. Now both my parents are retired, and my dad continues to do things like vacuum the house and wash clothes.

I didn’t expect anything different when I got married. Then when our daughter was born in 2009, I didn’t even think to question whether my husband would be hands-on and involved with her. Why wouldn’t he? He’s her dad.

Old school attitudes about dads

But, that attitude isn’t always the case. I also very clearly remember an older relative advising a cousin who had just had a new baby not to leave the baby alone with her husband for a while because he was a man and wouldn’t know what to do.

The reality of modern dads

It’s just not true. My husband figured some things out about our babies before I did. He jumped in and changed diapers right from the beginning. We approached parenting just like we do life: as a team.

When my son was a newborn, my husband was driving 60 miles one-way to work every day. He’d stay up as late as he could to help me manage our unhappy little guy. (Our son didn’t sleep much at all for the first three months.) One night in my exhaustion, I went to change his diaper and found a note my husband had left for me reminding me to wake him up if I needed a break.

That’s far from incompetence. That’s a father. That’s love. And that’s what dads do — or should do. That’s part of a healthy family.

The effect on our families

Yet, we treat them like they don’t know what they’re doing with kids. We expect dads will fail and not do something as good as we do. We overly criticize them for doing things differently. We have to stop because that is only harming dads and our children as a result! We are damaging our families by not trusting dads to parent.

People usually live up to the expectations set for them. So if we are expecting dads to fail, eventually that’s what they’re going to do. Or at the very least, they will stop trying if every time they do something they get ridiculed or criticized.

Embracing the differences

Does my husband do things the same way I do? Nope. I usually pack the kids’ lunches during the school year, but sometimes he does instead. He doesn’t always use the containers I use, he cuts the sandwiches differently and sends more grapes than I do. But he is still making them a nutritious lunch. And it’s completely fine.

My husband plays with our kids differently as well. I’m thankful for that. We have different strengths and weaknesses and work together to raise our kiddos. It’s a team effort through and through. We need to recognize the important role that good fathers play.

Set the right expectations

We need to expect all fathers to step up to the plate and do what they’re supposed to be doing. I look around and see all sorts of good dads in my generation. My husband is awesome, but he’s also not alone. I see dads bringing their kids to birthday parties, playing with their kids on the playground and showing up to every school event.

Dads aren’t incompetent buffoons. We need to stop cracking jokes at their expense. We need to respect their role in child-rearing as much as we do mothers’ roles. We can compliment dads and moms alike for the good job their doing, but not just for the mere sake of showing up like they should be anyway.

My message to all the dads out there in the thick of it with their kids packing lunches, taking them to school and practices, figuring out how to put in ponytails and patiently going over sight words: keep up the good work! We know you’re not incompetent and will stop making jokes to the contrary.