‘I didn’t want to spend time with my children. I was just going through the motions’: the pain of parental burnout
Most people with small children are worn out – but for some, the pressure of striving to be perfect parents can drive them to the edge
‘I cried like someone had died,” Rachel Stern says of the day things unravelled at home. “I thought: ‘I can’t do this any more.’ I didn’t want to spend time or play with my children. I was just going through the motions.”
It was a Sunday morning in January 2022. Stern’s sons were five and two. She wrote her husband a note – “I just need some space” – asking him to watch them, left their home in Manchester and started walking. “I was inconsolable,” says Stern, now 39. “And it was so shameful to admit that I just couldn’t be with my kids.”
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