There’s very little support for mums once the baby’s born

GP Laura Lenihan’s recent heartfelt Instagram post on the struggle to juggle her demanding job with the needs of three young children struck a chord with her followers, writes Helen O’Callaghan

Dr Laura Lenihan

WHEN Dr Laura Lenihan went on Instagram recently and spoke openly about just how stressful life with kids can be, how difficult it is juggling work and parenthood — when she looked for reassurance that she wasn’t alone in feeling like this and when she spoke about never taking time for herself — mothers everywhere must have sighed with relief.

Because here was a mum on social media telling it like it is.

Posting from her car, the Galway-based doctor who runs a GP and skin health clinic, said: “The stress and anxiety kids can cause … I don’t handle kid stress well. I can manage business stress super well, but kid stress I find extremely difficult. A lot of the time it’s made out that life with kids is amazing and obviously it is … but like it’s hard.”

Speaking to Feelgood a few days after she’d posted, the mum-of-three says: “I find Instagram quite cathartic. I wasn’t ready to go back into the house and I took a few minutes on Instagram. I really find talking about things helps — it’s why I think I have a popular Instagram page.”

It wasn’t that she’d had a particularly bad morning — her two-year-old had, for the first time, gone into Montessori without crying. Instead, it was that she’d had a stressful week — she’d experienced a complete meltdown from her youngest child, while another “totally played” her, managing to get a day off school.

“She probably wasn’t sick, but you can only argue so many battles,” says Laura, whose children are aged six, five and two.

Explaining that she’s not giving out about her children (“I have really great kids”), she says her focus is the parental issue of coping with life with kids. And being real about how tough that can be — and she encapsulates why it’s hard.

“I can handle work stress. With kid stress, it’s in the moment — like refusing to put on their shoes. And chances are I’m sleep-deprived, I haven’t been looking after myself, someone woke me the night before, so I shout, [which] I don’t want to do - it’s about how do I deal with that.”

And there’s no preparation for these kinds of flare-up-out-of-nowhere crisis moments you can have with children, she says.

“I’ve done a degree in commerce, a master’s in fashion, a degree in medicine. For everything in my not-kid life, I’ve studied. I’ve learned to deal with it. With kids, you don’t do that.

“As a GP, I know lots about kids. I examine them every day. I’ve read a lot, but nothing can prepare you for motherhood.”

And, of course, in these stressful moments, you can’t just walk away from your child. “You have to deal with it there and then. It’s that emotional labour,” she says, describing the multiple threads that can be running in a parent’s mind a lot of the time.

“Trying to remember they’ve a birthday coming up, or they need €2 for the school bake sale on Friday, or they’ve got PE on Tuesday and Wednesday so the uniform has to come off and be ready for Thursday. All that extra emotional labour makes it difficult.”

Supports for mums are “seriously lacking” in this country, she says, pointing to the “insane” waiting lists for counsellors/psychologists in the public system and to our overworked GPs.

Dr Laura Lenihan

“There’s very little support for mums once the baby is born, for that period of matrescence, becoming a mother, and everything that goes with it.”

Plus there’s the social media pressure to present a perfect picture. “I think people are afraid to vent about how kids can be challenging. There’s a desire to portray everything as hunky dory, that you’re living your best life with your children.

“Obviously I love my children and I enjoy every moment with them — except the moments when they’re making it stressful. There’s massive pressure on people to make it look like they’ve got their act together, that their kids eat a nice healthy lunch every day, that they don’t have meltdowns.

“Very few parents have it like that. The majority are struggling, to some extent,” she says, adding in a poll she did, 90% of 2,500 respondents said they find kids “super stressful”.

Since her Instagram post, Laura has had “so many” responses from mums who feel the same — one said ‘just out the other end of a terrible patch with three-year-old, tantrums over everything’; another confided ‘if I have to deal with one more illness, and the mental load and expectation of a mother to fix it all, I’ll explode’.

GP and Founder of Women in Medicine in Ireland Network Dr Sarah Fitzgibbon says women can feel under pressure to be a perfect parent — and a perfect professional. “Societal commentary about how children ‘should’ be raised can negatively impact a woman’s confidence in her choices. What society should offer is support, encouragement and appreciation for anyone trying their best — that can sometimes be hard to come by.”

Working full-time and particularly as a doctor, Laura says she gives a lot in her day job. “I give a lot of empathy Monday to Friday. It’s quite draining. I’m giving to others — and I don’t take time for myself.”

Fitzgibbon points out that working as a doctor is hard — and parenting is hard. “When you put them together, it can be very challenging, particularly when children are very young and at their most needy.

“And for female doctors, the burden’s greater — on average, about 91% of women with children spend at least an hour per day on housework, compared with 30% of men with children. Employed women spend about 2.3 hours daily on housework — for employed men, this figure is 1.6 hours [according to the] European Institute for Gender Equality report 2021.”

On Instagram, Laura talked about how taking time off almost stresses her more because she’s thinking of all she has to do. But she is taking steps to prioritise her wellbeing: “My husband booked me a massage, which I had yesterday. I’ve been practising breathing in the moment.”

She has also found some helpful resources, including a talk from the Child Psychology Institute on ‘Mothering: From Burnout to Balance’, as well as a workshop, ‘Calm in the Chaos’, from The Psychology Practice. “I’ve flagged it in my inbox to look at,” she says.

She likes the words of one psychologist she spoke with: “It’s OK to overreact every now and again, so long as you go back and say ‘sorry for overreacting, I shouldn’t have snapped at you, I wasn’t in the best place’.”

And she’d like to say to mums out there — and to herself: “Define yourself as who you were pre-children. Maybe: ‘I’m a mother but I also like going to the cinema’. Because it’s OK to love your kids — and still not want to be with them all of the time.”