The stay-at-home dad: When you feel like a fraud

Please indulge some “inside baseball” talk.

I resisted writing about being a stay-at-home parent for several years. For one, reflection can be hard when you’re in the thick of dealing with fussy babies, dirty diapers and toddler tantrums.

When I finally started writing about it, I didn’t have much of a plan except for one guideline for myself: I didn’t want to write anything that could be construed as advice. I may be a stay-at-home dad, but I would never consider myself to be a model stay-at-home dad. If anything, I’m better equipped to write a regular column about all the mistakes I made along the way.

I feel like I make wrong decisions all the time, and those mistakes make me feel like a fraud. After all, how can someone so bad at being a stay-at-home dad have a weekly column about being a stay-at-home dad?

In talking with other parents and reading articles and books by other people in my situation, I’ve come to recognize that most parents feel this way, at least sometimes. I’m not the only person making mistakes. I’m not the only one who feels like an imposter.

The concept of imposter syndrome isn’t specific to parenting. It’s defined as the “persistent inability to believe that one’s place is deserved or achieved as a result of one’s effort and skills.” Anything we do as humans is subject to self-criticism and second-guessing, and so many parenting decisions come with an almost immediate feeling of, “Did I just do the right thing?”

And setbacks, no matter the cause, can forcibly shift a perspective into unhealthy hindsight.

I still dwell on the big ones sometimes. For my oldest son, I remember taking him to the dentist at age 5, and having them tell me he had several severe cavities that needed drastic intervention. I felt so awful. What did I do wrong? We took him to the dentist semi-regularly for cleanings. We made him brush his teeth twice a day. We fed him a healthy diet — he didn’t drink juice regularly, never any soda, and candy and treats were reserved for special occasions.

But, to me, we obviously failed him. Not only did it come with a financial burden (which only compounds when you have multiple kids), but it led to physical discomfort and stress for my kid. I felt so guilty.

Same goes for my son’s recent dyslexia diagnosis (which I wrote about more extensively in The Press’ Live Well Magazine for December 2021/January 2022). I thought I knew enough about dyslexia to recognize it in my kids’ educational performance, only to realize that my knowledge of this particular learning barrier was woefully outdated.

In both these cases, I can’t help but feel like I failed my son.

Of course there were intangibles. We can’t expect ourselves to anticipate every challenge that comes our way (like any of us, except maybe a handful of scientists, could’ve anticipated a two-year-plus pandemic). We can do a lot of things right only to still be forced to deal with the troubles we didn’t see coming.

So while we can feel that guilt and wallow in hindsight, we can also do the best thing for our kids: Move forward and work to solve the problems in front of us. Fix the teeth. Learn about dyslexia and apply the interventions. Adapt. Improve.

I will never pretend to “know more than other parents” in this column space. I’ll share amusing stories. I’ll wallow in the difficult moments. And I’ll occasionally remind myself that being a loving and supportive parent means accepting the fact that we’re all imperfect people who make mistakes. Accept it, learn from it and try hard to do better when the next challenge comes along. It will be here any second.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer and stay-at-home dad to four kids, ages 4-10. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.