Time for taboo! I prefer to work than to play with my kids

Laurence Paquette
2 min readOct 24, 2021

Time for taboo! I prefer to work than to play with my kids… 👶👩‍👩‍👧‍👦

I love my children, I really do! But to be completely honest, I really don’t enjoy parenting. Being a parent doesn’t make me feel fulfill in anyway and although I think my kids are fantastic and I love them unconditionally, I’d often rather work than play with them. 🏢

Am I allowed to say this out loud?

I have two children with my wife. 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦 Our oldest is almost 5 and our youngest will turn 3 in February. On this Sunday morning, as I draft this post, the kids are playing while my wife is sleeping. As I’m watching them play, I think how wonderful they are but also how being a parent is hard and definitely not my calling. I’m not bad at it, but this is definitely not my life’s purpose or the romanticized version of being a mother movies I’ve shown me. Parenting is something I do because I have kids and they need me to do so.

When that is said, I admit humbly that I would much rather work than play with my kids and this is not a one off feeling but a recurring one. Am I a bad parent?

I’m sure many others feel the same way, but I admit that my own guilt for feeling such detachment hunts me often.

So I try my hardest to be a parent and to be kind to myself. It’s ok not to feel like I have found my life’s purpose in my children and I will continue to strive to feel purpose at work and elsewhere as that is what fulfill me most…

#parenting #love #work #learning #purpose #motherhood #children #calling #hard #taboo

Visit my website: https://www.laurencepaquette.com/

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Laurence Paquette
Laurence Paquette

Written by Laurence Paquette

Vice President, Head of Marketing | Mom | Queer | Neurodivergent | Pop culture & Mental Health Obsessed | Coach + Mentor | Swiftie | +50k on TikTok 🌱 🏳️‍🌈 🧠

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