Have you ever caught yourself mid-scroll through Instagram, mesmerized by those glossy family reels? There’s the dad hoisting his toddler onto his shoulders at sunset or the mom orchestrating the perfect homeschool breakfast.
I typically look up from the screen and see…reality. The fruit flies buzzing around the new groceries I just bought, the backpack left by the front door, and the lingering sense that I have already, by 8:15 AM, failed some crucial metric of parental optimization.
We live our lives scrolling past other people’s highlight reels, and it is quietly poisoning the mundane glory of the work we’ve actually been called to do. We are obsessed with the pictures. If the moment wasn’t documented, staged, filtered, and posted, did the nurturing even happen?
But parenting—true, soul-forming, character-shaping parenting—doesn’t happen in the pictures. It happens in the vast, unglamorous, often mind-numbingly repetitive stretches between them.
The Allure of the Image
We must, I think, have some compassion for ourselves. We are swimming in an ocean of manufactured images, and we’ve forgotten what dry land feels like.
Culture has always demanded performance, but the digital age provides a 24-hour amphitheater where every other parent is seemingly getting a standing ovation. This isn’t just “Keeping up with the Joneses”; we’re now trying to keep up with the algorithmically perfected digital ghost of the Joneses, who, by the way, just posted a time-lapse video of their eight-year-old vibe coding an app while simultaneously mastering sourdough.
We have developed sophisticated personas. There is the “High-Performance Parent,” the one who treats parenting like an executive role at a Fortune 500 company. They aren’t raising a kid; they are curating a résumé for a human who hasn’t hit puberty.
Then there’s the counter-persona, equally curated: the “Authentic Chaos Parent.” They make their lives full by stagging their ‘mess’. They post the relatable shot of the laundry pile. It’s chaos, but it’s branded chaos.
Both are a performance. Both are driven by the deepest, oldest human fear: What if I am not enough? What if I am doing this wrong? And what if—the most terrifying modern question—everyone sees me doing it wrong?
The Ordinary Craft of Parenting
The great lie of our age is that significance is found in the spotlight. The gospel truth is that significance is forged in the mundane. The world screams for the highlight reel. The Spirit whispers in the routine.
This is the real work. It’s the unsexy, unglamorous, repetitive daily labor that builds a child’s soul. These are the moments that will never, ever make the Instagram feed. They are the moments that, strung together, constitute a childhood.
It is the quick, hurried hug before the school bus arrives. It’s the quiet fortitude of fetching the third glass of water for a stalling toddler in the pitch darkness of 2:47 AM. It is the patience required to listen—really listen—to a winding, nonsensical, seven-minute story about a Minecraft battle, your brain screaming that you have emails to answer, but your heart choosing, just barely, to stay present. It’s the grit of mediating the same fight over the same toy for the four-hundredth time.
These moments feel like interruptions to the “real” work. We think the real work is the vacation, the milestone, the lesson plan. We are wrong. This is the work. This boring, beautiful ordinary is the sacred ground where love is tested and proven real.
