One of the most striking changes in contemporary parenting is the way it is starting to resemble a well-designed video game, which can make players become addicted. But what happens to parents who feel they are losing the game?
It is 10.45 pm, and she is still bent over the kitchen counter, wiping away the last traces of an ordinary evening: crumbs, spilled gravy, and other minor signs that this space is inhabited. The house is completely silent, but her mind is a busy place, filled with thoughts that come and go like trains at a station. The “Today I yelled at my older son again” train has just arrived.
She picks up the phone without even realising. A quick search on the mums’ group throws her into a discussion thread with dozens of messages about how to handle tantrums. Looking for reassurance and guidance, or perhaps just a familiar voice to tell her she’s not alone, she instead finds reasons to feel guilty.
She leaves the group page, intending to see what’s new in her news feed. “These seven mistakes traumatise your child without you meaning to.” She feels a lump in her throat. She should go to sleep, but she stays there, letting the blue light of the screen mediate between her fatigue and the hope that tomorrow will be better.
Gamification
Video game designers know and apply a principle that ensures the attractiveness of their creations: players remain engaged as long as they perceive that they have control over approximately 80% of the situation, while the remaining 20%, which is uncontrollable and unpredictable, continues to challenge them. It is this proportion that prevents players from closing the game and pushes them towards another level, in the hope that they may decipher what they are missing this time.
Psychologists have long observed a related phenomenon. When a task is completely mastered, down to the last detail, motivation evaporates. However, when a person feels that they are one step away from mastering a task, close enough that progress seems inevitable but not guaranteed, their involvement increases. People are captivated when success seems within reach but is not guaranteed.
In behavioural psychology, this mechanism is known as intermittent reward. In 1957, Ferster and Skinner demonstrated that systems offering success at unpredictable but frequent intervals generate the highest level of perseverance.
In “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi notes that the state of “flow” occurs at the edge of competence, in the delicate balance between what we know how to do and what we have not yet mastered. James Paul Gee, in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, calls this phenomenon “cycles of expertise”: games keep you engaged precisely because they offer a succession of moments of clarity followed by moments of controlled disorientation. Jesper Juul, in his analysis of difficulty in video games in Fear of Failing? The Many Meanings of Difficulty in Video Games, shows that it is not constant success that attracts us, but partial failure—that is, the kind of failure that promises success if you try again. The similarity between this mechanism and the experience of today’s parents is striking.
What fuels parental perfectionism?
Parents often experience moments of success that give them a sense of control, such as managing a tantrum calmly, enjoying a good night’s sleep, or having a conversation with their child in which they seem to open up. These are undeniably satisfying moments that give parents the impression that their methods are working. However, these moments are rarely stable. Soon, the apparent balance is upset.
The crisis that seemed to be fading returns with unexpected intensity. The child who slept perfectly one night wakes up three times before midnight the next. Openness suddenly evaporates, replaced by a confident “I’m not telling you” that only children can utter. Even strategies recommended by experts, which seemed to work for months, can dissolve without warning, as if they never existed.
Although not the most comfortable experience, this repeating pattern is part of human development. People do not develop in a linear fashion, but rather take steps forward and backward. However, parents, who are constantly exposed to discourses about optimal methods, tend to interpret their child’s fluctuations as negative feedback on their performance as parents. Each step forward confirms that they are doing well, and each step backward suggests that they have misunderstood something. Thus, reward and frustration alternate at a pace that keeps parents in a continuous cycle of adaptation, information consumption, and improvement. The parenting industry amplifies this cycle: for every failure, there are five resources, four books, three podcasts, two paid webinars, and an influencer video explaining to parents what they did wrong.
Some of the pressure that parents feel is natural and inevitable. The other part is culturally constructed and stems from society’s view of parenting as a field in which adult identity, morality, and self-worth are established. However, the trap of seeking fulfilment through one’s children is not a new phenomenon. What is new is that parents now have to navigate brand-new cultural paradoxes.
The culture of “this. . . but also that . . .”
With the erosion of community authority, extended family, and church influence, parents are left alone in a present that constantly demands so much from them across countless levels. At the same time, they receive a constant stream of micro-advice, protocols, and warnings. One day, they learn that it is not advisable to sleep in the same room as their child. The next day, another authority says exactly the opposite. One week, an influencer goes viral with the idea that a certain type of toy stimulates “emotional intelligence”. The next week, the same object is deemed suspect due to new studies.
No matter how well-intentioned the professional parenting community may be, expertise is, by its very nature, fragmented. Each specialist has their own angle, theory, and studies. What one psychologist considers normal behaviour for a child of a certain age, another may consider latent trauma. For a behaviour specialist, it is discipline; for an attachment expert, it is a missed opportunity for connection. Without an external compass, parents are left caught between these incompatible interpretations.
The result is a climate of hyper-responsibility. Parents feel they must anticipate all variables, control all risks, and maximise all opportunities. They also inevitably internalise all failures. If the child is anxious, it is the parent’s fault for not applying a co-regulation technique correctly. If the child is frustrated, perhaps it is because the parent did not validate their emotions. If they are inattentive, perhaps they were exposed to screens too early or for too long. In other words, parenting has become a kind of behavioural engineering with zero tolerance for parental error.
Paradoxically, this technical approach to family life coexists with a culture that emphasises authenticity and vulnerability. In podcasts and interviews, parents talk about how difficult they find it, how exhausted they are, and how they try to find balance. However, these confessions do not alleviate the pressure, because in this ecosystem, vulnerability itself becomes a form of achievement.
Ultimately, all of this extremely complex dynamic has a moral underpinning. It is a powerful one, but not openly acknowledged.
Parenting is a moralising field
Although we live in secular societies and parenting no longer has a spiritual context, it paradoxically retains its moral intensity. Parents continue to feel the ethical weight of their role, even if they no longer have a transcendent reference system to contextualise their failures and ground their expectations.
In fact, the concept of transcendent deprivation is becoming increasingly prevalent in analyses of contemporary culture, reflecting the sense that the world no longer provides moral or symbolic benchmarks beyond the individual, leaving people suspended in a present that offers no promise of a future. The philosopher Charles Taylor describes this condition in The Age of Authenticity, in which identity is no longer stabilised by an external truth, but constructed exclusively through introspection and self-expression. However, this turn inward is not necessarily liberating. Often, the opposite is true; turning inwards puts enormous pressure on the individual, who becomes solely responsible for defining their own meaning.
In the absence of transcendent reference points, society begins to moralise areas that were previously neutral, such as nutrition, ecology, lifestyle, and parenting. As Jonathan Haidt points out, people naturally tend to turn certain practices into moral domains—spaces where moral judgement intensifies and where claims of purity, guilt, and virtue arise. When transcendence is absent, morality does not disappear, but seeks other frameworks through which to express itself.
In this context, the hyper-moralisation of parenting turns against parents. They end up being the author of the rules, their evaluator, and the first to be accused when they fail to comply with them. Minor deviations take on disproportionate dimensions and each success imposes the need for a new standard to be achieved. Stealthily, parenting takes on the contours of a religion that knows neither grace nor rest.
In this sense, it can be said that the relationship with the child becomes an idol. This does not happen because parents love their children too much, but because they unconsciously try to extract from this love what they once extracted from their relationship with the divine: meaning, justification, and forgiveness. This is a significant vulnerability of our culture.
A legitimate good that has been turned into an idol
In contemporary public discourse, the word “idolatry” has no place. It seems more like a vestige of a vanished world populated by ancients, carved figures, and primitive rituals. However, in classical theology, idolatry is a phenomenon that goes far beyond the veneration of objects; rather, it is a misplacement of affection. From this point of view, idolatry did not disappear with ancient civilisations; rather, it became more refined and became synonymous with the distortion of something essential or vital by elevating it to the ultimate criterion of one’s own existence.
In the Christian tradition, this concept is evident as early as Augustine, who claimed that the primary sin is not immorality, but a disorder of loves. It is not that you love something bad; rather, you love something good too much, to the point where your inner structure completely reorients itself around it.
Reconciliation
Christianity enters this landscape as a transformative force because at the heart of the Christian message lies a radical affirmation: mankind is not God, and the child is not its messianic project. This limitation, however, is not a loss, but a liberation. Our culture constantly tells parents that they are responsible for everything: the child’s emotional regulation, the architecture of attachment, and the child’s psychological future. The Gospel challenges this message by affirming that there is an authority beyond the parent: a moral and ontological authority that cannot be manufactured, managed, or optimised.
From a Christian perspective, the child is not an extension of the parents’ identity, nor is the child proof of their moral competence. Having a child is a gift in the truest sense of the word. The concept of a “gift” implies receiving, not producing. In turn, “receiving” implies gratitude and responsibility, whereas “producing” implies control and evaluation. Modern parenting operates almost exclusively in the latter. The Gospel deliberately shifts the focus to the former.
This change in perspective directly affects how parents experience guilt. Without a transcendent reference point, guilt has nowhere to go. It cannot be forgiven or transformed because there is no one to do so. Parents are forced to deal with the guilt themselves, which leads to a continuous effort of self-correction and optimisation. This constant pressure ends up consuming more energy than the relationship with the child itself. According to Christian logic, guilt is an inevitable human reality, but it does not remain solely on the shoulders of the individual. It can be and it must be handed over to the One who offered to bear it, because He is the only one who truly knows what to do with it: Christ.
The forgiveness that Christ offers the parents keeps them responsible, but removes them from the cycle of constant pressure. Without forgiveness, responsibility becomes rigid and oppressive. With forgiveness, however, it can be embraced without fear and transformed into a catalyst for growth. For a culture obsessed with performance, it is to be expected that this is a difficult truth to embrace: failure is not, in itself, destructive. It only becomes destructive when there is nothing beyond it.
The Gospel also provides an important perspective on performance anxiety. If the ultimate meaning of life does not depend on the success of the child, then regression, conflict, or fragility no longer have absolute moral significance. These issues remain real and painful, and sometimes exhausting, but they are no longer definitive. Parenting no longer functions as a high-stakes game, not because the stakes are insignificant, but because they are not ultimate.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of Christianity to accept in this context is its refusal to elevate parenting to a sacred value. Today, parents are expected to be constantly present and emotionally available, and able to resolve any issue that arises. However, the Gospel reminds us of the “duty” of rest, based on the belief that the world continues even when we stop. This includes your child.