Undone By Bath Time
Jacqlin Richards on why you can hold a boardroom together, yet bath time still breaks you – and how to change that.
Jacqlin Richards is a Parenting Alchemist and mother of two, who has been recognised as a Women Changing the World Gold Award recipient. Here, the founder of the Resourced Parenting Method™ shares a truth many high-achieving parents feel but rarely say out loud.
“If I can lead a team, manage a business, solve complex problems and hold everyone else together… Why does parenting bring me to my knees?”
It’s a question I’ve heard from countless high-achieving women. Women who are exceptional leaders. Women who can navigate million-dollar decisions, manage teams, juggle impossible workloads, and somehow still remember to buy the birthday present. From the outside, they look like they have it all together. Yet many are drowning in guilt and shame as they discover that the qualities that make them highly effective at work don’t always translate into the kind of connection they wish they had with their children.
The problem isn’t that they’re failing. The problem is that parenting asks us to use an entirely different set of muscles – ones that don’t live in the boardroom.
Many of us have been rewarded for being capable. For anticipating problems before they happen. For fixing things quickly. For carrying everyone else’s load. For pushing through exhaustion. For striving to get everything right. For holding it all together, even when everyone else is falling apart. Those qualities can absolutely help build successful careers. But when they’re driven by an under-resourced nervous system rather than genuine choice, they come at a cost: burnout, anxiety, never feeling like you’ve done enough, never feeling like you are enough, constantly carrying the weight of everyone around you.
At the end of the day, that same nervous system comes home with us. Parenting doesn’t happen in the team meeting. It doesn’t happen during the 10am PowerPoint presentation. It happens in the middle of dinner, homework, sibling arguments, sleepless nights, and responding to children who have yet to develop the capacity to consistently regulate themselves. In those moments, our kids don’t need another project manager. They don’t need someone to optimise them. They need something far more powerful: a calm, resourced nervous system standing in front of them.
That’s the part nobody teaches us. We’ve been taught behaviour. Strategies. Consequences. Rewards. Sticker charts. But very few of us were taught that the greatest influence we have on our children isn’t what we say – it’s the state we bring into the room. Children borrow our nervous system long before they borrow our advice.
Which is why so many parents know exactly what to do… and still find themselves unable to do it. Especially in the moments that matter most. They end up yelling. Or rescuing. Or controlling. Or collapsing under the overwhelm – and then punishing themselves for it. It’s not because they lack information. It’s because information can’t override survival. When our nervous system is stuck in fight, flight, freeze, fawn or collapse, we don’t suddenly become the parent we aspire to be simply because we know better.
This is why I believe parenting isn’t about becoming more perfect. It’s about becoming more resourced.
A resourced parent doesn’t get it right all the time. They still lose their patience. They still get it wrong. They still have moments they’d love to rewind. The difference is they have the capacity to notice what’s happening, take responsibility, repair the rupture, and return to connection. That doesn’t just change our parenting, but it changes what our children learn about being human. Because children don’t need parents who never make mistakes, rather, they need parents who show them what it looks like to recover from them.
For years we’ve been asking parents to try harder. To do more. To get it right. Perhaps it’s time we asked a different question: what if the greatest gift we could give our children isn’t becoming more capable… it’s becoming more resourced? Because the future doesn’t need another generation raised by exhausted parents desperately trying to get it right. It needs children who grow up experiencing something many of us never did – a parent who can recognise when they are in survival, who can stop, take responsibility and find their way back. A parent who understands that strength isn’t found in manically scrambling to hold everything together. It is found in having the capacity to come back to yourself, and then come back to your child.
Because that is what our children will carry forward. Not whether we got every decision right. Not whether we remained calm in every difficult moment. But whether they experienced a parent who was willing to look inward, repair the ruptures, and keep choosing connection.
Our children do not need us to be perfect. They need us resourced enough to break the patterns we inherited, repair the ones we repeat, and stop passing survival on as parenting.