This is the first installment of our series on happier, healthier mothering.
Ah, sweet summer. Lazy days in the sun, lemonade and watermelon, cookouts in the backyard, sleeping in the hammock, long, warm afternoons and jasmine-scented nights, right?
Then why are all the young moms we know gasping for breath?
Check the calendar.
Their kids are booked every day of the week, all summer long: swim lessons, algebra prep, soccer practice, softball, gymnastics, ballet lessons, piano, choir, play-dates, and the list goes on. Mothers do the heavy lifting in the form of schedule coordination, filing applications, making appointments, and, of course, schlepping the little darlings back and forth across creation every day to their multiple engagements.
The result: overwhelmed, depleted moms who are running on empty in every sense.
“Parenting today often feels like trying to hold back a tidal wave with a paper towel.” – Christina P. Kantzavelos, LCSW, MSW, MLIS
“When you’ve forgotten your wild, when the fire inside feels more like smoke, it’s time to pause.” So says Pasadena-based Needah Kavallierou, M.A., a marriage and family therapist associate who specializes in helping mothers regain their sense of self and personal peace amidst the demands of modern mothering.
She’s also the founder of indie brand Wild Heart Mamas Coffee, offering a bold brew called “Community Blend” brought to the grind by local artisanal roaster Jones Coffee of Pasadena.
Kavallierou describes her practice, decaf, high-test or otherwise, as being “…born from my deep love for connection, motherhood, and those soul-nourishing conversations that happen over a really good cup of coffee.”
In addition to seeing clients in her private practice, Kavallierou, mother to two young “wild boys” ages 5 and 8, hosts Weekly Wednesdays, a weekly gathering at Brookside Park beside the playground, every Wednesday at 9:30 AM.
“Lots of Mom groups charge a fee to join,” she says. “Ours is free. No charge. I now have 8 to 10 lead moms. We start with an icebreaker, then there are the intros, then a topic or a theme. Everybody brings their mat and their snacks, and there are lots of babies.” She adds that dads, aunties, grandparents and women who are not moms are also welcome to join the conversation.
She describes the gatherings as “…a heart-centered, joy-filled village where moms can truly feel at home.” Sweatpants, messy bun, coffee in hand, all good, she says. She also organizes and leads monthly meetings at Philz, casual coffee catchups, Mom’s Night Out meet-ups, and weekend adventures with details @wildheartmamas for mothers and others who need to re-set and restore themselves.
After moving to Pasadena from Brentwood in 2020, and having her second son the same year, Kavallierou founded Wild Heart Mamas in 2021 in response to the pandemic, a crisis which proved to be a turning-point for many mothers in terms of how they parent.
Now, well into our region’s devastating song of fire and ICE, societal pressures on mothers have never been more unrelenting.
Feeling the Burn
Mental health professionals now cite parental burnout as a public health epidemic. In 2024, Newsweek cited a study in which 57 percent of the parents surveyed reported feeling stressed by their roles to the point of burnout.
And here’s the twist: mental health professionals also observe that burned-out parents often produce unmotivated, underachieving kids. The harder some parents push, scheduling multiple enrichment activities during the long days of summer, the more passive and distracted the kids become.
One explanation is that children mirror their parents. When a parent is exhausted to the point of becoming disconnected, kids disconnect too. While several variables may lead to burnout, summer scheduling tops the list for many.
Kavallierou says “Saying ‘no’ in this culture feels rebellious. We’re conditioned to believe that a ‘good mom’ is one who gives everything — her time, her energy, her body — until she has nothing left. There’s a deep collective wound here. We’re lost the rhythm of the seasons, the permission to rest, the wisdom of boundaries. Many mothers fear judgment, or worse — that their child will ‘miss out’ or ‘fall behind.’”
We connected overseas with Christina P. Kantzavelos, LCSW, MSW, MLIS, a UCLA alum and licensed psychotherapist who currently serves her San Gabriel Valley clients on a remote basis, via Zoom from Crete these days, where her own mother is from. She says, “Parenting today often feels like trying to hold back a tidal wave with a paper towel.”
Kantzavelos further observes: “Overscheduling often stems from anxiety and a desire to ‘optimize’ a child’s future. But what it often creates is a dynamic where the child feels pressure to perform instead of permission to just be. I work with teens who are burned out by middle school, unsure of who they are without a resume, and parents who are terrified to step back for fear their child will fall behind. Helicopter parenting can stunt emotional independence and leave kids ill-equipped to self-regulate or advocate for themselves.”
An over-structured life in general may rob a young person of natural curiosity, and thus thwart real-life problem-solving capabilities.
When Did it Get So Bad?
Women have always carried the emotional weight of creating a family. A generation ago, Ward and June Cleaver may have epitomized the classic American formula: Dad brings home the bacon, and Mom vacuums while wearing perfect pearls and heels. Like faithful Penelope, June stayed close to home, pruning the roses and polishing the silverware while Wally and the Beav went wilding in suburbia, experiencing a series of well-scrubbed, midcentury high jinks.
More recently, couples strive valiantly to divide domestic tasks, especially since 84 per cent of American women are employed full-time outside the home, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But the invisible labor of keeping the proverbial home fires burning continues to fall to women, beginning with childcare and housework, and extending to subtler aspects of familial dynamics, often mental and emotional, such as keeping in touch with relatives from both sides of the family, remembering their birthdays and anniversaries, planning and executing holiday gatherings, extending and reciprocating social invitations, and smoothing over any upsets in the family ecosystem.
These gendered expectations begin at birth, and persist. One landmark study around gender attitudes utilized a photograph of a slightly messy room. When survey participants were told that the room belonged to a man, they shrugged it off, reasoning that he’s busy. After all, he’s a man.
When the control-group was shown the same photo and told that the room belonged to a woman, the participants passed harsh judgments concerning the woman’s moral character. What decent woman would live in such squalor?
This largely unrecognized domestic workload often limits a woman’s availability for upward professional mobility, thus maintaining the stubborn wage gap, as well as gender discrepancies in positions of corporate power.
But what we’re witnessing this frenetic summer in particular goes beyond the usual chauvinism. The concept of summer vacation or an open calendar where children are concerned seems to have vanished in the past couple of decades.
For example, although I myself grew up in the WASP-y, squeaky-clean, “Leave It To Beaver” years, I experienced utterly unsupervised leisure along the lines of Huck Finn goes to the Bronx, turned loose in the boroughs with a pair of roller skates, a library card and a key to the front door. Yes, your correspondent was a dreaded “latchkey kid,” a designation often positioned as a gateway to becoming a serial killer.
In my case, so far so good.
Kantzavelos says “I believe the current shift started slowly in the 80s and 90s with the rise of what is now called intensive parenting. There was a cultural push toward overachievement, academic pressure, and constant supervision. Add in 24-hour news cycles, school shootings, fear-based messaging, fewer neighborhood networks, and the growing role of technology. Mothers especially have become more isolated, more scrutinized, and more exhausted. Parenting has turned into performance. The village disappeared, and the pressure stayed. It is no wonder so many feel overwhelmed.”
The real and present dangers of eco-anxiety and fear of human trafficking also add to the sense of rising social panic.
Like Kantzavelos, Kavallierou speaks of the need for a “village.” Over a sandwich at Kathleen’s in Pasadena, she says, “In 2017, as a new mom, my own post-partum depression made me feel very isolated. And then in 2020, I had a new baby and had just moved to Pasadena from the Westside. So, I know the feeling. I want moms out there to know that you are not alone. We are creating a village, like the community settings that gave earlier generations strength, safety and comfort.”
The key difference is that today, Kavallierou also offers skilled talk therapy and other professional referrals as needed, although a friendly cuppa joe among women in similar life-passages is a great place to start.
Busting Myths for Happier Mothering
Dr. Gertrude Lyons is a Chicago-based life coach and the author of the new book “Rewrite the Mother Code: From Sacrifice to Stardust — A Cosmic Approach to Motherhood,” and we chatted by phone last week on the subject of maternal exhaustion in the quest to create a life which to quote Dr. Lyons “looks good on Instagram.”
“Kids don’t need more activities,” she says. “They need more anchors.” She likens the overstuffed calendar to an overstuffed suitcase: “The suitcase gets so full that it won’t zip, and the child can’t carry it themselves.”
The neural overload can result in sleep-loss, anxiety and depression for both mother and child, says Lyons. This overstuffing also “…makes moms feel like they are working for their kids.”
Lyons’ work is informed by the fact that she is a seeker of the earth’s sacred places, and today offers Mother Retreats — she also calls them self-mothering retreats — twice a year in a remote and lovely hamlet on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Her visits to Nepal, the healing waters of Laos, Lourdes and Chimayo deepen her context, and the provenance of these sites adds a spiritual dimension to her examination of family dynamics.
“Many parents live vicariously through their child to heal their own wounds,” she says. Unexpressed pain, as she writes in her book, prevents normal, robust function: she cites unprocessed trauma in her own life as blocking her lactation and ability to breast-feed her new baby.
A woman’s undigested grief, rage and sorrow may lead to frenetic over-mothering and resulting burnout, says Lyons. Some therapists further note that extreme discomfort with unstructured time may arise from the same unresolved trauma: traumatized people seek distraction from their pain.
Her research has included the use of genograms, a nuanced visual chart of the family tree. She says, “The awareness that we will inherently create relationships that mirror our parents and in so doing stir up our unfinished business was revelatory. We do this unconsciously by repeating family-of-origin patterns in our own intimate and family relationships, friendships, and even in office settings interacting with our supervisors and co-workers.”
Regarding mothering styles, Lyons finds that women often replicate what they themselves experienced as children at mother’s knee, or violently reject that childhood programming. “Either extreme is limiting, if it’s carried out without exploration,” she says. In her book, Lyons implodes mothering myths — she calls them the “Codes” — one by one, starting with “Code #1: You immediately fall in love with your baby, and you have only blissful love from the moment you hold them.”
And even beyond familial modelling, Lyons says that at the heart of the problem — wait for it— lurks the patriarchy.
Her myth-busting reveals an architecture of shaming that has taught women, especially mothers, to aspire to a super-heroine level of “doing for others” that approaches masochism.
And there is indeed a darker side. She writes “Our Western culture isolates mothers…by pitting us against each other. We are living with the imposed, unrelenting standards of doing motherhood perfectly, which is impossible, but we are told it is possible so the only away we can feel a modicum of OK-ness is to judge other mothers.”
