Loneliness in parents of young children: never alone and lonely all the same

Tuesday, twenty to eleven in the morning. The mother of an eight-month-old is sitting on the living-room floor among building blocks and realises that since seven o’clock she has spoken a great many words, none of them to an adult. On her phone is a message from a friend: “Lunch on Thursday after work?” She starts writing a reply three times and deletes it three times, because she does not know how to fit naps, breastfeeding and the fact that she no longer really has an “after work” into one line.

The same day, at half past five, the father of a two-year-old sits in his car outside the block of flats and leaves the engine running a minute longer. He has been talking to people all day at work. And yet he cannot remember when he last told anyone anything about himself. His friends meet on Thursdays; they stopped inviting him somewhere between the second and third “I can’t make it this time”.

Neither of them is alone. Quite the opposite — they are never alone, not even in the bathroom. And yet both, if asked directly, would use the same word: lonely. Then they would quickly take it back, because with a healthy child they wanted, it does not seem a proper thing to say.

In this post I would like to explain why loneliness is so common in the first years of parenthood, why it does not mean you do not love your child enough, and what can be done without adding yet another task to an already full list.

Never alone and lonely all the same

Loneliness is not the same as being alone. The researchers Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau described it as the unpleasant experience that arises when there is a gap between the relationships you have and the relationships you would like — in number or in depth. The parent of a small child has contact in abundance: physical, loud, uninterrupted. What is missing is a different kind of contact: someone who asks how you are and waits for the answer.

A review of research on loneliness in pregnancy and among parents of children up to the age of five, published in 2022 by Jacqueline Kent-Marvick and colleagues, shows that loneliness is a common experience in this period and that it is intertwined with low mood and a lack of support. The authors also note that studies are few and that most of them concern mothers.

A figure from a neighbouring field shows that this is not only about mothers. In a meta-analysis published in 2010, James Paulson and Sharnail Bazemore estimated that roughly one in ten fathers experiences depression in the period from pregnancy to the child’s first birthday, and that it is more common where the mother experiences it too. That is not a figure about loneliness, but it does tell us that the transition to parenthood shakes both partners — only one of them is asked about it far less often.

Three words: social isolation, loneliness, solitude

We often use these three words as though they meant the same thing. With parents of small children it is worth separating them, because each has its own route.

• Social isolation is something you can count: how many adults you see in a week, and how often. On parental leave there are simply fewer of them.
• Loneliness is the feeling that there is not enough closeness, or not the right kind. You can feel it in a full house, at a family lunch and at the playground among ten other parents.
• Solitude is time when you are truly alone with yourself. It is chosen and nourishing — and the parent of a small child has almost none of it.

This is what is particular about this period: a parent often has too much of the first two and too little of the third at the same time. They are lonely and also long to be on their own for an hour. It sounds like a contradiction, but it is not. Two different things are missing: an adult who sees them, and a silence in which nobody needs them. I explain the difference between the terms in more detail in Loneliness is not solitude: the difference that changes everything.

This is why the well-meant “just get out and see people” often does not help. Someone who is isolated really does need more adults in their week. Someone who is lonely beside a partner and grandparents does not need more people, but one person in front of whom they do not have to be grateful and composed. And someone who is mainly short of solitude will come back from socialising even emptier.

Where the old circle went

Before the child, contact mostly happened by itself. Colleagues were at work every day without needing an invitation. Friends were there in the evenings and at weekends. A hobby, training, choir, a drink after a meeting. When a child is born, it is not these people’s affection that changes but the timetable — and it turns out how many relationships rested on two people being in the same place at the same time.

Research confirms this. Kelly Bost and colleagues followed couples from pregnancy until the child’s second year and observed that after the birth of a first child, time spent with friends becomes less frequent, while family moves more into the foreground. So the circle does not empty; it is reshuffled: fewer people you chose yourself, more who are there because of the child.

It is especially painful with friends who have no children. Nobody has done anything wrong. They invite you out at eight in the evening, when you are settling the baby. You would go for a walk at ten in the morning, when they are at work. After a few cancellations the invitations become rarer — often out of consideration, not resentment. You read it as “they have forgotten me”; they read it as “they have other things on their mind now, let’s not burden them”. And both sides stay silent.

It also helps to know that humans were probably never adapted to raising children as a pair, let alone alone. In her book Mothers and Others, the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy describes how, in our species, children have always been cared for by others besides the mother — grandmothers, older children, relatives, neighbours. A flat in which one adult spends eight hours alone with a baby is, seen against that history, a very unusual arrangement. The feeling that “something is missing” is therefore not being spoilt. It is a fairly accurate perception.

A year at home: a different rhythm from the rest of the world

In Slovenia, one parent is at home with the child for about a year, and in the great majority of cases that is the mother. This is precious and far from a given in many parts of the world. It also means a year in which you live to a different rhythm from almost everyone you know. In the morning, when you have time, the town is full of pensioners and other parents with prams. In the evening, when others have time, you have no energy left.

Something else disappears that you had not noticed before, because it was always there: the small confirmations that you are an adult with work of your own. Somebody asks your opinion. Somebody thanks you. You finish something. At home with a baby nothing is ever finished — nappies, meals and washing go round in a circle, and the child cannot tell you that you did a good job today. I have written about how this shifts your sense of who you are in Parenthood as a transition: who am I now that I am a mother or a father?.

Kathryn Lee and her colleagues carried out in-depth interviews with first-time mothers about their loneliness. The mothers did not speak only about having fewer contacts. They described comparing themselves with other mothers and with the image of the “good mother”, and not being truly understood by those close to them, even when those people were physically present. So loneliness was not simply a lack of company. It was the feeling of having no one to tell what they were really going through.

Fathers: the loneliness nobody asks about

When a child is born, people ask the mother how she is. They ask the father how mother and baby are. That is understandable — the mother gave birth, the mother breastfeeds, the mother is at home. But meanwhile the father finds himself in a strange in-between space. At work it is as if nothing has changed, although everything has. At home he often feels like a helper rather than one of two parents, and that his partner and the child form a pair he is only just entering.

His circle shrinks differently from the mother’s. Outwardly it remains: the job, the colleagues, the same faces. What falls away is everything outside work — training, the Thursday crowd, the Saturday hill walk — because every hour away from home is an hour his partner spends alone with the child, and he knows it. Many fathers therefore give up precisely those contacts in which they were something other than an employee and a father. Because men’s friendships are often tied more to a shared activity than to conversation, when the activity goes, the friendship goes with it.

When the father is the one who stays at home with the child, the picture flips: suddenly he is the one with nobody to talk to at the playground in the morning, often among mothers only, where he feels like a guest. He then gets to know from the inside the kind of day he previously knew only from his partner’s “fine”.

Lonely side by side

The most confusing loneliness is the one you feel beside your partner. You are together more than ever — and you talk about almost nothing but who will buy nappies, when the vaccination is and who got up last. The couple becomes a well-drilled team that has forgotten it was once something else as well. There is more on keeping your partnership alive in The couple after the baby: keeping your partnership alive through parenthood, and on the experience of being alone beside someone in Loneliness in a relationship: alone beside someone.

There is often a quiet competition here, too, over who has it harder. She is alone with the child all day. He works all day and then takes over the evening. Each is right, and each is waiting for the other to admit it first. This is how an evening might sound when something shifts (the dialogue is composed; it is not a real person):

“How was today?”
“Fine.”
“Just fine?”
“Since seven this morning I haven’t talked to anyone who could answer me in a full sentence. I don’t know how to say that without it sounding as if I’m complaining about him.”
“It doesn’t sound like that. And I talk to people all day and then sit in the car wondering whether I even know what’s new with the two of you.”
“So we’re both lonely. Each at our own end of the same flat.”

Nothing was solved in this conversation. The timetable is the same the next day. All that changed is that loneliness is no longer a secret each carries separately, and that it no longer has to be proved by comparing tiredness.

Why a parents’ group does not always help

The most common advice to a lonely parent is: find other parents. Sometimes that really is what is missing. A person at the same stage understands things you cannot explain to a friend without children. But plenty of people come back from a mother-and-baby class or an online group lonelier than they went.

The reason is comparison. Wherever several parents of children the same age gather, a quiet measuring quickly begins: whose baby already sleeps through, who is still breastfeeding, who cooks from scratch, who is already back in shape. Nobody wants it, and yet it happens. And with comparison comes shame, which does exactly the opposite of what you need: instead of saying how you are, you show that you are coping. Ten parents can sit in a circle like that, each privately thinking they are the only one who is struggling. I have described how this works for mothers in Mother’s guilt: why the most devoted mothers are the ones who feel they do too little.

So when you are looking for company, the number is not decisive. What matters is whether the group contains at least one person to whom you can say, “Today I shouted and then cried in the bathroom,” and who will answer, “I did last week.” One contact like that outweighs many polite ones.

Something similar applies to social media. At three in the morning during a feed it is the only company that is awake, and sometimes it truly helps. But photographs of tidy living rooms and smiling babies are a poor yardstick for your Tuesday; there is more on this in Comparing yourself on social media: what constant measuring does to the brain.

Exercise: a map of one week

This exercise takes ten minutes and you can do it while your child is asleep. It is not a to-do list. It is a way of finding out which of the three things you are missing before you change anything.

1. Count the adult conversations of the past seven days. Those that lasted more than a few minutes and were not about who would bring or take over what. Do not judge the number; just write it down.
2. Next to each of the three words, write a score from 1 to 5: how much I miss adult company, how much I miss someone who really hears me, how much I miss time on my own. The highest score tells you where to start.
3. Choose one person from your old circle and send them a message without apologising for the silence, but with a suggestion that works in your rhythm: a walk with the pram, a phone call during the afternoon nap, a visit at your place. You can also tell them straight: “I can’t do evenings, but I miss you.”
4. Choose one recurring contact with people at the same stage — the same playground at the same time, story time at the library, a class, a family centre — and go four times in a row. The first time you will almost certainly stand at the edge. That is normal.
5. Agree two things with your partner: one hour a week when each of you is truly alone and unreachable, and ten minutes in the evening for a conversation with no logistics in it. If you are raising your child on your own, ask someone from your support network for this — specifically, with a day and a time.

Repeat the exercise in a month. Not to check whether you have “made progress”, but to see which of the three numbers has moved.

Where this does not apply, and when it is more than loneliness

Not every parent experiences this period as lonely. The sociologists Kei Nomaguchi and Melissa Milkie found that people who become parents also report being more embedded in relationships with relatives and neighbours than those without children. Many people get to know their neighbours for the first time because of a child, grow closer to their own parents or find a circle they did not have before. If that is true for you, there is no need to look for a problem that is not there.

Second, for some parents the isolation runs deeper and one walk with the pram will not shift it: those raising a child alone, parents of children with additional needs or a long-term illness, immigrant families with no relatives nearby, those living far from a town. Here the exercise above is not enough, and that is not a personal failure but a lack of support that the community ought to provide.

And third — this is the most important — loneliness is sometimes part of something larger. If for more than two weeks you have felt empty or hopeless on most days, if your child brings you no joy, if you cannot sleep even when the baby sleeps, if you are flooded by anxiety or intrusive thoughts, this goes beyond the subject of this post. It may be postnatal distress or depression; there is more in Postnatal depression: when you “should” be happy and you are not. And when exhaustion is in the foreground, with a sense of parenting on autopilot, read Parental burnout: always available and never enough as well.

In these cases, talk to your GP, your gynaecologist or your community nurse — this applies to fathers too. If you have thoughts of harming yourself or your child, do not wait: in Slovenia call 112. In Slovenia, the mental distress helpline Klic v duševni stiski is available at night on 01 520 99 00 (7 pm to 7 am), and the Samarijan confidential helpline around the clock on 116 123.

When talking to a therapist makes sense

Most loneliness in the first years of parenthood does not need therapy, but time, sleep and two or three people. Talking to a therapist does make sense when you notice that you cannot bring yourself to ask for help even though help would be available; when you and your partner cannot talk about it without reproaches; or when, beside your own child, feelings from your childhood surface that you cannot place. In relational family therapy this is exactly what interests us: what you learned, in the family you grew up in, about whether you are allowed to need anything, and how that affects today whether you say that things are hard.

I am a marriage and family therapist in training under supervision; sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, individually or as a couple, and I also work with English-speaking clients. If you recognise yourself in this post, you are welcome to write to me.

What to remember

• Loneliness beside a small child is not a sign that you do not love them enough. It is a gap between the contact you have and the closeness you need.
• Social isolation, loneliness and solitude are three different things; a parent often has too much of the first two and too little of the third.
• The old circle mostly does not vanish out of resentment but because of timetables — and often both sides stay silent.
• Fathers are lonely too; according to a meta-analysis roughly one in ten experiences depression around the time of the birth, yet hardly anyone asks them.
• One person you can tell the truth to helps more than a group in which you compare yourself. When loneliness comes with hopelessness, seek medical help.