Would you believe me if I told you that modern parenting is an extreme sport?

The New York Times says, not only is it becoming increasingly more demanding than in bygone eras before the internet and visions of the perfect family unit on Instagram, it’s a completely all-encompassing “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labour intensive and financially expensive” endeavour.

And the data is in. A Pew Research study found that 53 per cent of mums don’t have enough or, in some cases, any time for friends and hobbies; 73 per cent said their kids participated in athletic activities in the last year; 60 per cent said their children went to youth groups; while 54 per cent said their kids were enrolled in music, dance or art lessons.

To add to this, 67 per cent said they had attended parent and school meetings and 63 per cent volunteered with projects and excursions.

The drama doesn’t stop there. Bear in mind these statistics are from a group in which the majority of mums worked in full-time employment.

But while you’re making pinterest-worthy lunches, scrolling through high-fashion Insta babies on your phone before you pick the kids up for their four hours of extra curriculars after school, remember this: all you need is love.

It’s true! Do you want to set your child up for a lifetime of greatness, academic achievement and success? Love them and spend some loving quality time with them. If you do nothing else because you’re so tired even looking at that pile of washing growing legs in your living room, know that your biggest job today is loving your child.

This might seem elementary, dear Watson, but science can even back this up.

Washington University School of Medicine, in a study conducted in 2016, found that kids aged three to five who had supportive mothers displayed increased volume in the hippocampus section of the brain. The hippocampus is responsible for learning, memory and emotional regulation.

And as the other extreme would dictate, the children who had less support showed “less robust” hippocampal growth.

Indeed, everyone would have seen the famous image circulate the internet of a normal child’s brain versus a neglected child’s brain, which was the research work of Bruce D. Perry, an American psychiatrist who has done extensive research and work with child trauma. In this image, we can see the normal child’s brain is full and healthy, and the neglected brain has troughs and valleys and gaps throughout.

While many have refuted Perry’s evidence his brain scans provide and also scrutinised some of his claims about children and trauma - saying it’s politically corrupt research or his emphasis on the first three years being pivotal in a child’s brain development is a fallacy - the facts still remain. 

Although this area still needs more conclusive neuroimaging or neuropsychological research, many of the rudimentary studies align and agree that love and positive attention boosts brain development and neglect causes gaps in brain density or function.

Around the time the film Straight Outta Compton was released, a high-profile court case was going ahead in the US, petitioning for students who were victims of childhood trauma to receive special support in schools as a result of the trauma they had received from ‘the streets’ of Compton, which in turn created learning delays and difficulties. 

In this case, many experts were called upon, including doctors who showed that the brain activity in a neglected child was much less than that of a normal, healthy child. They argued that why the kids in these areas failed to live up to educational standards is not because they didn’t have a desire to learn, it was because they couldn’t learn and there was little support for them.

Other studies have observed that children who had experienced neglect and trauma had cognitive, memory, emotional regulation and problem-solving deficiencies - deficiencies that may be rectified over time, thankfully, using what we know about brain plasticity.

Basically this boils down to, along with basic human physiological needs like food, water, clothing and so on, the best thing you can do for your child is love, support and spend quality time with them. In fact, in our hierarchy of needs, love features in the third most important place, behind safety.

This is not to say that an Insta-worthy lunch for your kids or an hour of ballet after school three times a week isn’t important. They enrich life for sure, are perfect bonding moments with your kids and can even be an act of love in themselves.

What I’m saying is that if you just can’t keep up at times in the extreme world of parenting and things slide every now and then, if you just show love when you can't do anything else, that is good enough.

Rachel Hollis’ book Girl, Wash Your Face talks about exactly this. She says that it’s impossible to be a perfect parent, but if we strive to be good enough parents, everything else that you achieve in this roll is an absolute bonus and something to be proud of. Pick the things you’re good at and rock those. For everything else that you struggle with, do your best and give yourself permission to not be the greatest all of the time.

Rachel says: “I’m able to see that narrative for the lie that it is. Being a perfect mum is a myth. Being a pretty great mum most of the time is actually possible. I don't believe in one best way to parent. In fact, I think it could be pretty damaging to our children if we try to impose the ideals of someone else on to how our family should function… You don’t have to get it right all of the time. You only have to care.

“But sister, please, please, please, stop allowing your fear of getting it wrong to colour every beautiful thing you’re doing right.

“When I’m stressing about parenting, it’s usually because I feel like I’m lacking for quality time with my kids. When I focus my energy on them that’s when I really feel content I’m doing a good job.”

So if you struggle with the complicated “beautiful soup of modern-day parenting” as Rachel says, know in your heart of hearts that love really does make the world go round.

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