Mom needs a moment! How to pause parental rage

Psychologist Cassidy Freitas noticed something in her own parenting: the moment her son woke up screaming for cuddles at 1 a.m., 2 a.m., and 3 a.m., she had nothing left. "Being a parent is just a lot, always all the time," she says. "It just attacks all of your senses and all of your resources." In 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General declared parental stress an epidemic. Parents are working more and caring for kids more than in past decades, leaving almost no time to recover. Freitas, author of Mom Needs a Moment, argues that the solution isn't more grit or better scheduling — it's deliberately protecting small pockets of empty space, which she calls "margins," before your nervous system forces a crisis.

The magical calendar and why your brain needs margins

Freitas asks parents to imagine a calendar that tracks not just appointments but everything occupying their mental bandwidth: the mental tallying of who picks up whom, what a child needs for camp, and the constant low-level planning. Most parents look at that calendar and see no empty space. Worse, when a rare three-minute gap appears, many parents immediately hear an internal voice saying, "What are you doing? Why are you just sitting there? We have things to do."