Why this doctor and mom of three is retiring from competitive motherhood
Frank Flores/Unsplash
"My kids don't need a childhood that looks impressive on paper. They need one that feels good while they're living it."
Table of Contents
“My kids don’t need a childhood that looks impressive on paper. They need one that feels good while they’re living it.”
That’s the line Dr. Shilpi Agarwal, a board-certified family medicine physician, keeps coming back to. By any measure, she’s an overachiever: she graduated with honors from George Washington University’s medical school, is on faculty at Georgetown, sees patients at its on-campus clinic, makes regular appearances on Fox 5 D.C.’s medical segment, and somewhere in there found time to write a book. She’s spent her career being the person other people come to for the right answer.
Why I wanted to ask a high-achieving doctor about something other than medicine
I usually talk to experts like Agarwal about their field — the latest research, the protocol, the thing everyone’s getting wrong. But experts are also just moms, and the work they put into raising their kids is often just as demanding as the work that makes them experts in the first place. So this time I wanted to ask about the other job. Being a mother of three boys, and what happens when someone trained to optimize everything decides to stop optimizing her kids.
How a high-achieving doctor got caught up in competitive motherhood
For a while, she actually didn’t stop. “There’s been this big cultural push — first hustle culture, doing all the things, and now we’re veering toward more type B living, softer living,” she told me. Somewhere between rec league turning into travel-or-bust, and watching other moms who seemed to be doing it all, she noticed she’d stopped checking in with herself. “You get wrapped up and forget to reevaluate what actually works for you.”
So she started over. Not with a system, but a simple question. What does she want her kids to remember? Not a mom who was always rushed, not a chaotic blur of activities. “I think they value being heard,” she said. “Whatever behavior you display, I think they really mirror and absorb that. If I’m harried, they’re going to be harried.”
What a good day looks like now
These days, her benchmark for a good day is small on purpose. Five focused minutes with each kid. Reading with her five-year-old, or listening to him read. Shooting hoops. Coloring. Making a cake together. “They’re oddly into things you’d think are very basic,” she said, “but those things land strongly on kids.”
Going from one child to three changed how seriously she takes any of it. “I’m taking things way less seriously now. I’m looking at the big picture — what’s actually important here, versus when I was younger with one child and very caught up in things that don’t even matter now.” The shift she’s proudest of is in how she listens. Where she used to default to a fast no, she now pauses. “Tell me the problem,” she’ll say. “What do you think? What do you want to do?” Half the time, she said, they already know the answer — they just wanted to say it out loud.
The hardest thing for her to let go of
Letting go hasn’t been painless, even for someone used to making hard calls under pressure. The hardest battle for Agarwal was the state of her own house. “My place is not going to be tidy,” she said, half-laughing. She caught herself unloading the dishwasher while her kids watched a show together instead of sitting down with them — and made herself stop. “That was very hard for me, against my core. But I try to do it now.” Recently, that meant actually watching a Crunch Labs video with her sons instead of doing chores around them. “It’s fun for them to have that shared connection over something.”
Her advice for parents who can’t stop overscheduling
For the parents who recognize themselves in this but can’t quite let go, she has a practical exercise rather than a pep talk. Write down your schedule for the week. Every activity, every day. “People just keep adding things without realizing how much is piling up,” she said. Two sports each, piano, a separate math class — “is all of this necessary? Could we get time back? And then, what would we actually do with that time?” Not a free Sunday morning that turns into a kid on the couch while she does laundry — an actual hike, an actual breakfast.
What’s changed in her kids
She’s already seeing the benefits. Her kids are learning to be bored, and to like it. They’ve started noticing their own limits before she has to point them out. “They’ll say, ‘I already have this, I kind of want a free day,'” she said. “And I tell them that’s good. You shouldn’t have something every single day of the week. That leads to burnout in kids.”
Agarwal isn’t claiming to have cracked it. She still feels the pull of the group chat, the comparison, the sense that everyone else’s kid is doing one more thing. But she’s stopped treating motherhood like something to be evaluated. “Sometimes the kids will tell you themselves they don’t want to do something,” she said. “And you should listen to them.”
Related articles
