News Corp Great Australian Parent Survey 2025 results are in and the survey’s findings about guilt are shocking
News Corp Great Australian Parent Survey 2025 results are in – and the country’s parents share the crushing reality of modern childrearing.
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It’s dropping the kids at school at breakfast and not seeing them again until dinner time. Working five long days a week and missing school concerts, sports days and a calendar of special milestone moments – but still not being able to afford a family holiday.
Being a stay-at-home mum and worrying that the kids are lacking the things money can buy. Watching picture-perfect Insta mums do it all for their young ones and feeling that it’s a struggle just to do a little.
Stressed-out mums and dads have spoken in one deafening, unifying voice about the crippling guilt they are suffering in a world where parents are working more than ever and their expectations and demands have hit record highs.
News Corp’s Great Australian Parent Survey 2025 has unleashed a tidal wave of emotion, with two out of three respondents saying they are plagued by guilt of not doing – or being – enough for their children. “Not knowing how to manage my child’s behaviours, my emotions and feeling so stressed I want to die at times,” is one parent’s shockingly honest response in the comments section of the survey.
“It’s a constant juggle of time and money to keep food on the table and provide them with the love and support they deserve,” writes another.
Mum-of-three Kristi Centofanti suffers that pain. “It’s absolutely overwhelming,” says the 32-year-old of the parent guilt she feels every day.
“You just are constantly worried that you’re not doing the right thing and that your kids are missing out. It’s definitely getting worse, not better. Everyone tries their best and everybody’s best is different.”
At her home in Highbury in Adelaide, which she shares with her husband of nearly six years, Michael, and their three young children, Centofanti says it’s the pressure to measure up to the perfection of social media mums that hits her hardest.
“Social media is just in your face,” says the mum of preschooler Celeste, four, and two-year-old twins Giselle and Antonio.
“All you see is poster people going from swimming lessons to dancing lessons to violin to fricking acrobatics all in the one day and you think ‘oh, wow, am I a bad mother because I’m not doing all of this? I’m only doing one
co-curricular, will my child be okay?’
“There’s no accreditation or anything but these people on social media are experts on everything, telling you what you should be doing – have a five-course organic meal ready for breakfast, eggs straight from the chickens and breastfeeding til they’re five. And if you’re not doing all of that, shame on you.
“There wasn’t that comparison for our parents. For someone to get a comparison of somebody else’s lunch box, they would have had to open up their bag and have a look, pop over to the neighbour’s house and say ‘oh, what are you feeding your kids today?’
“Whereas now, it’s smashed in our face. It’s shocking and it’s hard not to get caught up with it and think you’re not as good as a mother.”
That social media-fuelled burden inspired Centofanti to create her own Instagram page, ThatAdelaideMum, where she posts honestly about her parental wins and losses in the hope of making others feel better about their realities.
In one post shot from her kitchen bench, which she dubbed the “longest 5:62 minutes ever”, the young mum determinedly tries to stay calm as she makes sandwiches for her hungry young ones bellowing in the background.
“This is the most relatable thing, honestly,” a follower says in the comments.
It wasn’t always that way. In her first Instagram post – a flawless portrait with baby Celeste – Centofanti glossed over her real truth of struggling with a newborn who wasn’t sleeping, trilling: “At this rate, we will be the Brady Bunch.”
“I didn’t want one more kid, let alone eight more,” Centofanti laughs now. “I was suffering back then but I was almost ashamed that my daughter wasn’t sleeping properly.”
She quickly realised that those embellished posts were not helping her – or other parents in her position. Changing tactics, she started to post her “raw reality – the troubles and real feelings” and her followers swelled to nearly 11,000.
“People would say ‘thank you for posting that, thank you for posting that every corner of your house is a shambles. Thank you for posting your kid crying because motherhood is not perfect,’” she says.
“The first one that went viral was ‘spend a morning with me with the twins.’ It was literally the raw reality of what I would do – explain the process of how I breastfed them, all three kids screaming and me just sitting there with stickers all over my face and vomit down my front saying ‘good morning world, how’s everyone feeling today?’”
After giving birth, Centofanti went back to work three days a week as an accountant at a small Adelaide firm – when Celeste was one and later when the twins turned 14 months.
It unleashed a frantic rush of childcare drop-offs and pick-ups, meal planning and squeezing in chores and appointments around long work days.
“There was not one minute of downtime,” says Centofanti, who made the life-changing decision to quit her job and become a stay-at-home mum last October.
It’s given her the time she was craving, but it still carries its own feelings of guilt.
“There’s a lot of pressure – financial and societal – for women to work,” says Centofanti, who helps her husband run his electrical company. “We can definitely feel it financially.”
As a tireless, dedicated obstetrician in Sydney, Hugh Porter often doesn’t see his two young children for days on end. He’s on call 24/7 and is often whisked away from family time to deliver a baby.
It means the 43-year-old father misses out on some of the big moments in the lives of his son Ned, four, and two-year-old daughter Hallie. “I can literally go a week without seeing my children,” says Porter, who consults at hospitals on Sydney’s North Shore and northern beaches.
“Sometimes if I haven’t seen them I’ll go home and sleep next to my son all night, not waking him up but just being there close to him and cuddling him. We are fortunate as doctors that we are financially secure but the trade-off is we’ve got to work bloody hard.
“I feel like I’m missing valuable time with the kids but it’s for a reason.”
Porter’s wife, Isobel, also a doctor, working three days a week as a medical oncologist at a hospital near their Crows Nest home, does the “lion’s share” of daily duties with the children. They also have a nanny who works when she is not there.
The busy obstetrician tries to maximise his own limited time with the children with “fun dad” activities like go-karting and trips to the zoo. Sometimes Ned dresses up in a doctor’s outfit and joins his dad on his weekend ward rounds visiting new mums and their babies.
“If we’ve only got six hours a week, I want them to be six great hours,” says Porter, who was called away at the last minute from Ned’s first cricket Test on New Year’s Day at the Sydney Cricket Ground to help a patient give birth.
But those special outings don’t alleviate the guilt the young dad suffers when he knows he is missing out on a big moment in his children’s lives or his energy is depleted after a long working week. “(The guilt) sits there under the surface and it can really bubble up and get you down,” says Porter, who loves dropping Ned off at preschool when his schedule allows.
“I’d love to take more time off and just be present (but) I’m on call all day and night. Often after a big day of delivering babies, I’m just exhausted, which makes it hard when you don’t have a huge amount of time anyway.”
Porter is not alone. One man laments in the News Corp survey comments about “not having enough energy most days to be the fun dad”.
“If I’m working I feel guilty because I’m distracted by my child, if I’m with my child I’m distracted because of work and that makes me feel guilty. And sometimes I’m just too tired and that makes me feel guilty, too,” confesses another stressed-out respondent.
A third admits to being “always tired, often grumpy … don’t feel like I am parenting very well. Not enough fun and time spent together”.
“I feel guilty about everything, all the time, as a parent,” is yet another devastating assessment.
It’s comments like these that parent educator Gen Muir finds “heartbreaking”.
“I made a post on my socials saying ‘parents are sinking, the ask is too much’ and one dad said ‘I’ve sunk’,” says the founder of Sydney-based support service Connected Parenting.
“It just really hit me. I think it is endemic and something has to change to shift the pressure.”
Muir says today’s mums and dads are burdened by an “impossible ask of perfection”.
They have an information overload of what it takes to be a perfect parent. And that means they expect to be able to provide far more for their kids – emotionally and physically – than they received from their own parents at a time when they are working “harder than ever and under more financial pressure”.
Muir says most parents are more immersed than their own parents were but this obsession with not stepping a foot wrong means they are not giving themselves credit for their wins.
“Somehow parenting became a competition or something we have to perfect,” says the respected educator, who has worked with more than 40,000 parents during her career and has four sons of her own. “I tell my clients, ‘the fact you are reflective is a good thing but you can’t be reflecting on every move you make.’ It’s about reframing – instead of looking at the one thing we’re mucking up, how can we look at all the things we’ve done really well.”
When guilt starts to overwhelm single mum and digital marketing coach Angela McMillan, she focuses on the special time she spends with her two sons. She also makes time for herself, heading to the gym and dance classes and scheduling regular catch-ups with friends.
“I try not to put so much pressure on myself to be perfect,” says the 48-year-old, who is also a Feldenkrais movement therapy practitioner.
“You do feel guilty because you want to earn money and provide for the family but then you’re spending all this time away from the family. I feel overwhelmed a lot of the time.”
Still, she suffers guilt-ridden fears that her parenting is not enough for sons Alex, 16, and Zelman, 10. They have not been on holiday together in nearly two years. Their household budget is stretched to cover everyday life, with extra-curricular fees, new clothes for the rapidly growing boys and skyrocketing bills.
“It does make me feel guilty that we haven’t gone away for that long together,” says McMillan, who tries to focus instead on what they can do on weekends. “During summer, we tried to get to the beach and at Easter, we camp on my uncle’s property. We’re also going to start martial arts together. It’s important to have family time but with the cost of living, it’s difficult to do.”
Adelaide child and teen psychologist Kirrilie Smout says guilt is “not usually helpful” for parents, who “may be more likely to feel more stressed and end up parenting in less helpful ways”. “It is not easy to reduce feelings of parental guilt but parents should try to continue to show compassion towards themselves, and understand that children are often more resilient than we think,” says Smout, who runs Developing Minds clinical practice and is a University of SA course co-ordinator and lecturer.
Still, modern pressures have parents feeling they “parent like we don’t work, and our employers expect us to work like we don’t parent”. And, as one survey respondent says, feeling “like I’m underachieving in both roles”. ■
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