Mums today are burnt out and terrified to ask for help

I was surrounded by people, and yet I had never felt more alone. And I knew I wasn't the only one.

I still know that.

Every day, women come to our community and say the things they don't say at baby groups or to their families. And this year, for the first annual Motherhood Index, we dug in - we sat down with mothers to better understand what their version of motherhood actually looks like.

What we found was that mums are living in a perpetual state of burnout - to the extent that it has now become the new default mode. Mothers today are expected to work like they don’t have kids and parent like they don’t work. The result is that mums are reaching rock bottom behind closed doors.

Behind the Instagram smiles and the TikTok reels about motherhood, mothers spoke frankly about their reality and the loneliness of motherhood today.

Emily Jane has her mum and sister living under the same roof. On paper, that's having a village. In reality, the help was "random and short-lived." She spent the first months of her son's life with people physically in the house, but still felt completely alone.

When we asked whether she knew how to ask for help, she said no. Asking meant she wasn't doing her job as a mum. She chose to have him, so the suffering was hers to carry. Burnout, to her, is constant exhaustion with a list that never gets shorter.

The day we spoke to her, she'd spent the morning lying on a playmat watching her son learn to crawl instead of doing the dishes. And she felt like she was failing.

Then there's Kerrie. She hasn't had more than four hours of unbroken sleep in longer than she can remember. She saves every bit of herself for her son during the day, and by evening, there's nothing left, not for conversation, not for her husband, not for herself.

She told us that lack of sleep has caused more arguments than anything else in her relationship, because he comes home exhausted from work and she's been running on empty since before he left. "I'm just spent," she said.

She doesn’t consider herself in crisis, just a mother in 2026. And when we asked whether she'd ever consider asking someone for help, she said something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. She's terrified to ask anyone, in case she's a burden, in case everyone is already too busy.

"It's a weird thing," she said, "because I would drop everything to help someone if they asked me. But I'm so scared to ask for myself."

Jhoana is doing it entirely alone. When we asked what would need to change for the next generation of solo mothers, she said she hoped there'd be less shame around asking for help - that she was still getting used to the idea that it isn't shameful.

If she could go back and tell herself one thing before becoming a mother, it would be: "You're doing good. You're doing better than you think you are." Then she added that she still needs to hear that every single day.

These women are not unusual. They are the norm.

Almost every mother we surveyed experiences burnout. A third are surviving on fewer than four hours of unbroken sleep a night - a quarter report poor mental well-being.

Mothers who post on peanut worry less about specific choices and more about whether they are simply the wrong kind of mother. This is not a phase. It is a permanent state that we have collectively decided to call normal.

Kerrie remembered how it used to work. Her grandmother would look after her when her mum was working. Cousins played together, aunties stepped in at weekends, and shopping just got done because there were enough people around to absorb the load. The burnout had somewhere to go. Now it doesn't.

The world changed. Work, housing, family proximity, stretched services, and somehow mothers absorbed all of it and kept going.

They are more informed, more intentional, more connected than any previous generation. And they are running on empty in ways they rarely say out loud, because saying it out loud feels like failing.

That's the thing about being capable of doing it all. It means you'll probably keep being asked to. In a world where mothers are the lifeblood of our society, who is really looking after them?

Mothers today are doing it for themselves, but if this continues, then society will pay the consequences.

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Michelle Kennedy is the founder of the Peanut app for mums.

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The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

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