If everything you do as a mom was suddenly stripped away—if the house was messy, the kids were melting down, dinner wasn’t made, and your to-do list didn’t get touched—would you still feel valuable?
So many moms quietly believe your self value depends on how well you’re performing. On whether you’re being a good mom, a perfect mom – keeping the house clean, figuring out how to get things done, being productive, and being everything for everyone. And when you fall short—which happens to every mom—you start feeling like a failure as a mom.
Today, we’re gonna to talk about self worth. What it really means. Why you don’t have to earn it. And how knowing your worth as a woman—and as a mother—can radically reduce stress, mom guilt, and burnout, and actually help you be happier as a mom.
Welcome to Conquer Mom Stress—the podcast that helps you stress less and enjoy motherhood more. If you’ve ever crawled into bed at night completely exhausted, but still feel like there’s so much left to do, you are in the right place.
I’m your host, Jill Gockel—and I believe that motherhood is meant to feel joyful, not exhausting. Today, we’ll uncover what’s really fueling your stress and give you the practical tools to conquer it—so you can finally feel like the confident mom you were made to be.
Also, if you have a specific question or issue you’re stressing about, head over to jillgockel.com/ask to submit your question and who knows, you might just be featured in an upcoming episode so you can get practical, real-world solutions to the exact challenges you’re facing.
I remember a season where I felt like my worth rose and fell with my productivity. If the kids were happy, the house was running smoothly, and I was checking things off my list, I felt good about myself. But on days with kids at home, the house felt chaotic, and I couldn’t figure out how to be productive, I felt defeated before the day even ended.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was giving myself a self worth test every single day—measuring my value by my output. And that’s an exhausting way to live. Especially as a mother.
Here’s the problem so many moms are facing: society teaches—directly or indirectly—that your worth comes from what you do and how well you do it.
This belief doesn’t come from God. It comes from culture, conditioning, and decades of reinforcement in ways we nearly take for granted.
Think about your earliest experiences with evaluation. In school, a student’s value is literally measured by grades. You learn very young that getting an A means you’re smart, getting a C means you’re mediocre, and getting an F means you “aren’t trying hard enough.” Even when school is well-intentioned, the system still sends a message: your worth is tied to your performance. If you do well, you’re valued; if you don’t, you struggle for approval.
This pattern follows many of us into adulthood. In the workplace, performance evaluations, sales targets, productivity metrics, promotions, raises — all of those are measures of output. A person’s worth in a job is often tied to what they accomplish and how efficiently they do it. If the numbers are high, the praise follows; if productivity dips, criticism or consequences follow.
There are real studies that show how powerful this performance-based valuation is in society. Research in organizational psychology suggests that when people are valued primarily for performance over who they are as a person, stress, burnout, and emotional exhaustion increase significantly.
While it can be helpful to use performance in the workplace to justify raises or promotions, when you tie your identity — your self worth — to performance, your “self-esteem” becomes fragile, fluctuating with each success or setback.
Think about this in terms of motherhood, so many moms are going through life with an invisible report card for your performance as a mom.
You know you do this, we all do, myself included. At the end of the day, you look back and you think - Did I get the house all cleaned? Fail. Did I get everything done that I wanted to? Not quite, that’s a fail. Did I get my kids where they needed to be? Thank goodness, pass. Was I patient today? Ugh, fail. Did I play undistracted with my kids today? Another fail.
This is a twisted version of self worth meaning when your value comes from your performance as a mom, you’ll never feel worthy because it’s impossible not to fall short of the unrealistic expectations society places on moms. So as long as you’re using this self-criticizing performance evaluation to know your self worth, you’ll never figure out how to be happy as a mom.
Performance-based self worth increases stress and reduces joy because it doesn’t leave room for you to be human and make mistakes. When you’re constantly evaluating yourself — even unconsciously — based on a scorecard of motherhood tasks, your nervous system stays in a heightened state of alert.
The brain becomes wired to scan for threats instead of scanning for joy. This is why so many exhausted moms look back on a perfectly good day and still feel drained, because the stress chemicals in their body have taught them to stay on guard instead of relax and enjoy.
Most moms carry this stress quietly because it feels normal. You see other moms juggling tasks and you assume you should be able to handle the same things with the same ease. But what you’re watching is not a measure of worth — it’s a measure of performance. When you base your self worth on performance — whether it’s your productivity, your kids’ behavior, or how smoothly your day goes — you are building your identity on something that is fleeting and changeable. That sets you up for emotional instability because life with kids at home is full of unpredictability.
This is why mom stress and mom burnout are so common. It’s not just the workload. It’s the internal narrative that whispers, “If you could just figure this out… If you could just be more productive… If you could just get more done… then you would be worthy.” It’s the belief that worth is something you earn by output. And that belief leads to a life where your joy is always just out of reach — because there will always be one more task, one more need, one more expectation.
So many moms get stuck in this cycle — doing everything for everyone — thinking that if you check every box, then you’ll finally feel like you know your self worth. But performance-based self worth doesn’t deliver peace. It delivers pressure. It doesn’t deliver joy. It delivers anxiety. And most painfully, it doesn’t root you in love — it roots you in fear: fear of not doing enough, fear of not being enough.
And the truth is, when you’re grading yourself as a mom based on your performance, anything below perfect performance makes you feel like a failure as a mom. But remember motherhood isn’t a pass/fail test. A good mom is still an imperfect one, one who makes mistakes and falls short of perfection.
So if self worth doesn’t come from performance, how do you know your self worth as a mom? How can you define it? How can you know whether you are a good mom or not?
The first step in this is to redefine self worth meaning that you need to understand where your worth, your value, truly comes from.
When you think about the parable of the lost son in
Luke 15:11-24.
…A man had two sons. The younger son told his father, ‘I want my share of your estate now before you die.’ So his father agreed to divide his wealth between his sons.
A few days later this younger son packed all his belongings and moved to a distant land, and there he wasted all his money in wild living. About the time his money ran out, a great famine swept over the land, and he began to starve. He persuaded a local farmer to hire him, and the man sent him into his fields to feed the pigs. The young man became so hungry that even the pods he was feeding the pigs looked good to him. But no one gave him anything.
When he finally came to his senses, he said to himself, ‘At home even the hired servants have food enough to spare, and here I am dying of hunger! I will go home to my father and say, “Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son. Please take me on as a hired servant.”’
So he returned home to his father. And while he was still a long way off, his father saw him coming. Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him. His son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son.
But his father said to the servants, ‘Quick! Bring the finest robe in the house and put it on him. Get a ring for his finger and sandals for his feet. And kill the calf we have been fattening. We must celebrate with a feast, for this son of mine was dead and has now returned to life. He was lost, but now he is found.’ So the party began.
When you think about this story, did this prodigal son do anything to earn his father’s love? Did he do anything to earn his place of honor in the household? No! He basically made every mistake possible, felt like a failure, a horrible person, and came groveling back to his father expecting to be treated based on his performance, which is to say he thought his performance in life only earned him the right to be a servant.
And you know what? He’s right. His performance was worse than that of a servant. But his worth has nothing to do with his performance and everything to do with whose he was. He was the son of the landowner, the master, and based on that alone, he was valuable and worthy, regardless of his performance.
You may not realize this but that’s where your worth comes from too.
1 John 3:1 says,
See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God.
Mama, this is the importance of self worth that you must understand. Your worth comes from whose you are, you are a child of God. When you were baptized, you become God’s.
You are worthy, right now because God is not looking at your performance in life. When God looks at you, He sees Jesus in you. The death of his son opened the door to your baptism and your adoption of the Almighty God.
God is not looking at your track record, your list of mistakes, or your level of productivity. His love is perfect, unchanging, and unconditional. You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to measure up. You are already enough — because you belong to Him as a child of God.
This is the foundation of knowing your self worth.
When you believe your worth must be earned, everything becomes heavier. Parenting feels like pressure instead of purpose. Tasks feel like proof of value instead of simple responsibilities.
This mindset affects how you show up with your kids. A mom who feels unworthy is more stressed, more reactive, and more emotionally depleted. When you feel this way, you push yourself harder, trying to prove you’re enough, which only leads to more exhaustion.
And the outcome you want—peace, joy, connection, happiness as a mom—feels farther away the harder you try.
But when you know your worth comes from God and nothing else, something inside you exhales.
The constant pressure to prove yourself begins to loosen its grip. You stop waking up each day with an invisible scoreboard running in your mind—counting meals made, messes cleaned, patience lost, or tempers kept. Instead of measuring yourself by outcomes, you begin anchoring yourself in your identity in God. And that shift changes everything.
The first thing that changes is stress. Performance-based worth keeps the nervous system on high alert because there is always something at stake. If worth must be earned, then every hard day feels like a failure and every mistake feels dangerous. But when you understand that your value is already secured in God—that you are loved fully, chosen intentionally, and seen completely—your body no longer has to live in survival mode. Stress hormones calm because there is no longer a threat to your identity. You are not fighting to be “enough” anymore, you already are enough. This doesn’t mean life becomes easy, but it means hardship no longer feels like a verdict on your value.
That internal safety dramatically affects energy levels. So much exhaustion in motherhood isn’t just physical—it’s emotional and spiritual. Constant self-evaluation drains energy faster than any to-do list. When you stop trying to earn your worth, you stop leaking energy through self-criticism, comparison, and guilt. You begin to use your energy more wisely, from a place of intention rather than pressure. Rest no longer feels like laziness; it feels like stewardship of a body God lovingly gave you. You can pace yourself because you’re no longer running to prove something.
Your happiness and joy in motherhood deepens in a way that is quieter but far more sustainable. Joy is no longer dependent on whether the day went smoothly or whether the kids behaved. It comes from belonging. From knowing you are held by God even on the messy days. This kind of joy doesn’t disappear when the house is loud or plans fall apart. It stays. And because it’s rooted in an identity in Christ, not your circumstances, it becomes resilient. You can laugh more easily, forgive yourself more quickly, and savor moments without rushing through them to get to the next task.
And perhaps the most beautiful change is how you show up—for your kids, your family, and yourself. As a mom, when you aren’t operating from deficiency, you parent from abundance. You become more patient, not because you’re trying harder, but because you feel safer. You can be present because you’re not mentally calculating whether you’re doing enough. You can correct your children with calm authority instead of reactive frustration, because their behavior is no longer a reflection of your worth. You listen more. You soften more. You enjoy them more.
This identity shift also frees you from comparison. Other moms no longer feel like competition or evidence of your shortcomings. You can celebrate them without shrinking yourself. You can trust your own instincts more because you’re no longer outsourcing your worth to approval. Confidence grows naturally—not the loud, performative kind, but the steady kind rooted in truth.
And this is where true joy begins to flow. Not the fleeting joy that comes from productivity or praise, but the deep joy Scripture speaks of—the joy that remains even in trial. When you know you are a beloved daughter of God, your life stops being about proving and starts being about participating. You live from love instead of striving for it. You parent from grace instead of guilt. You work from peace instead of pressure.
Knowing your worth as a child of God doesn’t make you do less—it makes you live more fully. It doesn’t remove responsibility—it removes fear. And from that place, motherhood becomes less about surviving the day and more about being present in it. That is the joy God desires for mothers. A joy that flows not from what you do, but from whose you are—His.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux said,
It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to love.
Confidence in God’s love—not confidence in your performance—is what allows you to know your worth. You don’t need to earn it. You already have it. And when you understand this, you can see that being a good mom comes from loving your kids, nothing else.
You’ll make mistakes as a mom, you’ll fall short of being the perfect wife, keeping the house spotless, and being everything to everyone all the time. But all that matters in the end is do you love your kids? If the answer is yes, then you can rest assured that just as God’s love makes you worthy, your love makes you a good mom.
If you take nothing else from today, remember this: you do not have to earn your worth. You are already loved beyond measure by God. And from that truth, you can finally rest, breathe, and discover how to be happy as a mom again.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of Conquer Mom Stress. If today’s conversation encouraged you, hit follow and leave a review. That lets me know that these episodes are hitting the topics you need.
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Remember, this is your place to pause, reset, and start conquering mom stress — one small step at a time.
Motherhood isn’t meant to drain the life out of you.
It’s meant to be lived with joy, even on the messy days.
And together, we’re gonna find that joy again.
