Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt Says We Need to Stop Pretending Moms Can Do It All on ‘After Bedtime with Big Little Feelings’

Motherhood comes with a lot of balance: balance your career, home, friendships, marriage, self-care, and mental health—and look grateful while doing it. But if you’ve ever tried to return a work text while someone is crying because their granola bar “broke wrong,” you already know that the idea of “doing it all” doesn’t always line up with real life.

Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt explores the “balance” myth on After Bedtime with Big Little Feelings. She names motherhood for what it is—meaningful, overwhelming, beautiful, exhausting, and nonlinear.

Letting go of the balance myth

Right out the gate, the daughter of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver states, “I don’t feel like I’m balancing it at all. It’s a lie that you can balance—that I can be a great mom and a great author and do my book really successfully and then be a great wife, be a great daughter, be a great sister, be a great friend.”

Instead of chasing balance, Schwarzenegger Pratt focuses on recognizing the season she’s in. Some seasons require more of her work. Some need more of her family. And some require flexibility within the same day. She discusses how the cultural obsession with equilibrium often sets mothers up to feel like they’re failing at everything.

She explains one of the shifts that helps her stay grounded: “When I pick up my kids from school, I really try to not have to be on my phone or answer any emails.” She schedules calls and interviews earlier because she wants her afternoons with her children to feel like they belong to them, not to everyone who wants something from her.

But she doesn’t pretend that this works perfectly. “Your schedule doesn’t always line up with what my child needs in that day perfectly,” she says. Some days go sideways. Some days require trade-offs.

When the day spills over

The conversation also gets into the emotional overlap of work and parenting. When you’re mentally split between tasks, tone is often the first thing to go. Schwarzenegger Pratt describes catching herself being shorter than she wanted to be simply because her mind was still elsewhere, and realizing something needed to shift.

A lot of Schwarzenegger Pratt’s approach comes from how her mother raised her. “I love you no matter what. I see you for who you are. You can always come to me,” is a message she remembers hearing throughout her childhood. That kind of emotional safety is something she wants her own kids to recognize without question.

She also discusses family closeness as a value she hopes will carry forward. “I live like five houses from my mom. I wish we could all live under the same roof together still,” she says. It’s about connection, not interdependence or enmeshment.

Reclaiming presence in a digital world

To keep her children present and in the moment, Schwarzenegger Pratt is bringing back the landline. “All the little girls call each other on the landline, and I love that,” she says, describing how her daughter and her friends have moved away from smartphones. And she laughs, but she means it when she adds, “What if I were only on a landline? I would love that.”

Rather than wallow in nostalgia, Schwarzenegger Pratt is disrupting the expectation that adults—especially mothers—should be constantly accessible.

Motherhood was never supposed to be a performance art project, and neither is it meant to be tidy and wrapped in a neat bow. But, as Schwarzenegger Pratt makes clear, you don’t have to balance everything or do it all. You only have to do what matters today, and let the rest go.

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