The Psychology Behind Raising a Child Ft. Sarah Zafar

I sit down with my old school friend Sarah Zafar, a psychotherapist who now runs a support group called Ammis for Mental Health. This conversation is a long, winding catch-up that touches everything from growing up between Islamabad and Florida, to the weight of being the mother of a boy in a culture that is finally shifting its narratives. But at the core of it all is an honest look at what it really takes to raise a child, and what it takes to keep yourself whole while doing it.

The school bus and the free write that changed everything

Sarah moved to the US when she was 13. She calls it a time of prime teenage years, the age when you are just beginning to understand yourself and your culture. The first day on the school bus, the driver asked her something and Sarah answered in very clear Urdu. I could feel her reliving that confusion when she told me. “I remember I spoke to her in Urdu… I was just like what’s happening. I know English. What’s happening to me?” It was a harsh introduction to the feeling of not fitting in. In a Florida middle school with no other Muslims or Pakistanis, she spent that first year glued to the seat closest to the teacher.

That year, she made a friend named Tracy. Tracy was struggling with an eating disorder, something Sarah had no words for at the time. Then Tracy ran away from home, and Sarah was the only one she told. Having to share that secret and sitting in the guidance counselor’s office started something. But the real pivot came from a regular Friday free write in language arts class. One weekend, after a fight at home, Sarah wrote about what was upsetting her. By Monday, her teacher, the school psychologist, the counselor, and a police officer were waiting for her with photocopies of that page. Sarah sat there for hours convincing them not to take action, carrying a huge secret inside. “It was one of those moments,” she says. The deal was therapy every week. At first unwilling, by the end of that year she knew she wanted to go into psychology. She had seen firsthand how a single caring intervention could help a young person understand themselves.

Coming home and the crash of cultures

When Sarah came back to Pakistan, she was 18 and had missed out on learning how to carry herself as a Pakistani woman. She remembers getting warnings from everyone and still getting into a lot of trouble simply because she did not know the unspoken rules. She enrolled in a BBA program because she had no choice, but she could not study the subjects. She sat in the car outside her sister’s university for weeks, pillows and treats in the backseat, refusing to go in. “I just wanted to do what I wanted to do,” she says. Eventually she started a bachelor’s in social sciences with a psychology major at ZABIST, at a time when the field was not yet popular in Pakistan. She was ahead of her time, but it was exactly where she needed to be.

Her high school years in the US had their own movie-like cliques. By junior year she had become friends with everyone, from the cool kids to the ones who never fit in. She made a video project called “How to be American” that had her classmates leaving their own classes to come watch. But when she returned to Pakistan, she did not recognize that version of herself anymore. “It was like an act that had to be dropped,” she says. That dropping led her toward a more personal faith. She started praying regularly, which brought harsh comments from relatives who once judged her for short sleeves and now judged her for covering her head. She stopped going to every family dinner, and she slowly realized that none of their validation mattered.

A job, a scarf, and a city called Karachi

Sarah has been earning her own money since she was 14, working alongside her sister at a Sunday school in a church. That independence became a core part of her identity. After her masters in London, she got married and moved to Karachi. She taught at a university, and when she became pregnant, she expected to be able to take maternity leave. The reality was different. “If you have a miscarriage,” she tells me, “you are entitled to a week of paid leave. And I’ve had one. I was teaching the day that I did.” When her daughter was born, the university did not pay her during her leave. She was technically employed but earning nothing. That loss of financial independence has stayed with her.

I asked her how she made the decision to let go of working outside the home. She texted her husband, torn between not wanting to be unfair to her child and not wanting to take money from anyone else. He wrote back, “Everything is mine is yours.” That small exchange, she says, made all the difference. I want to pause here because this is where a quiet but radical idea lives. We often talk about equal division of labor, but Sarah and I landed on something else. Equality is not really about splitting chores down the middle. It is about equal respect. Caregiving is not less because it does not bring a paycheck. The respect for the one staying home must be as solid as the respect for the one earning. “Equal respect is more important than equal sort of division of labor,” I told her, and she agreed wholeheartedly. You can only go out and do your work effectively when you know your child is safe with someone who is valued.

The bridge every mother stands on

Motherhood brings a constant mental load that is hard to describe unless you have lived it. Sarah shared a picture she carries in her head: a bridge. “If there’s a situation just me,” she says, “there’s a diaper situation that needs to be changed but the other child needs a nap. So what do I do first?” I knew exactly what she meant. You spend all day solving tiny, urgent equations that nobody else sees. That mental math is exhausting. She also pointed out something beautiful about mothers: we forget the rawness. The sleepless nights and the colic fade, and the love remains. But in the moment, it is isolating. She said, “Even if you have excellent friends, when you have a child suddenly you can no longer be friends with people who don’t have children.” They cannot relate, and you are in a different zone entirely.

This isolation is what led Sarah to start Ammis for Mental Health, a support group for Pakistani mothers. When postpartum depression hit her around six months after her daughter was born, she found she needed something for herself. She wanted a judgment-free platform, a place where you can talk about all things motherhood without being called ungrateful. An early participant told her, “If you can help one person, even if you’re helping just one person, you should feel like you’ve done something big.” That has stayed with her. In her groups, mothers at different stages give each other hope. Someone says, “I was exactly where you are a few months ago, and now I’m here,” and that can be the thing that carries you across your own bridge.

Intuitive parenting and the myth of absolutes

We got into a candid talk about respectful parenting and the pressure to follow scripts. Sarah is honest about her skepticism. “I take it with a pinch of salt because I don’t think everything applies to our culture specifically,” she says. The online advice often says never let your child see you distressed, never say you are making me sad. But emotions are natural. The moment we start dealing in absolutes, we close the door to compassion and room for mistakes. Sarah pointed out that in forensic psychology, when a person says “I would never do this,” it is actually a sign of lying. Human psychology does not work in extremes. If we hold ourselves to a standard of never showing frustration, we set ourselves up to feel like failures. “You can’t hold yourself to a consistent shame because of a standard that is unnatural,” she said. I chimed in that the best kind of parenting is intuitive. You follow that gut feeling, you reflect, and you course-correct with kindness. Our children don’t need robots who always have it together. They need genuine empathy and genuine respect, and they need to see that adults make mistakes and come back from them.

Raising the next generation without fear

Sarah and I talked about how narratives around raising boys and girls are finally shifting. When she found out her second child was a boy, she was shocked and scared. “I felt like it was such a huge responsibility to be the mother of a boy in our society,” she said. But that fear is a good sign. It means we are thinking about raising kind, respectful men and giving our daughters the same freedom to be who they are. We both agreed that academic excellence cannot be the only measure of a child’s worth anymore. Sarah failed first grade while her sister skipped it, and she jokes she took it twice for the both of them. Now she knows she was good at so many other things, and she wants to give her own children that space to explore without pressure. The playing field at home has to be level for boys and girls, not just in chores but in emotional expression and the permission to have varied interests.

As the conversation wound down, Sarah admitted that sitting down to talk like this felt therapeutic. So many of these topics we never touch in day-to-day life, even with close friends. I love that this podcast can create a space where we finally ask the questions that matter. Sarah’s story is a reminder that the small things, like a message from your husband saying everything is ours, or one mother telling another she has been there too, are the things that hold us together. Motherhood does not need to be done with perfection. It just needs to be done with honesty, a village, and a whole lot of self-compassion.