the perfect parent myth…

Every parent makes mistakes. It’s part of being human. We have an entire lifetime of baggage following us around which we have to work through in order to bypass and move on. Many of us, in an attempt to improve ourselves as people and parents, actively strive to do better for our kids. We hope that we leave our children with as little negative baggage as possible and that we enable them to learn the skills they need to be better than we were/are.  The fact is, we all still mess up. It’s inevitable, and suddenly you find yourself wondering how those words or that tone came out of your mouth or how you could have handled your frustration better.

However, just as the mistakes our children make are opportunities for learning, the same can be said of our own mistakes. Not only are they opportunities for us to learn from and work on, but our children are there, too, observing how we handle ourselves in those times.  We can model how to apologize and come up with solutions to make the situation better. It’s often said that parents are often more gentle with their children when others are there, observing. Our children are always there observing us, and they are the ones who matter.