Guilty: Parenting While Imperfect

Are you feeling guilty about your deficiencies as a parent? Can you look at your children and see the glaring evidence that likely you did not give them some of the skills they needed to be happy and to interact with other people?

Learning to Parent While Imperfect

In the Ridiculously Effective Parenting Training, we’ve talked extensively about how we as parents did not know how to love our children, and that as a result we have caused a great deal of our children’s pain. So now we begin the process of learning how to love and teach them.

We’re learning not just how to be better parents. If only it were that simple. We’re overcoming our own lifetime of pain as we change perspectives learned from early childhood. This is no small task we’re taking on our shoulders, to initiate and maintain this much change. Most people don’t change how they see the world and themselves after about age four. They learn only to react to their pain in more creative and adult ways.

So, the days will come—likely many of them—as you’re trying to love and teach your children, when you will have serious doubts about having any parenting ability at all. You WILL make mistakes—tons of them—and at times will be certain that your journey is actually backward. Oh, relax, it’s all part of learning.

Responding While Imperfect to an Angry Child

A mother called me one day, and said that as she had been trying to love and teach her son, he bitterly complained that she wasn’t listening, wasn’t understanding him, wasn’t giving him what he wanted, and more.

She listened for a minute or so, and excused herself so that she didn’t respond with anything stupid or unkind. She called me in frustration. “What can I say when he talks like that?” she asked.

Many of you will hear this question on occasion, and I can’t tell you exactly what to say, but I can suggest that you not:

* Apologize. They don’t need your apologies. You’re doing your best, and what they need is the truth—as described in Chapter Six of the Parenting Training—not meaningless apologies.

* Feel guilty. Again, you’re doing your best. You can’t do more than that.

You might do a piece of the initial truth telling, mentioned above, something like, “We’re all learning how to do this differently together. I’m learning to love you and teach you better, and you’re learning how to feel loved, and to be loving, and to be responsible. We’ll all make plenty of mistakes as we go.”

You could also try a bit of light-heartedness:

* “Now I understand. You’d like a perfect parent to suddenly appear. You might consider going to the store to see if they have any. Let me know.” And/or

* “I wanted a perfect child too, but I got you. (You must have NO unloving tone if you try this one). So here we are, imperfect parent and imperfect child, and the learning continues."

Find People to Love You While Imperfect

Find people to love you. Keep trusting the people who do love you. Use all the resources available to you on the parenting site. There are no shortcuts. There is just walking along the path—one step at a time—sometimes walking, sometimes limping, sometimes skipping.

But you’re not alone. Step back. See the bigger picture. Find gratitude and take another step.