Are there any parenting experts out there? I ask because it seems that every parent I know, including my wife and myself, seems to be on a “work in progress” path to being a well-rounded parent. It’s been said so many times before, but why oh why don’t kids come with an owner’s manual? Ask most any parent and they’re likely to tell you that they are still trying to figure out what makes a “perfect child”. The fact is, we parents are incapable of “creating” perfection. Try as we might, every one of my children (yours too, come on) will leave home both an imperfect and an incomplete project. I know many parents that really struggle with the fact that their child has this or that flaw or that if only they had done this one parenting thing better, it all would turn out perfect. In my opinion, one trick to being a better parent is to accept that you can not make your kids perfect and to embrace that. Don’t get down on yourself or your child because they act up in public or don’t make the grades you wanted, or aren’t the star athlete. Your job is not to create perfection but to give children the basic core values that they can take out into the world to make their own decisions with. Trying to inoculate your child from every possibly harmful thing you can think of will not help them be prepared for the even greater number of things they will encounter in their life.My wife and I have 6 children, so some people make the assumption that we must know what we’re doing and have all the right answers. They’re right of course, but that’s not the point … No … wait their NOT right and in actuality we have no idea what we’re doing either. 🙂 But one thing having a larger family forces you to do as a parent is dial back your intensity. With 6 children you are forced to not focus your microscope on every action a single child does because there is something else coming up all the time. What you do instead, is keep moving and try to teach lessons so kids can learn from each experience they have, whether it was pleasant or not. If your kindergartener gets in trouble at school you talk to his teacher and you talk to him and explain that it’s not nice to hit people and you don’t want to hear of it happening again. You try to explain that he needs to think about how he would like to be treated then next time he’s in this situation. Then you move on and try to figure out how to get the peas out of the 2 year old’s nose and give them a stern look so maybe they won’t do it again (yeah right). Then you help the 9 year old with his spelling words and you keep going back to the words he missed over and over. You keep moving, and things have less of a tendency to fester. Because if you don’t then it will overwhelm you. Of course that’s not to say you need to have a large family to do this. We just have no choice but to not focus too long on any one event. In doing all this, you also prepare your children for life after they live at home. You’re teaching them how to find a way to bring a positive out of even bad experiences.
So the next time your child gets in trouble somewhere, or forgets to close the door for the 400th time, or won’t stop hitting her brother, don’t make too much of these day to day things. Focus your energy on teaching them core values that will help them make decisions when they leave home and no longer have you there to bail them out.
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