Bad Parents Anonymous
There’s something that needs to be said about parenting that too few people are willing to say – “It’s normal to feel bad at this.”
It’s normal to be unsure about how to deal with a particular situation. It’s normal to realize that you didn’t handle an issue particularly well. It’s normal to be overwhelmed with the amount of work that goes into raising kids. It’s normal to feel annoyed, frustrated, worried, anxious, sad, angry, uncertain, unprepared, unequipped, unsupported, and entirely at the end of your rope.
I first learned this from my mother. She had five kids – all boys, all loud, all active, all crazy making – so she has some insight into these things. “There are no perfect parents,” she told me when I had my first kid. “You are going to screw this up sometimes. You may as well get used to it.”
Now, she didn’t mean that I shouldn’t bother trying to be a good parent, that I shouldn’t bother striving to become a better parent. What she meant was that even the best parents don’t always get things right. Even the best parents aren’t always good parents. Even the best parents get overwhelmed and frustrated. It goes with the territory, and part of being a better parent is learning to accept that in order to do better next time.
Too often, however, I think parents feel the need to pretend that they’re perfect, that they’ve got everything under control. No matter how crazy the morning has been, or how little sleep they got the night before, or how short their temper was just a few minutes before, they show up at the school yard or the bus stop with a forced smile, a lunch that has a happy-face sandwich, and the art project that they mostly had to do themselves so that their kid can get a decent mark.
It’s easy to take those smiles and sandwiches and art projects at face value and feel that we’re the only parents who aren’t keeping it all together. It’s easy to feel pressured to live up to one parent’s beautifully decorated contribution to the bake sale, another parents’ perfect attendance at every school sporting event, or yet another parent’s work on the PTA. It’s easy to see these things as proof that they’ve got their act together and we don’t, that they’re good at the parenting game and we’re, well, not so good.
The thing is, if you spend time talking with parents for any length of time, even in the school yard, but especially over coffee or a drink, you pretty quickly find that they all feel inadequate in some way. They may make gorgeous cupcakes, but bed times are a disaster. They may have the time to get to school events, but their kid throws epic tantrums every morning. They may do lots for the PTA, but their kid is struggling with a learning disability. All parents, or all the ones I’ve ever met anyway, sometimes feel bad at parenting. It’s part of the deal.
That’s not say that we can’t get better. It’s not to say that we can’t develop new strategies, learn from other parents, focus more on the important things, or otherwise grow as a parent. It’s just to say that it’s way for us easier to grow as parents if we stop pretending that we have at all together. We need to be more open with each other about the things we struggle with as parents, more honest about feeling bad at parenting sometimes, more willing to help one another through the tough bits.
It’s okay to feel bad at this. It’s okay to admit it. That’s how we start getting better.
