PERFECT PARENTS

D. Charles Williams, Ph.D.

There are only two kinds of perfect parents in this world ….those who haven’t had kids yet and those whose children are grown and gone. The former evaluate their parenting skills based on wishful thinking or what they would do if they had children. The latter recall their expertise based upon selective memory of the past. Aspiring to be a perfect parent usually leads to high frustration, guilt and a sense of failure because it’s an “exercise in futility.”  It is well intentioned but unattainable.

Imperfect parents are generally those who are still “in the trenches” trying to rear their kids through the up and down stages, they were never prepared to face. Parenting is not doing everything just right. It is doing the best you can, where you are with what you have.

“Parenting is on-the-job training that by the time you’re sufficiently experienced, you’re unemployed.”  Parenting is truly a work in progress. Even though our kids “don’t know what they don’t know;” as imperfect parents, we do know that we don’t know. This realization is both freeing and empowering. It allows us to accept a “trial and error approach” to parenting until we discover what really works for our kids, to learn from our mistakes instead of feeling like failures and to transfer more and more responsibility to our children for how they turn out.

Some parents worry about whether or not they did an adequate enough job as parents. Others are just relieved that its over and their kids are grown. At some point, however, most of us realize that neither parents nor children will ever be perfect, and no matter how old we all are… parenthood is never really over.