The one tool that will help you be a perfect parent
Specializing as adolescent therapists, we get a lot of questions about how parents can be better for their children:
“How can we communicate better? How can we support our child’s growth without getting in the way? How can we not be so much like our parents?”
As parents, we want the best for our children. We want them to thrive and grow and learn and live fully expressed as their authentic selves. The thing is, despite what we like to think, being a perfect parent will not make our child healthier or stronger or smarter or well-adjusted. Being perfect is striving for some unattainable goal. You can’t possibly show up 100% perfect every single day and say the right thing in every situation. The thought of trying to do that for someone, especially for our children, can actually create more stress and anxiety. It puts pressure on ourselves as parents. So, yes, I’m not asking you to be perfect. I want you to be human. That’s how you will make the greatest positive impact on your children.
When we live and learn with our kids, we will mess up. We are all human, and because of that, we are all imperfect and going to mess up at some point. Being a parent is hard. It’s like learning a new language without a teacher or manual. Maybe we will mess up every day. And, I’m not saying this because you will mess up. I’m saying this because even if you think you did everything perfectly, your children will interpret things differently. (We live in our own subjective realities.) Every child is different, every family is different, and every parent is different. On the contrary, your perfection might actually be hurting them in some way. So how can we make sure we are parenting our children well and helping them thrive even when we mess up?
Repair. Repair is our ability to take accountability for our missteps as parents and propose a new path forward. I like to think of the Japanese art of Kintsugi when I talk about repair. In Japan, they take broken pottery and piece it back together with gold lacquer. Everyone can tell which pots have been broken, evidenced by their golden seaming. What’s beautiful about this is that the Japanese pots that have been broken and sealed with gold are more valuable than an unbroken pot. The Japanese recognize that a pot's value comes from its experience, its past. And one thing I love about this art is that they don’t try to hide the brokenness of the pot. Rather they celebrate it because the pot has more experience now. I like to think of parents and children as the pots. We are going to break our pots. We are going to say the wrong word, ask the wrong question, or struggle with our own stress and emotions while parenting. The pots will break, but our ability to repair the pots with gold lacquer—taking accountability for the part we played in the misstep—is what will make the pot whole again.
We will fight with our children, no matter how great we think we are. Not fighting isn’t a realistic scenario. Instead, we must expect fights. We must expect to knock the pot from the shelf only for it to shatter onto the ground needing repair. Entering into a disagreement with our children knowing we will mess up and that there is an ability to repair is more realistic and healthy than not expecting conflict. Avoiding conflict presents its own issues.
Repair can look like many things. It can be choosing to walk away when an argument starts, saying that we need to figure this out once the emotion has subsided. It can happen after having an argument when you apologize for saying hurtful words. Repair is the ability to recognize our shortcomings and create space for connection anyways. It’s the golden lining that allows us to learn more about each other, even when there is tension and conflict.
Many times, we can find that we aren’t at our best in the moment. One minute you know how you want to handle conflict and the next your brain is hijacked and you’ve lost connection to the part of your brain that knows better. Your primal reactive mind is feeling fear and anticipating the worst. Maybe you yell. The thing to know is once you recognize the misstep, acknowledge the primal side of your brain for wanting to protect you in the way it knows how, forgive yourself, and ask what’s the next best way to try and mend the situation. Repair might be modeling your ability to forgive yourself and ask for forgiveness from your partner or child. It might be saying, “This is what I wish I had done differently.” The most important piece here is the attempt.
Teens will ask a lot of you, it’s in their nature, and it doesn’t mean that you have to honor their requests at the expense of your values and boundaries. It’s important for repair to happen and to not get so focused on perfection. Finding a way to forgive ourselves so we can respond to kids with the same compassion is key. However, once we are aware of a better way, the repair is to actually take new actions and not just ask for forgiveness every time. But when we aren’t aware of a new way yet or we become aware after the disruption, then the steps to forgive ourself and choose a new action is essential
Our ability to initiate repair shows our children that the magic isn’t in being perfect. The magic is in our ability to repair when we mess up. This mentality sets an example for our children not only when handling conflict in the house but also when handling conflict later in their lives, in the big world.
Rather than putting our attention on how many things could go wrong as parents, put your attention on how many possibilities there are for things to be broken apart and brought back together again. The magic is in the golden seams.