Were You Really A Bad Parent?

I hear this all the time …

“Don, I was a bad parent because I made so many mistakes.”

Well, you are a better parent than you think.

The fact that you still fret over this and are concerned about your children, no matter their age, means you cared about your kids then, and you still care about them now.

That alone makes you a good parent.

But what about those bad decisions?

Well, in most situations in life, we accept the fact that we will make mistakes – that we are not perfect. However, we expect to be perfect parents - to be flawless in our choices. To have the superhuman power to know and control the outcome of every decision we make. Buy you are not a perfect person -  so stop believing you should be a perfect parent. You aren’t – no one is.

But you are a better parent than you think. You have made many more good decisions than bad ones regarding your children. The problem is that we remember all the bad choices we make because of the consequences they created. And we never expected, nor wanted, those harmful, hurtful, outcomes. We don’t remember the right choices we made for our kids because they produced the good outcomes we were hoping for. Those excellent decisions tend to get erased from memory, but they greatly benefited our children.

Some of those bad decisions you made weren’t even poor decisions. They were right decisions that resulted in adverse outcomes. You make the best decisions you can at the time with the best information you have. You are not all-knowing. You are not perfect. But if you make the choices you think will benefit your kid, you are a good parent.

Of course, there are those tough decisions you make where there is no good alternative – the lesser of two evils. Again, you tend to remember the bad outcome, which is almost assured in this situation, but you forget that you made what you considered the best choice available.

If you care about your children, if you love your children enough to try to make the best decisions for them, then you are a good parent. You are not going to make all the right choices. You are not and were not going to be the perfect parent.

Therefore: STOP SECOND GUESSING EVERY CHOICE YOU MADE AS A PARENT! IF YOU DID THE BEST YOU COULD UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES, YOU WERE A GOOD PARENT.

And it’s harmful to beat yourself up over decisions made in the past on things you cannot change. It’s much better to focus your attention on the choices you are making now, which impact things you can change.

Even If Your Decisions Were Good …

“But Don, my children didn’t turn out as planned.”

Well, of course not. Because they seldom do. Although some do miss the mark more than others.

But this is not your fault. 

Parenting is one of the toughest challenges there is because the outcome is so highly uncertain. Parenting is even more complicated than those mathematical equations it takes geniuses months to solve.

The parenting calculation takes at least eighteen years to finish and the equation frequently changes over time. Just about the time you master how to parent a preteen – boom! You must parent a teenager, and your math problem just turned from algebra to calculus.

But you can’t really “solve” this problem, can you? You can put all the right numbers in, do all the right things, and still not get the desired result.

Because your job is not to assure your child’s success in life, it is to prepare your child to have the opportunity for success in life. Because at some point, your children make their own decisions, which are typically different than yours. And they must live with the outcomes.

The choices your children make do not reflect poorly on you, especially if they contradict everything you tried to teach them. If things in your adult children’s life take a terrible turn, you have not failed as a parent; many times, your children just make poor decisions. And again, sometimes they were the right decisions but with a bad outcome.

I have several friends who are great people and were great parents. However, they had children who made extremely poor choices after they became adults. These children even became estranged from these excellent parents for a period, for no logical reason at all. I have other friends whose daughter died of an opioid overdose in her 20’s. Another couple’s son committed suicide. Were they bad parents? No, these are good people, and they were all excellent parents, and none of these outcomes are in any way their fault.

You can do everything - well, almost everything, right - and still not have things turn out well. You can provide as much training as possible for your children to make good choices, but you can’t make those choices for them. Your adult child’s success, or lack of it, is not a reflection of you. 

And good parents will want to continue to parent their adult children because, of course, they are good parents and care about the welfare of their kids no matter their age. But you must resist this temptation. We must at some point, stop parenting and just start advising them. Because it is their choice where to work, where to live, how to raise their kids, etc. Their decisions, not yours. (mothers-in-law – I’m talking to you)

So: STOP BLAMING YOURSELF FOR THE CHOICES YOUR ADULT CHILDREN MAKE! IT IS THEIR CHOICES, NOT YOURS. SO, STOP IT! STOP IT NOW!

You are a better parent than you think. And if you cared about your children and tried to provide for and train them as best you could, you were/are a good parent.