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Don’t think you can judge whether or not you’ve been a good parent by the choices your children make. It may seem like your parenting success should have a clear outcome, but that’s not the case. The children of really terrific parents sometimes make really bad choices.
The goal is simple: happy, healthy, well-behaved children who grow up with high self-esteem and lots of friends, go to college and then embark on successful careers. But you can put a lot of energy and effort into this and still not get the outcome for which you were hoping. Parenting is one of the hardest jobs on earth. You’re probably really trying to do it right.
You may often feel like a total failure.
While some people don’t seem to care about making good parenting decisions(you know the ones), most parents worry a lot about how they’re doing in this area. Parenting books populate store shelves and television news program frequently feature stories about how-to and how-not-to raise your children. Parenting is such a huge job and so many people struggle with it that a popular television reality television show features frustrated parents and their out-of-control brats both being chastised by a super-nanny.
There are few demanding jobs at which it seems so easy to fail as parenting. The question you need to ask yourself is: Are you measuring your success with the right yardstick?
You may feel judged as a bad parent when your child throws a tantrum in a grocery store or kicks the back of another patron’s seat at the movies or gets bad grades in school. You might think you look like a parenting failure. It might, in fact, feel like other people always have opinions about what you should be doing with your kids (of course, you’re never doing whatever this is).
But even when you’re trying your hardest, your kids may struggle. So, how does this work?
It is a little recognized fact that children, to a certain degree, get to choose their own paths. Parenting has a major impact, but it’s not like steering a car--you turn the wheel to the left and the kid goes left. You can be a loving parent and give your children your attention and love and your kids still may make bad choices.
They get to do this. They get to fail miserably. They get to create their struggles by heading in really lousy directions.
Sometimes, this has nothing to do with you. The only way to measure how successful you are as a parent is to look at your own behavior. Good parenting doesn’t automatically lead to good outcomes. Kids have minds of their own and, while you want them to think for themselves, it also can make you crazy.
So, ask yourself if you’ve put your children’s needs at a high priority. Have you let them deal with their own lessons rather than stepping in to save them from the consequences of their actions? When they’re young, you keep them from running out in front of cars. When they’re in high school and cheat on a test, however, you don’t rescue them. Allowing them to experience consequences when they make bad choices is hard, but still important to children’s learning process.
Remember, you can’t take credit for their successes, only your own. And you certainly can’t blame yourself for their failures.
Individuals make choices. Therein, lies our power.
