Parenting Fails and Wins

Parents want to enjoy family life. All parents make mistakes and it feels bad. Have you noticed how loud and annoying the voice in your head gets when you parent in a way you don’t feel good about? That makes it hard to enjoy family life.

There are some bad parents out there, but I know that my readers are doing better than they think, because they care enough to be reading a parenting blog.

Parenting Fails

It’s so easy to feel like a failure when we mess up in our parenting job. Sometimes I forget about checking the baby’s diaper and then they go too long without a change and get a sore bottom. Fail! There’ve been way to many times that I’ve gotten tired or overwhelmed and snapped at a kid who didn’t deserve it. Fail! And how about the times when I realize I should have left 15 minutes ago to pick someone up from somewhere? Fail again! Or even when I’m not paying enough attention when our 2 year old comes asking for something, so she runs away to hide and cry. Sigh!

I can’t enjoy family life when I dwell on those mistakes.

There are a few stories that stand out in my mind as my worst parenting moments. Here’s one of them:

One time I took our 3 littlest to the park. We had a picnic and had a lot of fun playing. When it was time to go, I put the kids in the car and buckled the younger 2 in their car-seats. Then I walked around to help #8 get buckled as well. I don’t quite know how to describe the sound that came out of my throat when I opened the door and he fell head first onto the dirt parking lot. It was something like a helpless, horrified moan. I picked up our 5 year old baby to find a gash on his forehead and blood from his eyebrows to his hair. 😭 I felt like the worst mom ever! I found the first aid kit and did my best to fix him up. But everyday for a while when I looked at his wound, which in my mind was all my fault, I moped for how badly I had parented that day. 

Whenever I make a parenting mistake the voice in my head gets loud and distracting. Does that happen to you too? Thoughts like, “I messed up again!” “Why can’t I just be nice?” “I know better!” run through my head. In my hardest parenting trials they’ve been even worse, like, “Why do I even try?” and “I just can’t do anything right” or “I just make everyone miserable.” 

Keeping those thoughts in mind makes enjoying family life impossible.

But that’s not the whole picture.

Everyday we, as parents, do so many good things for our kids. It really isn’t fair of us to judge ourselves so harshly when we try so hard. We have to make more effort to see our good job. The good feeling that comes from our service to our families is never as big as the bad feeling that comes when we mess up. It doesn’t nag us to get our attention, so we have to make an effort to find it. 

Parenting Wins.

Just recently I took 2 of our boys on an outing. I bought each of them a new pair of shoes. Then I let them get some ice cream. I had such a sweet, satisfied feeling about taking care of our boys and making them smile. 😊 That feeling is joy in family life.

Every day parents all over the world give hundreds of acts of service for their children. Think for a minute about all you did for your children yesterday. Better yet, go get a paper and pencil and make a tally mark for every thing you can think of, or for every half hour spent to benefit them. I’ll list a few things to help you think. You might have:

I think this is just the beginning of the lists that could go on and on with what parents do for their children each day. I think if we’re fair to ourselves, we will see that we do way more good than bad for our kids. Remembering the good we do will help us enjoy family life.

Look for the good in yourself.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read about or heard about or seen the power of being positive. The experts talk about how pointing out your children’s positive behaviors will help them increase. They also talk about how well adults respond to positive feedback, performing better in their workplaces. I’ve learned about and experienced how positive thinking can help you find more joy in life. 

I am definitely not saying I’m an expert at this one. I have lots of room for improvement in positive thinking. But I do believe in it strongly and have been blessed by working on it. 

I can share one story about the effects of positive feedback on kids. Our #6 was way more challenging as a toddler than our others had been. Time out and negative consequences had worked with our previous toddlers to get them to behave better, but not her. #6 didn’t seem phased at all by those negative discipline attempts. So I read and studied and tried to come up with a new way to work with her. I had already known to praise good behavior, but I had never tried to use it to stop bad behavior. But you know what? When I focused on what she was doing well, she behaved better than she had for any kind of punishing her bad behaviors. 

Being positive with ourselves will help us be better parents, and help us enjoy family life more. Aim for improvement, not perfection. 

Maybe as you’ve read my post today you’ve thought of places you need to improve. That’s ok. No parents are perfect. If you cared enough to read my post, and you care enough to try to change, you are a good parent. 

I hope that most of you will come away feeling better about the good job you are doing in parenting, and ready to go enjoy your adventure in family life. 

Thanks for reading. 

For more thoughts on joy in parenting, read my post Parenting with Interruptions.