Feeling Guilty: Parent Guilt and Making Mistakes
We all make parenting mistakes. Let’s face it. Our kids don’t come with instruction manuals or any how-to guide. We need a license to fish, but we don’t need a license to be a parent. There are lots of how-to classes for learning to cook, learning to play tennis, even learn to dance, but there is minimal schooling for learning to parent. It is no wonder we make lots of mistakes! You can’t fault yourself for that! And WHY is there no How-To-Be-A-Parent School? Well, because every child is unique and what works for one kid won’t work for another. There is no “good-parent-formula.” Instead, parenting is trial and error. Parenting is just doing your best.
Feeling Guilty
If mistakes are inevitable, why do we feel so guilty when we make them? Instead of guilt, I challenge you to learn from your mistakes. Learning from mistakes isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds. It takes a lot of reflection, but the reward for learning from your mistakes is growth. Sometimes we have to make mistakes to learn. In school, we can’t get every math problem right. It takes practice and learning from our errors to improve our skills. Parenting is similar. Instead of wishing you could reverse time and erase the past when you make a mistake, consider changing your perspective to being grateful for the lesson that mistake can teach you and celebrate your growth for learning.
I know this sounds crazy to some people, but imagine… What if we could take our bad choices and better ourselves for them? Parents naturally encourage children to do this but we don’t give ourselves the same grace. Your child falls off their bike, and you encourage them to get back on again. Your teen washes their clothes with a red sock, and you encourage them to learn how to separate their colors and whites better. But then WE make a mistake, and instead of learning, we just let the parent guilt set in. Ugh- the parent guilt! It is the worst! So, END the parent guilt and change your perspective!
Feeling Guilty
I had a client who yelled at her kids every day. Each day was a battle of screaming. No one listened unless her voice could make the house shake. She felt that nothing was working to change her children’s behaviors so each night she felt defeated. To make matters worse, her kids started yelling back. Why? Because that was all her kids knew. Kids don’t learn what you tell them. They learn what you SHOW them. When she came to me and I pointed this out, and her mom-guilt set in. Immediately, I told her not to feel guilty. Instead, learn from this experience. As a child, she grew up in a household of screaming, so it was no wonder that this is how she parented. There is no shame in that. She was doing her best and doing all she knew. How did she finally make a change? She confronted her mistake and this gave her an opportunity to better herself, her parenting skills, and her kids. Soon, she put in the work to learn other disciplinary techniques and coping tools. Now her household is much better.
Consider that big mistakes open us up to the most growth and the most change. Change is difficult. It rarely comes easy. Usually, the most significant changes in our lives come from big events of pain. The mistake was needed for growth. Without it, we wouldn’t have changed on our own. We would have never learned that lesson. And we would have never improved.
So the next time you are beating yourself up for making a mistake, turn that energy into finding the lesson to learn. It shifts the energy from negative to positive and makes you a more impactful parent.
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