Why Perfect Parenting Doesn’t Exist (and how it would screw up your kids if it did)
Fear is often behind our perfection. A scarcity that we are not good enough just as we are. That if we do not respond to our children perfectly every time we will be damaging them. The issue with this is our fear and anxiety about perfection are often having the opposite effect that we want. These fears keep our bodies stiff and brittle. They keep us stuck in a limiting belief we are not good enough that we are a failure.
The truth is that we have always been good enough just as we are in all our glorious imperfection and when our children learn that we can be gloriously imperfect they have permission to embrace their own glorious imperfection. Love is forged in repair and if we parented “perfectly” and met every one of our children’s needs and responded to the every time exactly “right” we would miss out on these moments of repair where our children would be able to see us in our raw vulnerability as we forgive ourselves in order to say sorry to them.
Whilst I would advocate for always trying to be curious about your children’s needs, If we met everyone of our children’s needs they would struggle to cope when life inevitably doesn’t meet their needs. If we met everyone of their needs they would never leave us and stride out to find their own way in the world. We can then aim to largely meet their needs but when we can’t or fall short we don’t have to destroy ourselves with guilt we can explain why we cant meet the need. “You really want me to listen to you right now and I’m really busy because I have to work/ cook/ tend to your little sister. I see you want to be heard and later I’m going to make sure we have some one on one time”
If we never got angry or frustrated or sad in front of our children we would be denying our children the range of human experience and we would make ourselves somehow “other” to them. In doing so we would also be repressing and squelching things down into our bodies. Instead we can learn how to healthily release our emotions by narrating them to our children “argh I’m starting to feel really frustrated now because it’s hot and both of you are crawling all over me” (clearly I’m writing this during a heatwave) I need a few minutes to calm down over here and move my body then we can play a different game”
We are not robots we are people and people are messy.
