F*ck Being A Perfect Parent, All You Need To Give Your Kids Is The Gift Of Embracing Imperfection

If there is one thing I know about parenthood, it is that we kill ourselves to be the perfect parent to our children. I cannot even begin to count the number of times I have agonised over what a shit job that I am doing at parenting, and how scared I have been of how my kids are going to grow up. I am absolutely petrified of how they will ‘turn out’. And I feel like just about every other parent is too.

But there is something very profound that I have learned over my years of cultivating awareness and understanding human behaviour.

We are never going to get it right. Ever. We can try and fight all we like. We can hold ourselves accountable for every bit of dirt that we can find on ourselves not being the perfect parent.

The absolute, unequivocal truth of parenting and human behaviour is – no matter how hard we try to be perfect; we are going to give our children some level of patterning that is going to hinder them in the future. It is unavoidable.

Is it better then to keep trying to be perfect, or start to accept an unavoidable truth and work with it and make something amazing? Accept that we are less than perfect and cultivate some amazing humans.

Here is how.

Think of it like this. A parent can do everything in the world to make their child happy. They have all the money in the world and give their child everything they need. Their child is full of love. They are happy. The child grows up. The child has an expectation of the world that everybody is like their parents, that they are perfect and make them happy all the time and everything is always good. They meet a partner. The partner never fulfils the standards that have been set by the parents. They then continuously going on a search for perfection they can never obtain. Their expectations of the world is also of being happy and everything is good, so they have no skills for resilience, persistence etc. etc. because everything was handed on a plate.

Something like that.

 My point is, no matter how hard you try, and no matter what you do, something is always going to be in the polarity of the psyche that needs to be overcome at some point in your child's life. There is no dodging the fact that we are not perfect.

If this is true then, we should not aim for perfection, we should aim for awareness. Our greatest gift we can give as parents is to learn the skills and tools necessary to pass onto our kids, so they are EQUIPPED with the knowledge of their emotions, and how to deal with the everyday human psyche so they aren’t LIMITED by them. By us becoming aware of how we operate, how we are limited and how we repress our emotions, we learn all the tools we need to build better humans. We can pass on to the generations after us how to OVERCOME the obstacles of life, how to ride the rollercoaster of ups and downs and how to love and be connected without holding onto the shackles of the past. Just by being able to become aware of your own limitations and COMMUNICATING them is a massive step in humanity. Communication is the greatest biggest obstacle humans have and the greatest potential for change.

Life can be shit. It is never going to be all roses and rainbows. Why not teach our children how to embrace imperfection, rather than fight a losing battle to continue our futile attempts to be perfect?

I want to see a future of us all being real, not of being perfect.

Leading From The Front

Gab D