Parent
Better Than Your Own Parents Did
By Lloyd J. Thomas
Your parents undoubtedly failed you as parents. All parents fail.
No parent is ever adequate enough to provide one child —
let alone two or more — with enough love, caring, support,
wisdom or whatever to completely meet his or her needs. Therefore,
parents naturally fall short when it comes to parenting. It is
impossible to be a perfect parent.
We teach our children almost all the skills they need to become
doctors, engineers, plumbers, architects, truck drivers or any
one of the millions of jobs in the world. We usually don’t
teach parenting.
This means when we have children, we are left with only the trunk
full of parenting skills we filled when we were children, stored
away in our psychological attic until we became parents. Then
we haul it out, dust it off, open it up and behave exactly the
way our parents behaved toward us. “When I was a kid, I
swore I’d never treat my children the way I was treated,”
says a young mother, who then proceeds to behave precisely the
way her mother did.
Or, in our rebellion, we determine to do just the opposite of
what our parents did. The result: children who become just like
our parents.
The two tasks of parenting
Since all the parenting we received is inadequate, as grownups
we have at least two vital tasks. First, we need to supplement
the good parenting our parents have given us. We need to find
other sources of positive mothering, fathering, sistering, brothering,
to add to our parenting and sibling skills. We need more “familying.”
Second, we need to forgive our parents. We must learn to do this
in order to get more “familying.” We need to forgive
our parents for their unavoidable inadequacies. We need to “let
go” of any resentments or anger against our own parents,
which we may have kept inside for years. We need to forgive not
for their sake, but for our own.
Our parents’ self-forgiveness is up to them, not us. We
cannot afford to wait for it. Waiting keeps us psychological children,
still looking to them for parental approval ... perhaps all our
needed parenting. We continue to cling to the hope (and behave
accordingly) that if we can be pleasing enough or make them feel
guilty enough or be “good” enough, then they will
love us more and fill those gaps in us they never filled when
we were kids. They didn’t then; we could wait forever for
them to do it now. We as parents cannot afford to wait that long.
We must let go of that hope by forgiving them.
To forgive our parents for our own sakes frees us to let go of
the resentments, guilt, fears, feelings of inadequacy, or angry
rebelliousness, resulting from our parent’s natural failures.
Forgiving our parent(s) frees us to supplement our current “familying,”
and learn new ways of behaving and parenting. It allows us to
become the parents we want to be today. It permits us to develop
the parenting we never had; to learn the parenting skills we were
never taught; to become more fully grown up ourselves.
Let your kids be themselves
Once we are free to be our grown-up selves, we automatically set
the example of our children to be themselves. Children always
imitate their parents — everything about them. They imitate
their weaknesses, strengths, good points and bad. If we are free
to be ourselves by letting go of the past and finding new sources
of “familying,” we will be giving to our children
the greatest gift a parent can offer: the gift of self-acceptance.
Parenting is life’s toughest job. But we can lean to do
it better, no matter how imperfectly, by freeing ourselves from
our own childhood. Today, we can find relationships that fill
in our psychological gaps and make us more completely ourselves;
unique human beings, who happen to love, care for and support
those other small human beings we call our children.
© Lloyd J. Thomas
Lloyd J. Thomas,
Ph.D., has more than 30 years of experience as a life coach and
licensed psychologist. He is available for coaching in any area
presented in “Practical Psychology.” As your coach,
his only agenda is to assist you in creating the lifestyle you
genuinely desire. The initial coaching session is free. Contact
him: (970) 568-0173 or e-mail DrLloyd@CreatingLeaders.com.
