With the considerable focus on conscious parenting, parents are under more pressure than ever to show up with perfection each and every day. In no parenting generation before us have we been as focused on what our kids eat, curating play set ups, ensuring social and play date events, encouraging early academic skills like reading and letter recognition, and of course, holding ourselves to be the most perfect parent – always present, engaged and loving every moment with our children.

While connection, engagement and finding joy in parenting is certainly the gold standard of parenting, and ultimately what we should all be aiming to achieve, we have to also hold that this is not a realistic expectation to be setting for ourselves. When we hold ourselves to perfect parenting, we are setting ourselves up for failure. This is because the idea of perfect parenting is a misnomer, it does not exist. We cannot show up perfectly every single time. And nor should we. For in perfection, we truly lose some of the greatest teaching moments with our children.

When we get it wrong, when we lose our temper, or our patience wears thin; or we are triggered to behave in ways we do not aspire to behave; we have an incredible opportunity to use these moments as teaching moments for our kids, in the best way possible. It is through both experience and what is modelled to our kids that the greatest learning takes place, not through what we simply preach to them. When we mess up, we have the opportunity to model several things to our kids:

• Firstly, we model to them that we too, make mistakes. We immediately normalize the idea that perfection is not the goal. We are not trying to be perfect all the time, and that grace with yourself is one of the biggest things we should want our children to develop.
• We model to our kids that ALL emotions are acceptable. We don’t only show up as the happy, proud and encouraging parents, we also show our kids that it is okay to be frustrated, disappointed, angry or sad. We normalize emotional processing and we use these experiences to teach them how to process these emotions appropriately.
• We repair. Probably the greatest gift to come from the mistakes we make in parenting – we have the opportunity to repair the relationship. The relationship will not rupture in one moment, and the re-connection is almost as powerful as the connection itself. Modelling what it is to apologize, and to repair the relationship without blame, self-loathing or critique will be internalized in your children and they will live this out in their own lives.

So while the relationship is the most important thing we invest in, something that takes years to build, hold onto the idea that as long as it can take to build this attachment, is as long as it can take to break. Your attachment relationship will not be destroyed in a few moments of struggle – this bond is not built in a day, nor is it breakable in a day. Have grace for yourself in this season, you’re doing the best you can!