You grab a bat, head to home plate, place your feet exactly where they need to be, practice swinging a couple of times to warm up and expect to hit the ball. You anticipate hitting a home run but when you don’t even get a ground ball, you wonder what went wrong. It looks so easy.
The same is true about parenting. You think you will do great and like the rest of us you start by thinking ‘Parenting isn’t that hard, right’? But then your child starts to cry for no reason at all, or you see a hurt look in their eye from something you said, or you get a call from the school asking you to come and pick up your kid. You start realizing you’re not as good as you thought you would be, and you feel like a failure.
True failure is when you don’t learn from your mistakes and just keep doing the same things the wrong way all the time. Just like in sports, you will need to ‘practice’ and miss a few balls before you will learn to start hitting a home run.
As we all learn from our mistakes more than we learn from our success I want to encourage you to not get give up. Instead, keep trying your best, get advice from experts, talk to other parenting friends, swap ideas, read articles or go for coaching. You are not alone in this, it is universal and one day you will look back and say, ‘phew, that was tough, but it was so worth it’.
Stay tuned over the next couple of months as I will be sharing the top 3 things, I think parents need to do to have success in their parenting journey. Come check us out at parentwithpurpose.ca for tips and family coaching. Lynda Harlos Certified Family Coach, vlogger and author
Do you like metaphors, Well I think parenting is like baseball.
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