Everyone has a Miz Edna moment. A Miz Edna moment goes like this. Your baby is crying. She is wet, or she is hungry, or the sun is in her eyes, or she has decided she is having a bad day and wants everyone to share it; for whatever reason, she is crying and not because of anything you have done. You pick up the baby but she keeps crying and then you look across the room or across the yard or the store and there is Miz Edna giving you a disapproving look. And so it begins. The whole something-is-wrong-with-my-child-and-it's-my-fault self-inflicted guilt fest.
Now don't get me wrong. Poor parenting does have negative effects of child behavior, but so does child temperament, what time of day or year it is, what the child ate last, and whether or not Barney is on the TV. In other words, it ain't all about you, you don't control everything and the best you can do do is make the best of the situation and do control what you can.
I see parents beat themselves up all the time for things over which they have little to no control. Babies wet themselves and cry. You should change the diaper but you can't reengineer the human Renal system. Kids throw rocks and balls and sometimes the rocks and balls hit and break things. You can fix or replace stuff, make the kid do some sort of restitution to teach him responsibility, but you can't unbreak things. Teens love or think they love the way wrong people, and even if you lock them in their rooms until they are thirty, they still one day turn thirty and you have to let them out.
Not everything that happens to your child is your fault and the older they get, the more frequently that is true. It's a hard fact to deal with because when they are in the most danger is usually that time in life when you have the least control, during those teen years.
But you do the best you can, and trust your kid to do the same.
So today, I give to each parent reading this a permission slip that says "At least once a day I have permission to let myself off the hook for at least one dumb thing my child does. The next dumb thing, I will wallow in self pity about, but this dumb belongs completely to my kid and I am okay with with that."
You're welcomed.
