Parenting: Hoping You Get It Right

As an adult looking back on my own childhood and rearing it becomes easy to question all the events in my life and ask "what if". What if my mom and dad had stayed together and I grew up with both of them in the home? What if my mom didn't work so much? What if my dad had less children?


Then you automatically take all your perceived negatives from your life and use them to create the list of things you will never do as a parent and things you will fight heaven and hell to make sure doesn't translate into the lives of your children.

I am the product of teen parents. When I say teen, I mean teen. My parents were 15 when I was born. I'm a first generation college graduate and one of few in my family to have no children before age 20 and even fewer to have no children out of wedlock. Wedlock...do we even still use this word? To that end there are many pitfalls and environmental situations I am trying to avoid in my own life and definitely those of my children.

But it's a parenting nightmare to try to come up with a solution or anecdote so that your child doesn't fall victim to teen pregnancy, high school dropout, addiction or the myriad of other things we fear as parents.

Like anything in life you should never make decisions based on fear. I fast learned that the better route to take is to envision the life you want or the desired outcome then put the resources and people around you to make it happen. If only parenting were so easy such that we could follow a formula:

loving home + extracurricular activities + (x)income + christian values= well rounded, adjusted, model citizens 

We know this not to be the case because too often you have siblings with the same parents raised in the same environment but the sum of the formula is not the same. This is hard for us because we were taught if a=b and b=c then a=c. But in the parenting world somehow a=d and we don't even know where "d" came from.  

Does this mean as parents we throw everything to the wind and say "they're going to turn out how they're going to turn out". Of course not. That's why parenting is the most frustrating job EVER. Because there is no such thing as doing everything right. Right for whom? (Did I use that correctly. I've never understood who vs whom) What may be right for one parent and one situation is not necessarily right for another parent and situation.

So I can't leave this post hopeless because I don't feel hopeless. I'm full of hope actually. I look at my son and marvel at his stubborn spirit (he got that from me), his bold ideas, and his cautious nature (he got that from his father). With all those combined in one person I know we have a journey ahead with him. I know he will be stubborn and do things I told him not to and warned him would end badly. I know he will try outrageous things that will make me scream "What were you thinking son?!!" But I'm ready to be there for him and with him through it all. Because "getting it right" to me is being there. It's one of the few things we can control as parents.