You're probably doing a good job.

Parenting as the Path this Tuesday, and a fun video for parents

Parenting as the Path, the monthly mindfulness and parenting class I teach with Ofosu Jones-Quartey, meets this Tuesday at 4:30pm ET. The topic will essentially be confidence (or lack thereof) in one’s own parenting, and was inspired by the live event (above) that I did with my fellow podcasters, Jon Roberts and Jess Morey, last week. We answered this question:

All of the parents in my orbit seem to be killing it as parents, but 99% of the time I’ve got this nagging suspicion that I’m failing big. Nobody has ever pointed it out to me, so this might be in my head; and my kid seems reasonably happy and healthy, but I just keep thinking, ‘Could he be happier and healthier? Are the other parents’ kids happier and healthier?’ Can mindfulness help me get out of my own head on this one? Is it reasonable to want to be just ‘good enough’ as a parent?

It’s really common in our culture to feel insecure about our parenting abilities because we may ourselves have had difficult experiences with our own parents, and also because we live in a society that isolates parents and so we don’t have many models or common agreements of what good parenting looks like. Not to mention the fact that people usually blame parents for everything that goes wrong with kids.

So it is from this place of insecurity that we’re often trying to chase a sense of perfection. But when we go for improvement from a place of insecurity and inadequacy, we find ourselves being hypercritical and blaming ourselves for every little thing that goes wrong with our kids. This isn’t helpful for anyone. It is possible to try and improve ourselves, not because we think we suck, but because we love our kids and we love ourselves.

Good enough parenting, and good enough mindfulness, are both about love. Does your kid get enough love from you? Maybe that’s what it means to be a good enough parent, that your kid feels safe and loved by you. And that’s also what it means to practice mindfulness - that you’re practicing love and protection of yourself and others. Look at the ways you love your kids already, the ways they’re already getting so many of their needs met, and build your quest to help them and to help yourself, from there.

And by the way, the fact that you care about your kids and your parenting enough to be reading this means you’re probably already killing it.

If you can’t make this month’s class, join us for our next session on August 26th at 4pm ET.

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