Parenting Pitfalls

Parents often miss the mark; the important part is making adjustments along the way.

Recently, after offering my niece some unsolicited parenting advice, she let me know exactly what I could do with said advice – and it wasn’t pretty. A few days later, she apologized for overreacting. She said she felt like I was mom-shaming her, and after a recent two-week hospital stay away from her toddler, she was already feeling like a bad mom. She simply wasn’t in the mood for advice, which, as we all know, often feels like criticism.

She asked if we could just forget the whole episode.

Of course, I said yes. She’s a terrific mom, and her toddler is as sweet as they come.

Later, I was joking about it with my sister, her other aunt, and we agreed that no matter how committed you are, parenting inevitably comes with moments when you feel like you’re falling short. I added that mistakes are part of the deal. You just do your best and love your kids.

Now that my own children are in their twenties, the whole thing got me thinking: What could I have done better? What mistakes did I make?

My daughter recently reminded me of the time I gave her a bag of fancy chips for Chanukah. Laughing, I vehemently denied it at first. But then she said, “You know – the ones in the black bag, with the sweet potato and taro chips?”

This detail jarred my memory. She was right. I started laughing all over again. I’m sure it was one of the later nights of Chanukah. I never gave my kids eight gifts. For the record, my parents didn’t either. Maybe nights one and two came with something special, but by night three, you were lucky if you got a dollar bill. Considering that bag of chips probably cost five bucks, I think she made out okay.

This might sound ridiculous, but honestly, I wish I’d gotten my kids to eat tuna fish. Not the sushi-grade stuff they’ll happily eat now, but the humble Bumble Bee-in-a-can variety. They both always turned up their noses at it. And it bothered me, because let’s face it, tuna salad – with mayo, and maybe some chopped celery on a good day – is one of the easiest homemade kid meals that doesn’t come from the freezer aisle.

Now I’ve got two adult kids who still won’t eat canned tuna, and yes, that still bothers me. I don’t know why. It just feels like failure.

I also sort of regret not doing more with them. And by “more,” I don’t mean enrolling them in every extracurricular – I just mean there were probably too many days when we simply hung out. Not that hanging out wasn’t lovely and a much-needed break. We had a pool, and we spent hours just chilling. But now that I edit this magazine and see everything South Florida has to offer, I wonder if we should’ve done more exploring.

Of course, we did some things. But was it enough? And what does enough even look like?

The truth is, no one gets parenting perfectly right. We all stumble through it – sometimes with grace, sometimes with a bag of overpriced root vegetable chips. We love hard, try our best, mess up, apologize and try again.

So yes, I gave advice that wasn’t asked for. And yes, I made my share of questionable parenting choices.

But I also raised two kind, thoughtful and super-funny humans. And if that’s not enough, I don’t know what is.

Susan Rosser is the editor of South Florida Family Life. You might find her celebrating her parenting successes with a tuna fish sandwich and a side of fancy veggie chips.