30 Parents Who Tried To Raise Good Human Beings Share Their Main Mistakes

It goes without saying that parenting is hard. If you’re not a parent and need an analogy for what it’s like, picture this:

As a parent, you’re expected to juggle swords that are on fire while riding a unicycle on a tightrope above a pit of snakes. The swords are your kids’ demands, the unicycle is your sanity and the tightrope—your patience. Oh, and the pit of snakes? That’s the rest of life’s challenges.

All jokes aside, though, parenting is no easy feat as it requires very delicate work with very impressionable human beings who need guidance in this crazy world.

“Most of us have been deeply conditioned by our own upbringings. We think we are choosing how to parent our own children and setting our own family rules, but actually most of us are simply repeating patterns of how we ourselves were raised as children,” elaborated Sarah Ockwell-Smith.

Ockwell-Smith continued: “This conditioning is incredibly strong and tends to override most attempts we make to try to be different from our parents. We all have triggers and baggage that make it hard for us to be the calm, compassionate parents we’d like to be. It is possible to overcome this, but first you have to be aware of your baggage.”

And deep conditioning isn’t the only factor that gets in the way of parents’ efforts to raise compassionate kids. Ockwell-Smith also points out that the constant stress, exhaustion, and being pulled in different directions by work, bills, and childcare takes a huge toll on us as individuals.

“Something has to give and it’s usually our ability to control our own emotions. When parents are dysregulated, the chances of raising calm and respectful children is massively limited,” added Ockwell-Smith.

It also doesn’t help that virtually none of us is really prepared to be a parent when the time comes. So, we take a learn it on the fly approach to parenting, keeping ourselves vulnerable to mistakes, vices, and misconceptions.

And Ockwell-Smith notes that one of the biggest misconceptions out there is the expectation of quick results.

“Most expect results far too quickly and when they don’t see them, they give up and say ‘gentle parenting doesn’t work for me and my kids’,” elaborates Ockwell-Smith. “Actually, in terms of results, we’re talking long term. We’re aiming to grow children who become kind, calm, respectful adults—not compliant obedient children.”