Failing as a parent

Are you ready for a full dose of reality?

Failure as a parent in inevitable. Stop living in a dream world, you’re not as great of a parent as you think you are. Okay, enough with the negativity.

Recently I’ve become aware of several parenting “misses.” I’ve encountered multiple people who have experienced total parenting failures, either as parents or as kids of parents. You’re probably thinking, “why is this such a surprise? Just take a walk around your block and you’ll find more parenting failures than you can count.”

No, what has raised my awareness of this issue is that in every case, the parenting disasters (or near disasters) have happened in incredibly loving, Christ-centered homes. From my limited viewpoint, I didn’t see any blatant sin or negative behaviors that would lead to these incidents, but they happened anyway.

I think that these situations are very challenging for us Christians. When stuff happens, we start to look for the cause. We try to justify what behaviors happened that caused this. We try to sniff out the dysfunction. As a result, we end up hurting rather than healing and we make the situation worse, even in our sincere efforts to “help.”

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