On worrying about our parenting skills

Do you anguish over your failings and failures as a parent?

Please don't. It is impossible to be a perfect parent.

All we can hope to do is our best on the good days

and learn to live with our worst efforts on the bad days.

Let us try to accept this

and know that it will not damage our children

irreparably.

They too have to learn to live

with the limitations and imperfections 

of their own lives,

including their families.

Perhaps it is this, as much as anything,

which helps them to grow.

Above all, we must not kowtow to them

out of a false sense of guilt.

This is one of the worst mistakes we can make.
They will learn 'us', with all our ways, as long as we are ourselves with them
and that's the greatest lesson of all.