Perfection is a myth – especially when it is applied to the most challenging task of parenting! There is no perfect parent nor is there any perfect child!
Yet almost every mother, at some point or the other goes through the experience of guilt for not having done the ‘Best’ for her child. In this piece, I am going to talk about mothers only as a very large number of mothers in India, are the primary caregivers of children. It’s the mother who in most families, does the job of bringing up children. Also, we all know that men and women perform the ‘parent role’ differently, partly because of the innate differences and to some extent because of the way culture/society defines gender roles. Hence it’s important to talk about the two separately.
Almost every social group gives not only more of the parental responsibility to a mother but also, subtly creates a heavy load of guilt in her too, by judging her ability to bring up a ‘perfect child’! I am sure many of you mothers, must have been subjected to criticism about your ways of parenting as well as unsolicited advice about ‘how to’ bring up your child! Hence it’s not surprising that when a child doesn’t do well in school or gets into bad company has poor health etc, it’s mostly the mother who starts wondering where she goofed up!
Before you, as a mother, start self-bashing, please do think of a few important aspects related to the development of a child which indicate that mothers don’t need to take the complete blame for a child not growing up as per the expectations of the family. In any case, in my view, such an expectation is a lost cause from its inception.
Do you think that any one person, even when it’s a mother, can be The Only influence on a child when he/she is growing up? Can anyone have 100% control on how the child shapes up?
What about the child’s DNA, genes which the child inherits? All children are wired differently, so we must let them grow as naturally as possible.
In addition, how a child grows is affected by so many external factors. Surely mother has a very important role to play in her child’s life, yet friends, neighbours, peer groups, school, extended family and social-media platforms etc. too have a tremendous impact on the developing mind, on the choices, preferences, values, and goals that the child embraces. There is no way we can prevent these influences from reaching the child.
While every parent needs to be aware of the right/wrong of their parenting practices, my point here is that we should not assume that a mother can control every bit of the kind of person her child becomes when he/she grows up. Nor is it right for her to carry the guilt of having failed as a mother, if and when, there happens to be a gap between the image of her child in her mind (based on her desires/demands) and the reality. In such a situation it’s very important not to feel guilty. If unintentionally she has made some mistakes in how she brought up the child, sure enough, she should try to undo the wrong as far as possible. But feeling guilty is not going to help. Guilt is an extremely destructive emotion that erodes you from within, your confidence and self-worth get destroyed by guilt.
