Let’s get one thing clear: parenting is not about raising perfect kids. It’s not about producing mini versions of ourselves who get it right every time, never spill a drink, never bomb a test, never break a rule.
It’s not about perfection. It’s about resilience.
Let me explain.
You’re in a room—it’s dimly lit, maybe a kitchen at the end of a long day. There’s a kid sitting at the table, staring down at a math problem they got wrong. Or maybe it’s a teenager who just blew a big game, or a college student who made a choice you warned them about. And they’re sitting there, frozen. Stuck. The weight of the mistake sitting heavy on their chest.
And this is the moment—the big one. Not the A+ on the report card or the perfectly cleaned room. This.
Because here’s the truth: our job as parents isn’t to prevent them from making mistakes. It’s to teach them what to do after.
It’s to help them see that the real test of character isn’t whether they fall, but whether they stand back up, dust themselves off, and figure out how to fix it.
To err is to be human. There’s no script that keeps life running perfectly. Even in the best-written screenplay, characters stumble. The audience doesn’t care if they get every line right; they care how they recover.
So when our kids mess up—and they will—we don’t need to jump in and fix it for them. We don’t need to yell, shame, or pretend it didn’t happen. We need to lean in and say:
“Okay, you messed up. Now what?”
Because that’s where the story gets good.
That’s where they learn that mistakes aren’t the end of the world. That fear and shame don’t have to keep them stuck. That they can pivot—that magical, underappreciated move where you realize you’re headed the wrong way and instead of doubling down, you change direction.
Our job is to show them how to do that. To resolve, to reset, to make it right.
And yes, it’s hard. It’s messy. It’s not the highlight reel we post online. It’s the backstage, the rewrites, the moments when you’re sitting at the kitchen table at 10 p.m. talking through what went wrong and what comes next.
Because that’s what’s going to define them. Not the absence of mistakes, but the presence of resilience.
The secret to parenting is not to raise perfect kids who never mess up. It’s to raise kids who, when they do mess up, know how to stand back up, brush off the dust, and say, “I’ve got this.”
That’s it. That’s the job.