The amount of times I hit the “forgot my password“ link in any given month is pretty impressive to say the least. If I change the Netflix password today, it would be a small miracle if I remember it tomorrow without looking at one of the many Post-it notes scattered around the junk drawer in our kitchen (yes, I know…it’s a pretty secure filing system).
I can tell you from talking to many clients, friends and family, that I’m in good company. Most of us are out here misplacing our keys on a regular basis, forgetting to schedule our second teeth cleaning of the year, and using our partner’s deodorant because we keep forgetting to buy more. Yet somehow, we still expect our kids to remember to say please and thank you, to sit on their bottoms at the kitchen table and that play time was supposed to be over 5 minutes ago.
Or how about sleep? That industry is booming! Adults are buying sunrise alarms, downloading meditation apps, deep breathing and relaxing pelvic floors at 3am because our alarm clocks are psyching us out. Sleep can be hard! Yet it’s still somehow frustrating when our tiny humans can’t go straight to sleep and/or stay asleep throughout the night.
And let’s not forgot how awesome we are at utilizing coping skills effectively 100% of the time. Sure, we’re trying our best to remember all those positive mantras and thought stopping techniques in between eating our feelings and dissociating while TikToking, but it is quite comical how baffled we are when Junior doesn’t remember to do his belly breathing instead of hurling his blocks across the room, or that little Sally doesn’t want to use her words to describe how she’s feeling so instead she screams inaudible sounds we automatically assume translates to something like “you’re a horrible parent and I deserve better!”
I don’t know about you but for me, the irony is thicker than I anticipated pre-parenthood. Luckily, “grace” is a free commodity. So maybe the next time we are experiencing some big feelings towards our little ones we can remember that we all deserve a little grace, no one is perfect and we’re all on similar journeys!
Sure, I could list some rad parenting skills here or perhaps some additional emotional regulation techniques could be nice too but let’s be real, we’ll probably get plenty of those on TikTok around midnight tonight when we should be sleeping.