Excerpted from Becoming the Parent You Want to Be: A Sourcebook of Strategies for the First Five Years, by Laura Davis and Janis Keyser, Parenting Experts with ParentsPlace. Becoming an effective parent entails making a series of educated guesses and seeing what works. In doing so, we inevitably make mistakes.
There will be times we're rigid when we should be loose, loose when we should be firm; times we're inconsistent or unfair. All of us will make judgments based on the best knowledge we have at the time, only to find out later that we were wrong. We will say and do things that hurt our children because we were too tired, frustrated, or mad to stop ourselves. At times, we will repeat mistakes that were made by our parents because we haven't come to terms with those particular pockets of history. We all hope that none of the mistakes we make will damage our children by compromising their safety, squashing their self-esteem or crushing their spirit. Yet whenever we do something we haven't done before, we inevitably make mistakes. It's part of the learning curve.
