BANISHING SELF-BLAME: A GUIDE FOR PARENTS

“I should have taken my child to a therapist sooner!”

“I must have done something wrong when I was pregnant that caused this disability!”

“My child is getting into drugs (or suffering from an addiction, or rebelling against the Christian faith, or attempting suicide, or [you fill in the blank])—I must have been an awful parent!”

“Maybe if I had stayed home instead of working, my child wouldn’t have developed these problems.”

“Why in the world did I think I could adopt and raise this troubled child? Clearly I didn’t know what I was doing!”

If you’re a loving parent of a child with any type of special intellectual, physical, or emotional needs, you have probably experienced these or similar thoughts. We want to do what’s best for our children, and it’s easy and natural to blame ourselves when things go wrong. Angry teenagers don’t help when they tell you how awful a parent you are. I confess, I’ve been guilty of self-blame more times than I can count!

Most of us know instinctively that living with self-blame is not good for us. Self-blame leads to guilt and stress, and living with guilt and stress long-term takes a toll on our physical health, mental health, relationships, and productivity. But even after we’ve done our best to be good parents, we might start to blame ourselves for not getting everything right. So let’s take a look at three things to remember when this happens:

1. Parenting advice keeps changing.

When my husband and I first adopted our children, various forms of attachment therapy, including “holding time,” were recommended to us by adoption and mental health professionals. We now know that most of the attachment therapy recommendations from twenty years ago don’t help and may actually make things worse. Now the field has new recommendations for how to connect with adopted children, which (let’s be honest!) may in another twenty years no longer be recommended.

The same is true of infant care. As I watch my daughter care for my first grandbaby, I am learning how recommendations for infants have also dramatically changed: how to position the infant for sleeping, when and how to begin solid foods, car seat laws—the list goes on and on.

The point is, as much as we parents search for the best information, that information is constantly changing. And as it changes, we might receive different recommendations from different sources. We can try to make the best, most well-informed decisions possible, but we’ll still make mistakes.

2. Children have minds of their own.

We can teach and guide our children to the best of our abilities, but the older they get, the more they make their own decisions. When a child misbehaves in school, it is not a sign that the parents haven’t been clear in their expectations. It simply means that the child is a sinner, as we all are, and still has things to learn. A rebellious teenager is making his or her own choices with a brain that is not yet fully developed. We can teach our teens what is right and wrong, wise and unwise, but, ultimately, we cannot force them to listen and obey; we can only consistently love them, even when they make mistakes.

Parents of children with autism cannot anticipate every social situation that their children won’t know how to handle. It is simply impossible to give them social skills instructions that will cover every contingency! And then there are those of us who are raising or have raised children who have experienced trauma, possibly prior to being adopted by us. We need to recognize that, in spite of our best efforts, children who have been through trauma may make unwise choices for more years and in more ways than children who have always had a loving and stable home.

In fact, all children–trauma or not, autism or not–have minds of their own and sometimes make poor choices. Our children’s choices are not our report cards. Remember, we are all God’s children. Yet all people, all the way back to Adam and Eve,  have rebelled against him–the perfect parent! This brings us to the next point to remember…

3. No parent can be perfect.

We live in a sinful, broken world, and all parents are imperfect sinners. It is unrealistic to expect ourselves never to make mistakes.

If we make a bad decision for our children, I think it is perfectly appropriate and helpful to apologize to those children (especially older ones) for our mistakes. Certainly if we do something wrong, like losing our tempers, we should apologize. When this happens, we need to remember that even if our children don’t forgive us right away, God does. He tells us over and over again in his Word that, through faith in Jesus, all our sins are forgiven because Jesus died on the cross for them.

God forgives us. And he wants us to forgive ourselves. He reminds us in Romans 8:1, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (New International Version). The prophet Isaiah also shares with us how God wants us to react to guilt: “‘Come now, and let us reason together,’” says the Lord, ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be as wool’” (Isaiah 1:18, New King James Version). Our loving God tells us to talk to him about the guilt we are experiencing, and he promises to take away the guilt and shame.

So, parents, it’s really ok to simply do our best. Let’s banish self-blame!