Don’t Take It Personally

Kids are individuals and making mistakes is part of learning. It’s not about you or your parenting skill!

Don’t take credit for their successes and don’t blame yourself for their failures. They are each individuals, with strengths and weaknesses—value them for who they are!

My oldest son taught me this one!

My husband and I very consciously wanted to introduce as many foods as possible to our children, hoping that we might avoid having a “picky eater”.

Our daughter has always eaten an amazing variety of foods—right from the beginning. She was probably about eight or nine months old when she refused baby food mush. She wanted what we were eating, so I cut up everything into little cubes that she could gum safely (she didn’t get her first tooth until she was eleven months old).

At just short of a year, she decided she wanted to eat our Sicilian olives (big green, spicy olives). Why not? So we cut some up, thinking she would spit the first one out. She ate three olives that day!

When I took her to the doctor and mentioned that I thought she was allergic to blue cheese, my doctor looked at me and asked “How in the world would you know that? What one-year-old would touch blue cheese??” Hmmm…. Apparently mine!

Oh, we were so proud of ourselves—what wonderful parents we were to have raised a child that ate such a variety of foods!

Then along came our oldest son—who ate nothing but peanut butter sandwiches and cheerios for three years! Okay, that’s a little bit of an exaggeration—but not by much!!

We parented both kids the same way, offering a wide variety of foods. Yet one kids eats everything and the other is only now (at six years old) starting to venture outside his narrow menu of acceptable foods.

So I learned to give credit to my children instead of myself!

Surprise surprise – it’s not about me! 

I’ve learned to honour my children for who they are as individuals – strengths, weaknesses, successes, failures.  By letting them own it, I set the foundation for them to honour and love themselves throughout their lives.

I caught a little bit of the movie “Bridget Jones’ Diary” on the weekend – the part where the guy floors her by saying “I love you just the way you are.”

Isn’t that what we all need to hear?