You’re Allowed to Be Human

We are going to be talking all this month about pretty much one thing:

You are allowed to mess up.

You are allowed to get it wrong. You are allowed to lose your patience, forget the water bottle, serve chicken nuggets three nights in a row, miss the cue, overreact, underreact, say the wrong thing, need a minute, cry in the pantry, and wonder who exactly gave you the authority to be in charge of other humans when you can’t even remember where you left your phone.

None of that makes you a bad parent. It just makes you A Parent.

Because nervous system regulation is so important, it might be easy to think (and easy to broadcast) that “good parenting” means always staying calm, always knowing what to do, always saying the wise thing in the gentle tone with the regulated face and the beautifully nervous-system-informed body language. Buuuuttttt – that’s not the whole story and we all know it.

The truth is, children do not need perfection from us. They need relationship. They need safety. They need enough steadiness to know that when things go sideways (and things will go sideways) we know how to come back together.

That’s repair.

And repair is the thing.

Perfection is not the thing. Performance is not the thing. Pretending you’re never annoyed is also SO not the thing. 

It is normal to be overwhelmed, touched out, confused, or furious that someone is crying because you cut their sandwich into squares and not triangles. And you can repair (even for that “ridiculousness”).

Repair is what tells a child: “Relationships can stretch without breaking. Hard moments can be survived. Love is still here.”

That is a profoundly important lesson.

Because here’s what happens when we chase perfection: we get rigid and we start parenting from fear. We spend so much energy trying not to make mistakes that we stop being real with our kids and with ourselves. We confuse “looking like a good parent” with actually being one.

So let me save you some trouble.

Unless you’re God (and if you are, please reveal yourself!), you’re not perfect. So stop trying to be Perfect and start trying to be Real.

Real sounds like: “I yelled, and I wish I hadn’t.”

Real sounds like: “I’m having a hard day, and I need a minute to calm down.”

Real sounds like: “I said no too harshly. Let me try that again.”

Real sounds like: “You didn’t deserve that tone.”

And no, repair is not “letting kids get away with everything.” It’s not abandoning boundaries or throwing structure out the window. You can hold the boundary and still repair the rupture. In fact, that’s the sweet spot. “I’m still saying no to the cookie before dinner, and I’m sorry I snapped when you asked.”

That’s the whole game right there.

If you want to practice some repair strategies, here are two to try at home:

First, normalize the do-over. Let “Let me try that again” become a full sentence. Model it yourself. Kids learn repair by experiencing it.

Second, make your apologies clean. No speech. No guilt spiral. Just: “I was too loud. I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.” Then reconnect. A hug, a hand on the shoulder, a glass of water, a reset.

That is the work. Mess up. Notice. Repair. Repeat.

If you need help figuring out how to stay steady enough to repair more and perform less, you can schedule a 1:1 coaching session with me. Parenting gets better when we stop asking people to be perfect and start helping them be supported.