I used to watch other parents and try to figure out what the good ones were doing differently. The ones whose kids seemed happy, seemed secure, seemed like they were going to turn out okay. I’d look for the technique. The method. The specific parenting approach that was producing these results – the right amount of discipline, the right balance of structure and freedom, the right way to handle tantrums and teenagers and everything in between.
It took me years to see that I was looking at the wrong thing. The best parents I know – the ones whose kids genuinely trust them, who have relationships with their adult children built on something deeper than obligation – aren’t the ones who got everything right. They’re the ones who let their kids see them get things wrong. Who apologised without defensiveness. Who modelled, in real time, what it actually looks like to be a flawed human being who’s trying.
That distinction changed how I parent. It might be the most important thing I’ve learned.
The myth of the competent parent
There’s an unspoken expectation that good parents are supposed to have it together. That we’re supposed to be steady, consistent, emotionally regulated, always knowing the right thing to say in the moment that it needs to be said. The model of good parenting that most of us absorbed – from our own parents, from the culture, from the endless stream of parenting advice that treats raising children like a technical problem with optimal solutions – is fundamentally a model of competence. Be competent. Know the answers. Maintain control. Don’t let them see you struggle.
I bought this model completely. For the first few years of being a parent, I operated under the assumption that my job was to be the steady one. The one with answers. The one who didn’t lose his temper, didn’t show uncertainty, didn’t let the mess of being a human being leak into the supposedly clean space of parenting. I was going to be the parent my kids could count on to always be solid, always be right, always be okay.
The problem with this model is that it’s a performance. And kids – even very young kids – can tell when you’re performing. Not in the way adults can, by reading microexpressions or detecting inconsistencies in your story. In a more primal way. They can feel the gap between what you’re projecting and what you’re actually experiencing. They don’t have words for it. They just know that something about dad doesn’t quite line up, and that not-lining-up creates a kind of low-grade unease that they’ll carry for years without being able to name it.
I know because I carried it. My own parents were performers – good people, loving people, people who absolutely did their best. But they operated under the same model I’d inherited: don’t let the kids see the struggle. Be competent. Be steady. Have answers. And what that produced in me wasn’t security. It was a quiet, persistent feeling that emotions were something to be managed rather than felt. That struggling was a private activity that should be conducted behind closed doors. That the appropriate response to difficulty was to appear unaffected by it.
I don’t want to pass that on. I’m trying very hard not to pass that on.
What getting it wrong looks like
I lose my temper. Not often, but it happens. A morning where everything’s running late and the shoes can’t be found and nobody’s listening and I snap. Raise my voice. Say something impatient that I regret before the words have finished leaving my mouth. The old model – the competence model – would have me handle this by moving on. Smoothing it over. Pretending it didn’t happen, or minimising it, or burying it under the next activity so everyone can get back to normal as quickly as possible.
What I do instead – what the best parents I’ve watched do instead – is come back. Sit down. Get on their level. And say: “I’m sorry I yelled. I was frustrated and I handled it badly. That wasn’t your fault and you didn’t deserve it.”
That’s it. No elaborate explanation. No justification. No “but you need to listen when I ask you to do something” appended to the apology, which turns it from an apology into a lecture with an apologetic opening. Just the acknowledgement that I got it wrong, the honest naming of what happened, and the clear statement that it wasn’t okay.
The first time I did this – genuinely, without the self-protective instinct to explain or justify – my son looked at me with an expression I’ll never forget. Not surprise exactly. More like recognition. Like something had clicked into place that he’d been waiting for without knowing it. He said “that’s okay, dad” and went back to what he was doing, and the whole interaction took about forty-five seconds.
But what happened in those forty-five seconds was enormous. He learned that adults make mistakes. That mistakes don’t have to be hidden or defended or pretended away. That someone can get something wrong and own it without the world ending. That apology isn’t weakness – it’s what strong people do when they’ve caused harm.
No parenting book taught him that. I taught him that. By getting it wrong and then getting the repair right.
Why the repair matters more than the mistake
There’s a concept in developmental psychology called “rupture and repair” that I wish someone had explained to me before I became a parent. The idea is simple: what matters most in a child’s emotional development isn’t whether ruptures happen – moments of disconnection, frustration, misattunement between parent and child. They’re going to happen. They happen in every relationship. What matters is whether the rupture gets repaired.
A child who experiences a rupture followed by repair learns something profound: that relationships can survive difficulty. That love doesn’t break when someone gets angry. That conflict isn’t the end of connection but a passage through it, and that the passage can lead somewhere deeper than where you started. This is one of the most important things a human being can learn, and it can only be learned through experience. You can’t explain it to a child. You have to show them. And the showing requires you to actually mess up, actually repair, actually demonstrate in real time that imperfection and love can coexist.
A child who experiences rupture without repair learns something different: that anger is dangerous. That love is conditional. That the way to maintain connection is to avoid conflict, suppress feelings, and keep things smooth at all costs. These children grow up to be adults who can’t tolerate disagreement in relationships, who interpret every conflict as a threat, who spend their lives managing other people’s emotions because they learned early that emotions, left unmanaged, destroy things.
I was that child. Plenty of rupture, very little repair. Not because my parents were cruel – because they were operating under a model that treated repair as unnecessary. The parent is in charge. The parent was right to be upset. The child needs to adjust their behaviour. Apology flows upward, not downward. That was the framework, and it produced a generation of adults who are very good at performing stability and very bad at handling the messy reality of human relationships.
Letting them see you struggle
This isn’t just about apologising after losing your temper. It’s about something broader and more uncomfortable: letting your children see you as a full human being. Not a curated, competence-performing authority figure. A person. With struggles and doubts and bad days and moments of not knowing what to do.
I let my kids see me struggle. In age-appropriate ways – I’m not burdening them with adult problems or using them as therapists. But when I’m having a hard day, I tell them. “Dad’s feeling a bit stressed today. It’s nothing to do with you. I’m just dealing with some stuff and I might be a bit quieter than usual.” When I don’t know the answer to something, I say “I don’t know” instead of bluffing. When I’m wrong about something – factually wrong, morally wrong, judgmentally wrong – I say so. Out loud. In front of them.
The effect of this is difficult to measure but impossible to miss. My kids are more honest with me than I ever was with my parents. Not because I’ve demanded honesty or rewarded it with some clever incentive structure. Because I’ve modelled it. They’ve seen that being honest about struggle doesn’t produce punishment or withdrawal. It produces connection. Dad says he’s having a hard day and nothing bad happens. So maybe they can say they’re having a hard day too.
My son told me last year that he was being excluded at school. He told me calmly, directly, without the shame spiral that I would have gone through at his age. He told me because he’d learned – from watching me, from living in a house where imperfection was acknowledged rather than hidden – that difficulty is something you talk about, not something you conceal.
That moment was worth more than every perfectly executed parenting technique I’ve ever attempted. And it was built on a foundation of every imperfect moment I’d let him see.
The parents I admire most
The parents I admire most aren’t performing. That’s the first thing you notice about them – the absence of performance. They’re not trying to appear as though they have it figured out. They’re not curating an image of family life that matches some template. They’re just in it. Fully, imperfectly, honestly in it.
They lose patience and they apologise. They make bad calls and they own them. They have days where they’re not at their best and they name it instead of hiding it. They let their kids see that parenting is hard – not in a complaining way, not in a way that makes the child feel like a burden, but in the honest way that says: this matters to me enough that I struggle with it. You matter to me enough that getting it right keeps me up at night. And sometimes I’m going to get it wrong, and when I do, I’m going to tell you, and then I’m going to try again.
Their kids aren’t perfect either. That’s the other thing. The children of these parents are messy and emotional and sometimes difficult and entirely themselves. They haven’t been trained into compliance. They haven’t been smoothed into easy, manageable shapes. They’re full humans – small, developing, still figuring things out – and they’ve been given permission to figure things out in the open rather than in hiding.
These families are louder than the performing ones. Messier. More likely to have a disagreement at the dinner table or a meltdown in a supermarket or a morning where nothing goes according to plan and everyone’s frustrated and nobody looks like they belong in a parenting advertisement. But underneath the mess, there’s something the performing families often lack: trust. The bone-deep trust that comes from knowing the people you live with are showing you who they actually are.
What I want my kids to carry
I don’t want my kids to remember me as the parent who always had it together. I want them to remember me as the parent who didn’t always have it together but who always came back. Who apologised when he was wrong. Who let them see the struggle without making them responsible for it. Who treated imperfection not as a failure to be hidden but as a reality to be navigated honestly.
I want them to leave my house knowing – in their bones, not in their heads – that you can be flawed and loved at the same time. That relationships survive mistakes when people are willing to name them. That the strongest thing a person can do isn’t to appear infallible but to say “I got that wrong and I’m sorry” without defensiveness, without justification, without the need to be right.
I want them to know that being a good parent – being a good anything – doesn’t mean performing competence. It means being present. Being honest. Being willing to let the people you love see who you actually are, even when who you actually are is someone who’s tired and uncertain and doesn’t always know the right answer.
The best parents I know are doing exactly this. Imperfectly. Inconsistently. With plenty of moments they wish they could take back and a handful of repairs that didn’t quite land. But they’re doing it. They’re showing their kids what it looks like to be a flawed human being who’s trying.
And their kids are watching. And learning. And growing into people who won’t need to perform perfection because they were raised by someone who showed them something better.
