Defining Success as a Parent

Regardless of your parenting situation, you can erase “control” from your job description and add “validate and nurture.” While you’re at it, don’t forget all that fine print about paying for things, coaching your daughter’s soccer team, correcting your son’s awful table manners, sitting through countless piano recitals, teaching spiritual values and how to balance a checkbook, driving all over town, disciplining, encouraging, saying no at times and yes at others, setting boundaries and repeating all this as needed.

In doing this year after year, you greatly increase the opportunity for your teenager to choose what’s wise and right. Even though you can’t control the final outcome, you’ve stacked the deck in your child’s favor. That’s what your job as a parent is.

Get into the mind-set that everything you do as a parent ultimately is part of validating or nurturing your children, especially during their teen years — preferably in ways they don’t consider offensive or embarrassing.

And don’t forget that it’s not about being perfect or exactly “right.”

It’s about “enough.”

Relax. You can do these things. And while there may be hard times, you can do them successfully, even if your teenager doesn’t turn out “right” — now or later.

Remember, the results aren’t in your hands.

The clearer you are about this job description, the more able you’ll be to maintain a balanced approach to this thing called control.