I always said the hardest part of being a parent was disciplining. It’s so much easier to just say, “Yes” to whatever they ask and pretend that whatever they did wrong will be just the single event. They won’t do that again, I don’t need to get worked up about it. It takes real courage and strength as a parent to get your hands dirty and be the bad guy. But, you know that they’re better off in the long run for it, no matter how much they seem to hate you in the moment.

But, that’s not the hardest part of being a parent. That’s just the first really hard part. That’s just an unfun thing you get an early start on and have to work at for the duration of the whole job. The hardest part of being a parent is watching your children fail. Having three kids who are pretty outgoing in many activities, it always surprises me just how much it fucking hurts when one of them fails at something meaningful.

My initial reaction is to protect my child. Scream outrage and injustice at whatever circumstances surrounded the failure. Point fingers at anyone else available. Thankfully, I’m also an introvert, so this part of it happens pretty much only in my head. I know there are plenty of other parents who do it out loud though.

The next stage for me is to blame myself. I go through my entire history of parenting this child and seek out errors that may have damaged the child in such a way that he or she faltered at this critical time, causing the failure. Maybe I pushed too hard? Maybe I didn’t push hard enough? Maybe if I had been more patient, understanding, engaged throughout his or her life, the kid would have more confidence and would have sailed through this fine. This stage lasts a long time for me. It’s a comfortable place for me, for a lot of reasons, to take the blame for whatever goes wrong. So, I can wallow in and out of this for days, if I don’t force myself to get over it.

The final stage is giving the child due credit. Failure is earned just like success. If the child hadn’t tried, he or she wouldn’t have failed. A failure is one of the two outcomes of taking a risk, and as the saying goes, you can’t win them all. The child took a chance and maybe he or she wasn’t as well prepared as possible (maybe a little bit of Stage 1 or Stage 2 does come into play with that sometimes), or maybe their opponent was just a little better prepared.

I’m sorry to say that getting to that stage of acceptance is still only half the battle. You’ve only convinced yourself of the reality of it all. Next you have to deal with your child. You have to convince the child that there was no conspiracy to cause the failure. You have to assure the child that he is not stupid, or clumsy or that she is not the worst person ever to do this thing. You have to be strong while you listen to your child run through pretty much the same thoughts of self-loathing that you had just prescribed for yourself. Like any other whipping, you’d rather give yourself up for it than your kid, and it’s so much harder hearing your kid to it to himself. You have to console this hurt child and then convince her to risk it all again, to get back on that horse even though she may very well fall again the next time, and that, my friends is the hardest thing ever.

My middle child just turned 9 in January and she’s supposed to be testing for her first degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do on Saturday. She pre-tested last night and failed. She has one more opportunity to pass the pre-test to get approval to test. So, we’re aggressively coaxing this little girl back up on top of the bucking Clydesdale, hoping against hope that she doesn’t fall again, because I don’t know if she can take a take a tumble like that twice without something breaking.

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