Are we rubbish parents?

Imagining or pretending.

There’s an important difference between imagining and pretending. Imagining takes place on the inside and pretending takes place on the outside. Obviously!  But which are we doing, right now, when we go to work, with our partners, when we stand out in a group? We each have an image of ourselves and live out that image. To a great extent, we “imagine” who we are through the medium of our internal dialogue. Our internal dialogue is a bit like social media – it never stops and a lot of it is irrelevant. Unlike social media, it’s a private group of one!

So in some ways, we are a combination of pretence and internal imagination. We may be pretending to be a motivated employee while actually feeling hung-over and completely uninterested in our job at that moment. But equally, we may be living out an image we have in our minds of how we want to be and how we want others see us.  

When someone  says ‘yes, I am well respected’, are they really well-respected, or do they believe this when in reality they were not? Or perhaps they are simply providing a socially acceptable answer? We don’t know, and probably they don’t know either.  

When someone acts tough, are they really tough, do they just think they’re tough, or are they acting tough because that is what they are expected to do? How much of what we believe we are is imagined, how much of what we do is pretence, and how much is what some inner voice say we must do? 

Doubt is said to be the origin of truth. It is only by asking ourselves these hard questions that we can learn and grow. It’s not really that difficult. Just ask your self [sic] the questions and give yourself time to find the answers. 

One way to do this is to turn what you believe on its head and see how the opposite statement sounds. If you negate “the sun will rise tomorrow”, so that you’re saying the sun will not rise tomorrow, it is obviously silly, and false. If you doubt that just wait for sunrise tomorrow.  

But what happens when you reverse “I am a rubbish parent”? 

List all the things that make that true. Now negate it: “I am a good parent”.  If you do this objectively, you will see that both statements have their merits.  Where does that leave us? Well, actually it leaves us realising that statements like I am a rubbish/good parent are obviously silly, and false. 

So when you find yourself doubting your parenting skills, try to focus on the particular. “When I [insert objective description of your actions on a specific occasion], I did these things well but I also made some bad moves. In future I will do the things I did well again, but not do other things.”

This sort of statement is not amenable to negation. When you can’t negate a  statement it’s usually because it already contains a dual perspective. This is more in line with reality. We aren’t good or bad parents. We are good-and-bad parents. Just like our own parents were…