Parenting mistakes we regret

WE all make them, after all, parenting is a learning process and mistakes are inevitable. Many of us recover quickly and manage to correct the errors, and raise children who are an asset to society. For others though, the mistakes they make are critical and leave a permanent impact.

“When it comes to parenting, though there are no hard and fast rules for success, there are still some rules that have proved to accomplish the goals society strives for,” high school counsellor Patrick Dela Haye told All Woman. “So these usually come up when parents seek therapy for their children, for example, and they are given steps to take to overcome what they’re experiencing, and to be better for the long term. Many times it’s only through this intervention that healthy relationships are built, so we can raise healthy adults.”

“I made the mistake of treating my daughter like a best friend, and literally and figuratively, it came back to bite me in the butt,” mom LB said. “She used everything I had told her in confidence against me, and then started to psychoanalyse my past behaviour to trap me into thinking that she was behaving no worse than I was, when I confronted her about her activities with boys in our scheme.”

She said she learned after the experience with her daughter to “embrace an air of technicality with my other children, so I won’t make that mistake again”.

Below other parents weigh in on the parenting mistakes they’ve made.

Arthur, dad of one:

My daughter’s just three but there are already mistakes we’ve made that we can’t seem to fix. She has no social skills and doesn’t know how to behave in public because she’s spoiled. Even when I try to discipline her she laughs in my face. The mistake was spoiling her too much, and not allowing anyone to discipline her, and then, of course, there was the lack of interaction with others during the pandemic. Now I’ve got a little monster on my hands, who I can’t bring anywhere because she’s just so rude.

Nadene, mom of two:

Don’t ever dedicate all of your time and resources to a child, trying to give them what you didn’t have, because if they’re going to be ungrateful, none of that will change their heart. I gave my older daughter everything — paid for extracurricular activities, sent her wherever she wanted to go with friends, let her travel abroad on language exchange programmes, and gave her whatever she wanted, because her dad wasn’t around. She still turned out to be this unlikeable teenager, and everytime she’s rude to me I think about all the money I spent on her while neglecting my own needs, and trust me, it’s not like I had it like that.

Joy, mom of one:

I made the mistake of trying to be the better parent and making sacrifices for my daughter when her father wouldn’t even look at her. Now she’s 11 and he’s finally paying her mind and gave her a trip last summer and she says she wants to go live with him and her stepmother. This child knows how hard I struggled alone for years with her, and despite all of that, she chose her father. I have learned to never give your all to a girl child because they will always choose their deadbeat fathers over you!

Sam, mother of three:

I beat my kids when they were younger and I regret it, because now we migrated and they’re in therapy and they all say that their “abuse” during their childhood impacted them greatly. I feel guilty, but that was what I knew to do, and what my parents did. The middle one, especially, doesn’t romp to make me feel guilty, and keeps reminding me that I ruined his childhood and listing out all the “abuses”, even though I don’t remember it being so bad.

Audrey, mother of two:

I chose my job over my kids and those are years I can’t get back. The pandemic made me feel extra guilty, because with work from home I realised just how much I could have accomplished by working from home, taking more of stand against my supervisor’s ridiculous demands, and juggling work and parenting better. Now I have all the free time in the world, but my kids have their own thing going on. I feel like I missed out on so much, and I struggle to remember key moments in their childhood, but I can’t, because I was always busy with work while nannies were basically raising them.