What constitutes a perfect parent? Is it one that does everything right and never makes a mistake? Perhaps… but can we find any of those?

Needless to say, no one is perfect, but when it comes to parenting certain things could and should be expected of adults given the wonderful responsibility of caring and nurturing children. As a parent myself of teenagers, I hope that one day when they’re grown, my kids will genuinely be able to say that my love for them was unconditional, I never had favorites and I did my very best to raise them with solid values and a good moral compass. I do believe that they’re able to say that even now. Am I a perfect parent then? Certainly not! That’s because I’m not a perfect human being. I make mistakes just like everyone else and when I’m wrong or mistaken about something, I apologize to my kids– I show them that I’m not too big to do that. Unfortunately, many parents I know believe it’s beneath them to apologize to their children when they’ve made a mistake, but if that’s the attitude, what are they teaching their kids? How will their children learn to apologize when they’re wrong?

I mentioned earlier that one thing I wanted my kids to be able to say is that I didn’t have favorites. Favoritism seems to be a usual problem in families even from the days of old. If you go by Biblical examples, you may think of Jacob and Esau or Joseph being his father’s favorite. The ideal situation would be that parents train themselves to love their children equally, but to those who don’t, my wish is that you never be open or make the fact obvious that you prefer one child over the other. This can be detrimental to the family structure and cause major problems among the siblings that will continue for years and years and then trickle down to generations. Open, blatant preference for one child over the other will have terrible, long-lasting effects.

In my book,’ INFESTATION: A Small Town Nightmare’, Marie Adams has faced the dilemma of being her mother’s least favorite child and as a grown adult now with a family of her own, she still faces the disdain of her aged mother. As a result of years of her mom’s mistreatment of her, her siblings have basically followed suit and the family structure is nonetheless, broken. However, Marie has turned out to be the most successful of all the children and although treated as an outcast, she has always been there to help each and everyone of them. I wanted to address this topic in my book because it is one that needs to be looked at and each of us as parents need to consider if we’re guilty of ‘tearing down our own house with our own hands’ based on the way we treated our kids.

In closing, I’d like to think that someone can improve the quality of a child’s life if we consider our children’s feelings before we speak and before we act.