A Confession to Dispel Shame

I have a confession to make: I don’t know how to parent. I have let my children down more times than I can count, and until a little over a year ago, I had no idea I had let them down. I parented on instinct, and I parented out of my own pattern of how I was parented.

James Dobson may be dead, but his approach to parenting lives on. He was a galvanizing figure in evangelical culture, shaping a generation with his rigid framework of discipline and control. Grace was in the rebuke. It was how I was raised. Every problem was sin. Every problem was disobedience. Nothing was seen as gorgeous humanity or uniqueness. Nothing was understood as a brain still developing. Nothing was innate temperament. She was as cute as a button, but that impish personality needed to be retrained. Shame was a tool generously used. Spare the rod and spoil the child.

A Caribbean childhood mixed with conservative white Evangelicalism: a toxic, combustible potion. It combined cultural expectations of strictness with theological certainty about sin and obedience. That mix left little space for curiosity, empathy, or understanding.

And yet—I love my children immensely. I was devoted to their thriving, delighting in them as much as I could, forgiving them as much as I could. But I know I made mistakes. What I would give to go back to those moments and choose another way. 

I know I tapped the flow of some pain. Some traditions I was able to stop; others, I knew innately should not continue, but I could not single-handedly end them all. I have apologized for my immaturity. They laugh and say, “Mum, you did so much for us.” But I hope the apology sinks in. Not because I now know how to parent well, but because I at least know how to parent better.

And that little girl in me—the highly sensitive one with so much to say—every now and then, I turn my attention to her and try to reparent her, too.

***************

Parenting is an unfinished story, written in love and error, in instinct and awakening. I offer this confession as a way of loosening shame’s hold, both mine and perhaps yours. May we learn to parent our children with more tenderness than we received, and may we learn to parent the child still living inside us.