I recently discovered why it always seems like I'm doing everything wrong as a mom.
Basically, parenting theories fall into three categories:
1. Be compassionate and respectful of your child's feelings.
2. Be firm and prioritize enforcing rules and limits swiftly, punishing bad behavior.
3. Be consistent.
The trick is that you can never successfully accomplish all three of these things. You can do 1 and 3, and violate 2. You can do 2 and 3, and violate 1. Or you can do 1 and 2 and violate 3. So at every step in Penny's young life, it is possible for me to bring to mind a widely accepted parenting theory that would tell me that I'm doing it wrong. We are set up for failure. So maybe we should just embrace all the inevitable "failure" that's really just the messiness of life, and stop beating ourselves (and each other) up.
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