What Is Your Biggest Parenting Fear?

My husband has a long-time friend who is a police officer. We’ll call him Calvin. Calvin is an honorable, moral, upstanding person. The exact kind of person you want as a police officer. Calvin is adopted. He is the oldest son of four children. His parents are still married and both highly educated. His two younger brothers (Ivan and Aaron) are his parent’s biological children. All three boys grew up in the same home going to the same Catholic private school. Ivan, the middle brother, is a patent attorney in Washington, D.C.. Aaron, the youngest, has two sons by two different women, both of which the grandparents are helping to raise. Aaron is currently in jail for dealing drugs.

Then there’s the story of my 1st cousins. They are three biological siblings all from the same parents growing up in the same house. They lived in a small town and their mother was a homemaker. The middle child, Brandon, is (once again) a police officer. The oldest child, Danielle, is living in near poverty with a drinking problem and the youngest, Anna, is an award-winning urologist at The Mayo Clinic.

Those two stories, combined with my own family history, encapsulate my worst parenting fears. That this whole thing is a total crap-shoot.

What keeps me up at night is that it doesn’t matter how many books I read, how many educational apps I buy for my iPad, how much I limit the use of the iPad, how much I spend on extra-curricular activities and art supplies, or how many organic veggies and hours of sleep I’m able to coax onto my children (or not)… my children have the same odds of ending up on skid row as they do being a renowned surgeon.

I know what some of you may already be thinking. It’s the same thing I’ve said to myself to assuage this dread.

All I need to give my children is love. All I can do, is the best I can.

I want to believe that is true. Because those are things I’m already doing. I do love my children with everything I have and I am doing the very best I can. But deep down I know, even that is sometimes not enough.

You see, my parent’s loved me while I was growing up. They still do. And they did the very best they could with what they had. I know this. But all of that wasn’t enough to stop me from making some unfortunate mistakes. Mistakes so dire, so potentially deadly and dangerous that it is only by the grace of God that I am where I am today. If you look at me and my siblings we are all on different planes in life too. Very different.

These stories have me grappling to make sense of parenting because it is the ONE job in this life where I pray I can succeed. In fact, I’m terrified of any other alternative.

I find myself wanting to understand my odds. I’m inspired to read smart books and save lots of money so that I can make educated choices and send them to great schools. Feeling desperate to safeguard my children against devastating potentialities of lives lived in pain and suffering.

Anything else has me feeling powerless, and powerlessness is a cold and frightening terrain. Powerlessness feels like very little oxygen inside a cave that’s growing darker by the minute.

This reality that the fate of my children’s lives is a total crap-shoot morphs into one big, pathetic excuse:

We can’t afford private school so I say, “Well, parenting is a crap-shoot anyway, might as well go to public.”

I have a crappy day and ignore and/or snap at my children, “Oooh well, parenting = crap-shoot, doesn’t mean they’ll need therapy.”

I get really excited when my 2-year-old labels his letters correctly, “Pfft, crappy, crappity, crap-shoot, doesn’t mean I’m doing it right.”

I get really frustrated when my kid melts-down in the grocery store checkout line, “This sh!t is such a frickin’ crap-shoot, doesn’t mean I’m doing it wrong.”

It’s a useful excuse for almost any parenting insecurity you can think of. It instantaneously absolves you of responsibility by putting your children’s fate in fate’s hands.

But that’s not how I want to parent. It’s not even how I want to live. I don’t want to put all my cards in the deck of complete pre-determination. I want to have an impact on their lives. I want my hard work to pay off. I want my children to be happy, well-adjusted contributors to society. I want that. I want that more than I want excuses and apathy.

I’ve searched my soul for something more comforting than “crap-shoot” to ease my fears about my children someday ending up on skid row. There is only one reasonable answer that brings me any margin of comfort. It is respect.

The R.E.S.P.E.C.T. find out what it means to me… kind of respect.

My children will make mistakes. I know that. They will fall off wagons, jump off bridges and take the low road more times than I even want to contemplate. We all do. It’s inevitable. But if they respect their parents; if they value our opinions; if they feel bad when we are disappointed because they enjoy our approval… then that is something.

But here’s the problem with respect. Respect is not merely given. It isn’t something that you can control, command or demand no matter what the Bood Book says. Respect happens when the person you are, is the person someone else strives to emulate. And, sadly, that has nothing to do with parenting and everything to do with one’s own sense of integrity and self-worth.

In the end, I think respect is something you must first have for yourself, before you can earn it from others… probably, especially your children.

As far as I can tell the best strategy I have against safeguarding my children from the more difficult paths in life is to inspire their respect for me. No small feat I assure you. Because respecting my wishes by remembering to take off their shoes in the doorway, versus caring how disappointed I’ll be if they have sex with their high school girlfriend, are two separate levels of respect in my mind.

The former is common courtesy, the latter is having a bond that acts like kryptonite on teenage hormones and peer pressure and we all know how strong those things are. Teenage hormones and peer pressure are the two forces responsible for a $1.6 billion dollar company called YouTube.

So how do I get this kind of relationship with my children? How do I inspire their respect for me so that they hear my voice during difficult decisions? Must I be flawless in front of them? Must I exemplify perfection and make every right decision?

I don’t think so. That’s just too damn much to ask from any human being especially not one who suffers from chronic tardiness and likes a little french fries with my ketchup.

Besides, the people I have the most respect for in life are not perfect. In fact, they are usually the most flawed.

To me, respect means humility. It means grace. It means saying I’m sorry, I was wrong, can you forgive me? And I forgive you, but don’t treat me like that and why don’t we try to do better next time because trying is the most important thing. Not perfection, just trying.

To me, self-respect is knowing you’re not perfect, and yet believing you were perfectly made.

It is something I remind myself of daily because if I can believe this — really, truly believe it… then hopefully, someday, they will too. And if they do… then I can put my fears to rest because I will have succeeded at my job as their mom.

Because you know what they say, you can’t change anyone else, you can only change yourself.

Shannon was thrown from the corporate ladder in 2010. Shortler after, she started writing. Now, in between folding laundry and corralling two small children, she writes at shannonlell.com and is the editor of Mamapedia.com. She writes introspective pieces on personal and social issues and she tries to use just enough sarcasm so you don’t think she’s emotionally unavailable. Over-thinking everything is her special super power. You can find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.