Many parents (particularly those with only one child), wanting to be the best parents they can be, think the best is being “perfect.” This belief is mistaken. Think about it.

Progress is a much more humane goal than perfection. Human is real. Perfection is ideal. In addition, if a child really had perfect parents, how would that child tolerate his or her own imperfections? The answer is, not very well. “I'm the only one in this family who ever makes mistakes! I'm the only one who does things wrong! I can never do things well enough!”

Self-criticism of this kind can be abusive, the child ending up racked with guilt, or even filled with shame, for not measuring up to the family model. Better to have human parents who, even at their best, perform unevenly, acknowledging their shortcomings and admitting their frailties as they keep trying to do the best they can.

So much of discipline, both instruction and correction, is directed at nurturing performance of one kind or another, it really helps if you can let the child know no one is perfect, including yourselves. You can use as a model the Great School of Life.

“You know,” you can say, “in the Great School of Life, we are all students. We never get to experience it all. We never get to learn it all. We never get to graduate. We never get it all right. We never learn it all on our first try. And a lot that we learn is from failure and mistakes. No student, ourselves included, gets all A's in the Great School of Life. The main thing is to show up to class every day and try to learn what you can. We never could do more than that ourselves, and we don't expect any more of you.”