Our value as parents is not dependent on the outcome but on our
input.

Said a wise friend of mine on a listserv post recently.

She was bolstering another parent who was questioning whether her current situation with her child (or the child himself) was ever going to get any better. She was encouraging this mom to reframe her situation and to consider that her value was not in how the child “turned out”, but in what she did for the child.

These are wise words, but nearly impossible to live by at times. Society equates a child’s success with good parenting; and a child’s failure with bad parenting. If I had a nickel for every time an educator said to me (back when I was interviewing teachers on a DOE compliance team) that there was little the school could do for a student because he/she had parents who didn’t care/weren’t involved/didn’t parent correctly, I could be funding all of LuLu’s therapies. (By the way, I believe there is MUCH schools can do for students who have parents with poor skills – but that’s another blog.)

This isn’t to say that there aren’t lots of parents out there who are shirking their duties or making some serious parenting mistakes (and making it harder for their offspring to succeed). Anyone who has adopted from foster care is likely acquainted with just how much harm parents can really do.

But what about parents who are doing much more right than wrong, but who end up getting sucked into the belief that how our children turn out is a measure of how good we’ve parented?

It’s confusing, at best. I, for one, have two grown/nearly grown stepchildren. I stepped into their lives when they were 8 and 12. They are both growing in independence and turning into loving, compassionate, hard-working adults who will likely marry, have families and be self-supporting their whole lives (or at least it looks that way as they are finishing school, getting jobs/careers, finding places to live.) I am the bio parent to Kay, who is an awesome teenager with a bright future. And then, there’s LuLu. Her future is so murky, and I’ve shared with you my deepest darkest fears about her outcome.

So what does this mean? Am I a success or failure as a parent? What is my value? The same could be asked Nancy, my blogmate Julia, Cindy Bodie, or several others who blog here. I know that I’ve worked a trillion times harder at parenting LuLu than I ever did at the others. In fact, I sometimes wonder if I can take any credit at all for influencing my stepchildren. They have two awesome parents already…if I have value at all, it may be in just staying out of the way. But will my level of input assuredly equal positive outcome…not by any stretch of the imagination

I think my friend points out something that’s very important – the input is more important than the outcome. It’s the process of parenting that we have control over, not what our children do with what we put into parenting them.

It is HARD to internalize this. Every time LuLu fails; I feel like I’ve failed too. But I haven’t. Conversely, every time one of the other children succeeds; my ability to take credit for that success in only partial at best – yes, I input good things; but THEY made the choices and did the work to get there. I can find joy in their success, but have to remind myself that it is THEIR success.

And, regardless of the outcome and the amount of time, energy or finances each child takes (took), the input of love remains the same.