The Conscious Parent

really need to learn is that perfection is an ideal of the foolish.
The goal isn’t to be flawlessly “perfect,” as the mother tried to be with
respect to her son’s bar mitzvah, but to embrace our “perfectly flawed”
self—and, in this mother’s case, embrace the fact that her son is also
flawed like her and may mess up at the most inappropriate moment. It’s
important to release our children from the illusion that we always “have
it together”—something we can only do once we have released ourselves
from the grip of being “perfect” parents.
When you are comfortable acknowledging your flaws and daily
mistakes, not in a self-flagellating manner but in a matter-of-fact
manner, you convey to your children that mistakes are inevitable. By
laughing at your errors and readily admitting your insecurities, you
remove yourself from the pedestal of wonder. Setting aside hierarchy,
you encourage your children to relate to you as human-tohuman, spirit-
to-spirit.
How sad that the mother who organized the bar mitzvah couldn’t laugh
at all the things that went awry. Had she done so, she would have taught
her son one of the most valuable lessons he could ever learn— that of
total acceptance of what is, including his misplaced behavior. All we
need to do is model. When our children realize we are perfectly okay
with our okayness, it encourages a feeling of competence within them.
By delighting in our follies, we teach our children not to take themselves
too seriously. By being willing to make a fool of ourselves as we try new
things, we teach them to explore life with little care for how they “look”
or perform.
I wonder whether the mother who planned the bar mitzvah so perfectly