When Your Parenting Bar is Too Low

I have a dear friend from college who always spoke of how he did not want kids. As a young Christian man fully immersed in an evangelical community of college Christians in the mid-2000s, this view point was a little uncommon.

Essentially everyone in our friend circle had dreams of a great career, marriage, and kids, and to have this really incredible guy say he didn’t want children felt so odd to me. At my core, I felt that if a godly, kind, responsible, and all around great man didn’t want to be a dad, that would be a waste. There are so many deadbeats out there, it felt like a loss to have this guy pass up on the opportunity to love and lead a family.

As a child of divorce, I would have given anything to have a guy like my friend as a dad. My dad was a nice guy, and I felt he loved and cared for me, but he wasn’t the classic Christian dad. He didn’t go to church with the family, read scriptures with his kids, or share about how God was working in his life. Early on in my life, he volunteered for a time with a local church youth group, so it was clear he was a Christian, but I just didn’t see that side of him much at home.

It was wild to have a friend who was planning to honor and follow God in meaningful ways, but did not want to have kids and raise a family. Ultimately, this guy let me know that his father was so awesome, he felt that he could not measure up. He envisioned a life of failing to be the type of dad he had, and dealing with that disappointment and shame. The parenting bar in his mind was just too high for him to clear.

Now that I am a parent, I realize that I am dealing with the exact opposite issue in my life. Instead of looking back on my childhood and feeling inadequate to measure up to the standard my father set, I find myself comparing myself to my dad and feeling pretty good about my parenting, even when I shouldn’t.

On my worst days, when I lose my temper or drop the ball in a myriad of other ways, I think to myself, “well at least I’m here.” With my parents’ divorce, after the age of two I only saw my father every other weekend and for two hours on Wednesday nights. He did not tuck me in at night, read me stories, drive me to school, or know any of my friends. In many ways, he was more like a fun uncle than a father. So he was as great as he could be in the circumstances, but he was nowhere near as present as I am with my kids.

My parenting bar is so low that I find myself settling day after day for mediocrity.

One of my first goals as a parent was simply to keep my marriage afloat until my kids were four and two, the ages that my brother and I were when my parents’ marriage fell apart. Once I achieved that goal, everything else felt like icing on the cake for my family. Sure I may look at my phone too much, raise my voice over silly things, and generally exude a grouchy demeanor 80% of the time, but I am here, and I am reading their bedtime stories and walking them to school. My kids are experiencing a childhood family dynamic infinitely better than what I endured, so why bother trying harder?

It has recently come to my attention that the standard my father set has also impacted me as a husband. Although the details are unclear to me, my parents’ marriage ended due to some sort of infidelity on the part of my father. Not only is the parenting bar in my mind exceptionally low, but as long as I am faithful to my wife, I feel like I am winning at being a husband. When I am reticent to connect emotionally, shifting into cruise control and roommate mode in my relationship with my wife, it is hard to feel too bad because of how I compare myself to my father and his failure to be a faithful husband.

Don’t get me wrong- there are things my father did that I truly could never do. He was mechanically inclined, entrepreneurial, and his presence in a room outshone literally every other person. In many ways, I cannot measure up to who he was. But as a father and husband, he did not tread a path that is too difficult to walk successfully. Which leads me to the realization that I am not the father and husband I could be.

We all need to adjust our parenting bar.

I have realized that people like me and people like my friend both need to adjust their parenting bar. Comparing ourselves to any parent, whether they are better or worse versions of us, is a recipe for a lifetime of struggle. On the one hand, if you feel like you cannot measure up to the ideal parent in your life (whether that be your actual parent or someone else you know), you will spend most of your life feeling like you are terrible. Trying to be like other people in any area of our life is hard, but parenting and marriage are two areas in which this is especially difficult. If you feel like you will never be the parent or the spouse you are comparing yourself to, your struggle with insecurities and low self-esteem will follow you all the days of your life.

On the other hand, if you are, like me, comparing yourself to a person that struggled to be a great version of a parent or spouse, it is so easy to get complacent. Your family will miss out on having a version of you that could be better, stronger, and happier. You cannot excel in any area of your life if the bar you are seeking to clear is on the floor. So what should we do?

The only person you should compare yourself to is the version of you from yesterday.

If for the rest of your life, you simply try to be a little better today than you were yesterday, you won’t become complacent and you won’t feel like a failure. This is the only reasonable bar that anyone should set for themselves in any area of their lives, but especially in parenting and marriage. We do not know the secret struggles of our parents. We cannot fathom the issues going on behind closed doors of the perfect couple next door. The problem with setting the bar based on other people is that bar is always based on an imagined reality. The only person you can 100% know inside and out is yourself. By seeking to be better today than yesterday, you will not only know for sure when you achieve that, you can be assured that the bar you are seeking to clear is based in total reality.

So whether you find yourself unable to measure up to other parents and spouses, or you feel satisfied with mediocrity, if you are comparing yourself to others, you’ve got to stop. Take a look at the bar you set yesterday, and try to get just a little bit higher today. By doing that, not only will you be a better version of yourself, you won’t struggle with self-loathing along the way.