When was the last time you felt guilty and inadequate as a parent?

A year ago? Last week? This morning?

We’ve all been there.

You get a call from your child’s teacher, and they want to set up a conference about his behavior. And you can’t help but wonder what you could have done differently.

Your teenage daughter is not happy, and you just know it’s your fault.

Your son is struggling to make friends. If only you had been more attentive.

Your aunt criticizes your handling of your child, saying she would certainly be behaving differently in their house. And she probably wouldn’t have ADHD either. And you want to crawl into a tight ball.

Your toddler fell out of a highchair and hit his head. In the middle of a restaurant. With patrons all around. And you just…

That last example is mine.

We were just finishing up lunch and getting ready to leave when my rambunctious toddler tried to climb out of his highchair and fell backward, hitting his head on the floor. SPLAT.

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I long, in a romantic, nostalgic way, for the days of my childhood.

Running in open fields. Biking down the road with my friends. Building forts and dams down by the creek. Camping in the woods. With nary an adult in sight.

But that nostalgic longing isn’t about me. I am sad my kids can’t experience the wild freedom of my childhood.

And why can’t I give my kids have that same carefree childhood that I had?

Fear.

I fear for my children. For their safety. I fear that they will be kidnapped. Hit by a car. Harmed by doing something because they didn’t think through to their consequences. I fear the consequences will be more than I can bear.

Parenting isn’t for wimps. It is soul-wrenchingly awful to let your heart out of your body and go walking around where you have no control and can’t protect it.

Before I had even realized it, I had forgotten the carefree joys of my childhood. And had turned into a clichéd helicopter parent.

I would strive to shield them from all consequences. I would hold their hands tightly as we crossed any street. I would stop them just as they were about to jump off the playground equipment, a mere 2 feet in the air.

It takes a lot of guts and bravery to let our children go and live their lives. I used to think that moving across the country alone with 2 suitcases, no job, and $1000 was the bravest thing I ever did.

Nope. Now I realize that pales in comparison to parenting.

Parenting has been the scariest thing I’ve ever attempted. I think I was more terrified than my kids on their first day of pre-school. And that was only the start!

I couldn’t keep going down that path, though. Because soon I realized, as kids grow older, so do the number of things I could be scared of. Continuing down that path of fearful parenting would someday lead me to a nervous breakdown.

I chose to learn how to parent bravely. It hasn’t always been easy. And it’s a conscious effort. Here are 4 key things I learned along the way.

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“Jacob, do you know how important reading comprehension is? Do you know how important becoming a good writer can be to your future?”

He stares at me blankly.

“Well, let me tell you. No matter what you do, you’ll need to understand what you read and convey a clear thought in writing. I can’t think of one profession where those things won’t matter.”

Some days, he continues to stare at me blankly.

On others, he quickly responds with a “Yeah, Ok. OK!!” in that exasperated voice of his that conveys he’ll agree with whatever I say just to keep me from launching into more nagging and lecturing.

Jacob loves math and science. However, when it comes to language arts, he is totally uninterested. And I lecture and nag to drive home the point that this stuff really matters.

In reality though, he probably just hears “blah, blah, blah.”

No matter how much I harp, nothing I say seems to get through.

So, what do we do, parents? There are so many important issues that we want to talk to our kids about, but if everything we say just goes into one ear and out the other and completely bypasses the brain, what good will it achieve?

Here’s what I’ve found out –

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You know what they say about too much of a good thing?

Yeah, that’s kind of what visiting grandparents is like for us.

Every summer and winter holiday we go to the Midwest for a long visit with both sets of grandparents.

My kids love it. Which isn’t surprising at all considering how much both our parents love spoiling grandchildren.

My kids eat more ice cream in those few weeks than they do all year round. They’re allowed to stay up late. They consume more television than is humanly possible. They play all day, every day.

On one hand, it’s lovely. I love that my kids get to do this.

But it also drives me crazy.  No homework gets done. Kids are tired and cranky from missing bedtimes and getting up early. Vegetables are a distant memory.

And I end up with the unsavory task of wrestling things back to normal when we get back home.

Time at Grandma and Grandpa’s is special. It should be. I don’t want to get in the way of that.

At the same time, I don’t like how out of balance my parenting feels by the end of the trip.

So, for the past couple of years now, I’ve been trying out a few tricks to make the most of the fact that my kids have such wonderful grandparents, while at the same keeping it from straining my own relationship with my parents, or my kids.

Here are 4 things that have really helped:

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