Perfect Parenting?

I have a bright and bubbly six-year-old daughter whom I love to call Tweetie Pie (TP).  Her mind is constantly creating ideas on arts and crafts projects, stories to publish, and play scripts to put to life.  It's like she has, what I would call, a "light-bulb moment" almost every five to ten minutes.  It's wonderful to see how she could come up with so many wonderful ideas.  The challenge though with having such a speedy, creative mind is that one also tends to expect the implementation of these ideas to catch up with one's thoughts at the same speed.

My little TP sees a vision in her mind, quickly acts on it, and expects to have perfect results after giving it just one shot.  At the end, when she sees that what she produced turned out to be a far cry from what she envisioned, she breaks down and cries -- so much so that she will end up resigning to the idea that she is terrible at such a task and give it up altogether.

One concrete example that happened recently is when she was inspired to draw a picture of a room with a flower by the window sill and a chair beside it.  She drew something similar to this:

To our surprise, she suddenly broke down, cried, and started kicking on the floor because "it doesn't look like a chair!  I can't get it to look realistic!"

Why?  What could cause her to be so hard on herself?  This is something I have asked myself as we struggled with this concern, particularly the past two years.  However, I didn't really have to go far to find the answer to this.  The answer lies in me...

As I look into my own life, I realize that I myself have given up too easily on acting on my ideas because of immediate and high expectations I put on myself and being afraid to fail in meeting them.  Perhaps my little TP got this from me through my genes.  Perhaps she picked it up from my not-so-positive outlook in life and from the way I respond to her.

Whether it's by nature or nurture, my earnest hope is that my TP will continue to value her ideas and explore them.  But even beyond that, my hope is that she will patiently and persistently work out her plan and be forgiving of herself when she fails and love herself enough to pick herself up, learn, and try again.

The only way I can teach her to do this is to do the same for myself.  We parents can only be effective as teachers of our children when we truly live out the values we wish to impart to them.

That night, when she broke down over her "failed" drawing of a chair, I initially dealt with the situation the way I always did -- by simply telling her how she shouldn't be so hard on herself and that she shouldn't be afraid to make mistakes. And since I had repeatedly done this for several months already, it had grown to a point that she could sense the frustration in my tone of voice.  But that's exactly all I would do -- just tell her -- and then go back to whatever I was doing.  I expected her to just be able to "get it" by listening to my explanation and then move on.

It suddenly dawned on me: How can I expect her to be patient and forgiving to herself if she can't feel her own parents being patient and forgiving towards her?

And so for a change, I stopped what I was doing and cuddled her in my arms to calm her down.  Then I went to her room to get her own little wooden chair and placed it in front of her.  I patiently went through every part of the chair, line by line,  corner by corner, to help her observe and figure out how to translate this 3-D object into a two dimensional drawing.  Every now and then, she had to erase and repeat certain lines -- and I made it a point to be patient and let her know that it was absolutely okay and that she could try again.  Finally, with only my verbal guidance but with my constant presence beside her, she was able to come out with this:

It was such a joy to see her so proud of herself.  Proud, not because she was some naturally gifted artist who did a great drawing -- but because she gave herself time to work on it, erase when not, right, and try again and again and again until she finished.  Aaahhh...  THIS is what our children should be learning.

It's not about how wonderful or perfect their work is but how much heart and effort they put into it.  THAT's what I want my TP to learn.  And that means THAT is also what I must learn....

Recently, TP suddenly asked me, "Mama, what's your New Year's resolution this year as a parent?"

Gulp.  Say what? (Darling TP always comes up with such surprising questions!)  I actually began year 2012 without any specific resolutions.

But suddenly it came to me so clearly that I replied to my her:

"My New Year's resolution is to be patient, persistent, forgiving, and loving to you
[and to myself!] 

so that you may also grow up to be patient, persistent, forgiving, and loving to yourself."