“I hate myself!”
These are the words my seven-year-old daughter cried in despair, throwing her tiny little body onto the couch and burying her head into a pillow.
We had been on a scooter ride with the neighbors. Off in the distance, our four kids got into some sort of spat. The youngest one started crying. Mine sat on the curb and started to sulk. Then she begged to go home.
After some hugs, she told me what had happened. Her friend had encouraged her to cheat in their scooter race so that they could beat the little kids. She agreed, despite knowing she shouldn’t.
Enter regret.
We’ve all been there. That moment you make a poor choice and immediately regret it. As adults, we (hopefully) know how to pivot and react by apologizing and righting our wrongs. But our children don’t yet have these skills, and it’s our job to guide them.
To boot, many of our kids have been significantly lacking in socialization. What my children used to learn daily on the playground is now reduced to brief and socially distanced interactions with those friends we see sporadically around the neighborhood.
For my “big feelings” seven-year-old, that means feelings have been even bigger, and her reactions to those feelings even more dramatic.
As someone who suffered for years with self-hate as both an adolescent and young adult, I am hypersensitive as a parent to the words and body language I use about myself and about how my kids should feel about themselves.
Yes, we can regret our words and choices. But we should never hate ourselves for those words and choices. That little voice inside that tells us we’ve flubbed is the same voice that speaks to our humanity and that we are, in fact, good people.
And so, that is what I told her. Sometimes, we will make poor choices. Sometimes, our closest friends will ask us to join in their poor choices. At those times, we have to listen to our heads and our hearts and do the right thing. At times, we will. Other times, we won’t. When we don’t, we have to recognize where we went wrong, right our wrong, and most importantly, learn from that wrong.
Mistakes make us human. But those mistakes are never grounds to turn against oneself. Our kids should always love themselves, mistakes and all. We are all human. We are all flawed.
