Our children's behavior doesn't always reflect on our parenting

I was watching one of my favorite shows when a text message from my oldest child's teacher came in. She said she had struggled with him that day in class as he was not concentrating and that he had been rough and violent with the other kids.

My first reaction was feeling ashamed. I wanted to find the nearest hole and bury myself, I took a while to respond.

I saw the behavior that was described as an indictment of my parenting. My child was naughty at school and I was immediately guilty as charged.

I went through all sorts of things that could have happened in the couple of months before this incident that I could have done or not done that might have contributed to his behavior.

I wondered if maybe the fact that we do not live with his father was affecting him, My mind was on overdrive. I was overthinking everything and blaming myself.

But the overwhelming feeling was shame, it was as if the text message was written differently, "YOU HAVE FAILED AT TEACHING YOUR CHILD MANNERS," -Those words were screaming at me.

As the day progressed I realised how hard I was being on myself. I went back to that text several times that night and read it again and again. It was very clear that the teacher was talking about my son's behavior in class and not my parenting or lack thereof.

From a young age, when I behaved in ways that were uncalled for, the question from strangers was always "Who is her mother,". The general idea that every way a child behaves is the result of the people raising them is way more problematic than we think.

I am not saying our parenting has no bearing on our children, hell it has a whole lot, but children are human, and not everything they do is done because their parent, especially their mother did not do something, or got her parenting wrong.

That day, my son made a couple of bad choices, his behavior just spiraled out of control and frustrated his teacher to a point where she felt I needed to intervene.

This idea that children must always behave acceptably also sounds like fiction. And like us, our children do not always make the best choices, if not most of the time.

What I got right that day, was the seriousness of the issue, violence is never okay and every time it rears its head, it must be addressed. But what got wrong was making it about myself and casting doubts on my parenting.

I ran the risk of addressing the matter in a way that centres me and my parenting, instead of my child and his behavior.

I also ran the risk of erasing his humanity and treating him as an extension of me and not as an individual in his own right.

At the same time, I have empathy for myself and other parents, especially mothers who do this because society already does it for us. There is a meme on social media that is often used when people are being problematic. It asks the question, "Who raised you?".

This meme means there is a generally accepted idea that whatever we do is the result of how we were raised. Which is not true.

We need to give ourselves grace when our children act in ways that are opposite to what we teach them or strive every day to model for them and remember they are human. Our children are not puppets being held to strings that we control.

We also should not take credit for all their good behavior, remind them when they do well, that that was all them.

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