When we 'drop the ball' as a parent...

I observed my daughter's netball coach during the grand final. During the half-time pep talk, she focussed on all of the things that the girls were doing well. Sure, they dropped a couple of passes - it happens. But what about that great defence, the fantastic intercepts and those goals!

As I watched the girls' faces light up in self-assurance, it occurred to me that, as parents, we could learn a lesson from this. Many of us - and I think women really 'shine' in this area - have a tendency to beat ourselves up when we 'drop the ball'.

In some cases, we pre-frame this before we even have children - watching others stumble through the gauntlet of parenthood, thinking with a quiet, almost smug (and, in retrospect, laughable) certainty: 'When I'm a parent, I definitely won't let my kids do that...' (After which we proceed to prove ourselves wrong on nearly every score.)

Having set ourselves impossibly high standards, fuelled in some cases by the guilt of our split focus on family and work, sooner or later we inevitably lose our step and tumble from the super-human parenting pedestal that we've constructed. We're not able to breastfeed, we lose our temper with a tantrumming toddler, we forget an appointment with the teacher or leave the lunch boxes on the kitchen bench. We're keenly disappointed that our parenting 'reality' has failed to meet the parenting 'ideal' to which we aspire. We let our heart's sink at this point, instead of realistically adjusting our standards to allow for 'basic human error'.

What if we were to think like the netball coach? What if we acknowledged that it's normal to drop the ball occasionally, before dusting ourselves off and choosing to focus instead on all of the times that we do things well?

Next time one of the myriad things on my mind slips through the cracks, or when I'm less patient than I could be with my daughters, I'm going to make a conscious effort not to focus on the ball that I've dropped, but on the goals that I'm scoring in the rest of the game...