Parents Don’t Need to Be Perfect—They Need to Do This Instead

It was a Tuesday evening in the car, when it happened. My 4-year-old daughter had just finished ballet class. As I was buckling her car seat, she asked for a snack. I reminded her, calmly, that she had already had a snack before class, that dinner was waiting at home with her dad and her baby sister and that we were ten minutes away. Ten minutes. Practically nothing.

What followed was not nothing. What followed was the kind of tantrum I never knew existed until I became a mom. It was a full-body meltdown from a tiny person trying to get out her feelings but not knowing how to manage them. Her screams ricocheted inside of my car for the entire length of a drive. My head pounded. My patience thinned. I was tired from work, from the pick-up-change-into-your-ballet-clothes-battle-traffic tango. I kept my calm for longer than I expected.

And then, I reached my boiling point, and I snapped.

I don't remember exactly what I said. I remember the silence that followed, which was somehow worse than the hysterics. I remember the guilt arriving before we even pulled into the driveway: it was completely disproportionate to an argument about a snack. I went to bed that night running the moment on a loop, cataloguing my failures as a parent and venting to my husband.

What I did not know then, and what a growing body of research has since made clear to me, is that the moment I had fixated on—the snap, the sharp voice, the failure of regulation—was not actually the moment that mattered most. The moment that mattered was when I walked around the car, opened her door, and told her I was sorry.

Gentle parenting has become a trendy cultural ideal for raising children, shaped in part by social media feeds full of mothers who appear to navigate every tantrum with the composure of someone who seemingly has never been touched out, never been interrupted mid-thought 17 times in a row, and never looked at the clock and wished it was bedtime already. The message, stated or implied, is that a “good parent” is a regulated parent: always calm, always present, always absorbing whatever the day delivers without visible cracks.

From a clinical standpoint, that standard is not just difficult, it is physiologically impossible. "Our bodies were never meant to be constantly regulated,” Tracy Carson, a licensed professional clinical counselor, says. "Our fight-or-flight response is embedded in our nervous system for a reason: It senses danger and threat, and as a parent we are constantly needing to assess those things."

When we ignore that cost and try to override our own system in real time, eventually the system pushes back—that’s why I eventually snapped. And when the pushback arrives, the shame arrives so quickly and so completely that many parents find themselves more consumed by guilt over the moment than they are focused on what comes next.

What comes next, it turns out, is the whole thing.

Research on secure attachment, the kind of bond between parent and child that predicts emotional health, resilience, and the capacity for healthy relationships across a lifetime, has long suggested something that runs counter to the perfection narrative: Children do not need flawless parents. They need parents who are steady, dependable, and take time to make amends.

Francesca Emma, a licensed mental health counselor, points to findings suggesting that a caregiver only needs to be truly attuned to their child about 30% of the time. That’s not because the other 70% doesn't matter, but because attunement, in this context, means being fully in sync with your child's emotional state in real time. That is an extraordinarily high bar that no parent, no matter how present or intentional, can sustain constantly.

What the research actually tells us is that children are remarkably resilient in the gaps. What shapes their sense of security is not whether a parent is perfectly peaceful and composed 24/7, but whether the caregiver consistently returns after a rupture: whether they validate, apologize, and model what it looks like to be a human being who makes mistakes and repairs them.

The science behind this is rooted in how the brain develops. Each time a repair happens after a rupture, a neural pathway is reinforced in the child's developing brain: one that encodes the message that relationships are safe, that disturbance is survivable, that the person who loves you will always return. When repair is absent, a different pathway forms entirely. "The neural pathway that gets developed is one that indicates their parental figure is not safe," Carson explains.

In other words: me snapping at my daughter wasn’t the dangerous part for our relationship or her development. What would have a negative impact would be me ignoring her, not talking about what happened, and repeating this process.

Olivia Pham, a licensed marriage and family therapist, uses the metaphor of the ocean: the goal was never a calm, waveless life, for us or for our children. When we are regulated, our emotions move like waves hitting the shore on a clear day, sometimes crashing, sometimes gentle, but always part of a living, moving system. "There isn't going to be a time where there are no waves hitting the beach of your life," she says. A flat sea, she points out, would be a very flat life.

Once we had pulled into the driveway that Tuesday, I gave myself a few minutes before I said anything more. Not because I had a clinical framework in mind, but because I knew I wasn't ready. If I went back to her still wound up, I would not be apologizing so much as performing one, and she would see right through me.

When I unbuckled her and got down to her level, I told her I was sorry for raising my voice. I told her I had been feeling frustrated, and that was not her fault. I asked if she was okay. She was quiet, then she flung herself into my arms and gave me a hug. A moment later, she asked, “Mommy, do you think Elsa actually likes the cold, anyway? What does anyway mean?” (I guess she wasn’t as emotionally damaged as I had worked myself up to believe she was!)

If, like me, you’re not sure what counts as a repair or an apology, the best way to think about it is to keep it simple. And to start ASAP, if you aren’t already. According to both Pham and Carson, it is never too early or too late to start.

Pham notes that repair can begin as early as infancy—even a moment of frustration with a newborn, a bottle set down too hard, is an opportunity to practice returning. If you put the bottle down hard or had to walk away because they were extremely fussy and couldn’t be settled, come back and say, “Mommy needed a second to breathe. I’m here. I’m sorry.”

The brain, Carson reminds us, remains elastic. Old patterns can be interrupted. New ones can be built. The parent who starts repairing at 40 is doing the same neurological work as the one who started at the beginning.

The steps themselves are less complicated than the shame around them makes them feel. Carson recommends stabilizing yourself first, even if that means telling your child you need a moment. Something like "Mommy needs a minute, I'll be right back" or “Daddy needs a sec” does more good than a rushed apology delivered before you have actually regulated. When you do return, talk about your own actions before anything else. Not theirs. Yours. "Name your behavior first," Carson says. "I am so sorry that I lost my temper. That was not right." Then offer connection—a hug, sitting close—to signal that the rupture is closed.

And importantly here, also repair yourself, Pham suggests, by offering a different reframe: "If you're striving for perfection in your parenting, you're inevitably going to fall short," she says. "Your kids don't need a perfect parent. They need a good enough parent." The 80% of the time you are regulated and present is doing its work. The 20% you are not is not undoing it, as long as you come back.

What makes repair so hard for so many parents is not a lack of love or intention. It is the guilt that arrives after a hard moment and lands so heavily that moving through it feels impossible: the spiral of self-recrimination that keeps a mother frozen in the aftermath instead of doing the one thing that would actually help.

Emma offers the most useful reframe: shift from "why did I do that?" to "what can I do about it now?” The guilt, she reminds her clients, belongs to the parent: It is not the child's experience, and staying inside it serves neither of them. "Your child doesn't need you to be perfect," she says. "They need you to come back and be honest."

I think about that Tuesday evening often now. Not the screaming in the car or the sharpness in my voice, but the driveway, and how she reached for my hand, and the way night felt afterward: normal, ordinary, just another day. She told her dad about ballet. Her little sister banged on her high chair tray. She asked me to read four books and tuck in Elsa and Anna next to her. She sleepily mumbled “I love you, Mommy” as I turned off the lights and walked out of her room. The evening kept going, the way evenings do.