The Gift of Small Moments
Creating space for fallibility and repair
“We have so little of each other now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy…”
I’ve apologized to children a lot over the years, at home and in the classroom. I’ve apologized after realizing I answered a question incorrectly. I’ve apologized when I failed to leave enough time for a child I promised to leave time for. I’ve apologized when I reacted with frustration or impatience. I delight in the company of children and have chosen to spend decades by their side. I find their curiosity, humor, unexpected ideas, and even their intensity important—their often clumsy and unwieldy temperaments are a reminder that there’s value in making a mess and figuring things out as we go. However, my enjoyment of children doesn’t inoculate me against irritation or mistakes, and I want children to know this.
One of the daunting things about parenting is that it is always micro and macro at the same time. We’re immersed in the many tiny, draining, blissful, exhausting, delightful, infuriating, ordinary, absurd bits and pieces of day-to-day life with children, the keeping them alive of it all. And at the same time, each of these moments can feel infused with the scope of the road ahead, as we yearn to be able to crystal ball their future and are tempted to fill in the shadows of their unknowns with our own histories. We are constantly amidst the trees while also trying to imagine the whole of the forest.
The sheer quantity of parenting moments can be overwhelming, too, especially in the early years when the intensity of meeting need upon need and the rapid, sometimes bewildering shifts in children’s emotions can seem like a blur we’re barely keeping pace with. This pace slows as children get older and become increasingly able to meet their own needs, but the stakes of the moments when they do need us—or, even more so, when they keep us at arm’s length—often feel much higher. The waves break more slowly, but the water is deeper.
Certainly there is also plenty of joy. All of the shared delights, which connect us and motivate us to preserve one another’s pleasure and soothe each other’s pain, are crucial in the tapestry of our relationships with children. It is possible to feel overwhelmed as a parent and still absorb the wonder and pleasure of raising these bewildering people with whom we are so infatuated.
For every meltdown in the produce aisle or 2am vomit episode, there are a million popsicle smeared smiles, crayon love notes, and sticky hands gently cupping our faces. The fear and doubt that sneak in would not be so powerful if we didn’t love our children so deeply. It is because we are so besotted with them that we feel such an intense desire to meet each moment well—and so exposed when we know we haven’t. And of course we won’t get everything right. We are fallible and tired, and kids are masters of the curve ball, and parenting is a 24-7 gig that we can’t possibly bring our best selves to all the time. Our relationship with our children is perhaps the one we feel most compelled to navigate well and the one that is hardest to get right consistently, for the sheer intensity and constancy of it.
Woven into all of this is also a newer pressure, I think, that seems to have emerged, ironically, from our growing understanding of the importance of early experiences and strong primary bonds. Having spent my professional life observing and teaching child development and the role of early relationships, this feels a little blasphemous, but I sometimes wonder if, in emphasizing the power of our interactions with children to shape their growing minds and hearts, we have inadvertently communicated to parents that there is always one right way forward with no room for error. The potential impact of our every word and decision can begin to feel either paralyzing or completely out of sync with the actual scope of a given moment when we are led to believe that any misstep could amount to trauma.
In The Power of Discord, Claudia Gold and Ed Tronick write:
“Recognizing the significance of relationships in making sense of behavior frequently gets translated into blaming parents. People may wonder if a child’s behavior is the result of poor parenting. A more constructive approach begins with accepting that, when relationships falter, individuals will struggle.”
All relationships falter from time to time and we struggle. There’s no way around this, and certainly not in a relationship that is as constant and long as the one between parent and child. But the gift of the many moments that accrue over this long trajectory of parenting, which can feel so inundating at times, isn’t in the cumulative power of getting everything right. It’s in the many opportunities to try again. Gold and Tronick refer to this as, “healing in a mosaic of moments.” Yes, children’s brains are highly sensitive and rapidly developing. But the real miracle of this rapid development lies in the ongoing potential for reshaping. Neural pathways don’t simply harden once established. The brain is constantly adapting, with nearly endless capacity to build new connections and revise old ones.
More than any other relationship in our lives, we have countless opportunities with children to return, revisit, and repair, to adjust our reactions and our messages, to learn and grow with them. We don’t have to get it right all the time, and we don’t have to prepare them for the entire forest all at once, because we can walk through it together and adjust our direction when we find we’ve taken a wrong turn. The young brains we worry so much about sculpting are built for exactly this recursive process. We learn as we try, reflect, revise, and try again.
This isn’t to say that we can’t do harm; resilience never justifies abuse. But, as all those neural pathways take shape through our daily, unavoidably fragile relationships, surely the experiences that pave the way for humility, forgiveness, and tolerance of imperfection are just as worthwhile as the experiences that fill us with pleasure and pride. In fact, Gold and Tronick describe this tolerance of imperfection and repair, not as the root of dysfunction, but rather as the root of confidence, trust, and hope.
We can’t know our children’s futures, and we can’t prepare them for every joy and every disappointment they will encounter along the way. But we can be honest about our fallibility and in doing so help them to accept their own and learn to be gentle with themselves and with others. We can show them that love isn’t perfect, but that it thrives when we do our best to understand each other’s imperfections and take responsibility for our own.
Often the most harm comes, not when we stumble, but when we become so focused on perfection that we can’t help but rush past our mistakes or try to recast them as something else, until we erase the dissonance that they create in us. If we leave no room for our own mistakes, we leave no room for our children’s mistakes either, and that is an impossible bar to surmount.
When I talk with parents of both young children and teens, their questions almost always boil down, at their core, to two concerns. The first is that their children won’t be “okay,” in a way that is hard to define but that hovers at the edges of parental consciousness, as we long to know our children’s futures in a very uncertain world. Research tells us that, broadly speaking, parents' greatest current worry is for their children’s mental health, whereas in the past fear of high risk behavior like drug use and teen pregnancy topped the list. This is an understandable and appropriate shift given the current rise in anxiety and depression among children and teens. In essence, however, all these concerns speak to the same, very natural parental worry—an awareness that there is much in our children’s lives we can’t predict or control and, despite our best efforts, they will surely struggle in some way. This dovetails into the second fear I hear from parents, which is that their children either won’t accept their guidance or won’t come to them when they need help. We worry that our children will suffer and we worry that, when they do, we won’t be able to ease their suffering.
And of course these are our fears. Our very first job as parents is to alleviate our children’s discomfort. They come into the world crying and our first act is to bring them close and provide the connection, nourishment, and comfort that satiate their most basic needs. The desire to be able to continue to meet their needs in this way embeds itself deep inside our hearts and our muscle memory, remaining with us as they grow. It bubbles to the surface with varying shape and intensity throughout our lives and theirs.
Here, though, is where we can return to the gift of small moments. When the history of our relationship with our children is filled, not only with joys and accomplishments, but also with fallibility honestly acknowledged, we give them the courage to stumble and not be shattered by their stumbling. And we also give them permission to share their failures with us, confident in the knowledge that we expect them to be no less human than we have shown ourselves to be.
The first fear, the anxiety of not knowing whether our children will be “okay,” is almost impossible to address. We can’t inoculate them against struggle, and we have no way to know what the scope or depth of the challenges that lie ahead for them will be, any more than we can predict our own. But I think at least part of the answer to the second fear, that we might not be able to reach them when they are struggling, can be found in an embrace of this “mosaic of moments.”
Some moments with our children glisten with the warmth of easy love and connection, and some inevitably have rougher edges that require conscious revisiting, acknowledging, and sanding down. But we can only bring our failures and our uncertainties into the light when we know they will be met with tenderness and grace. By showing our children, moment upon moment, that we will continue to return to and repair our own imperfections and ruptures, we hold the door open for them to do the same.
When children grow up knowing that mistakes don’t have to be isolating but can instead be opportunities for reconnection and deepened understanding, they are less tempted to cover their tracks or try to handle challenges alone when they may feel in over their heads. Resilience doesn’t have to be a lonely endeavor. As children carry these experiences forward into the world, they grow more comfortable taking responsibility for their own actions and more forgiving of others.
And, perhaps, in practicing this embrace of fallibility in our relationships with children, we might even find ourselves more able to do so with each other, allowing tolerance of imperfection to become the root of a larger hope.
Wishing you a mosaic of moments,
Alicia
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In my experience as a teacher educator new teachers especially feel the press to get it right every time. I am remembering now how often I advised teachers who were taken aback by a child’s question that they could answer tomorrow, or in a week or a month. Children can understand that the time you take to respond is a sign of respect for the significance of their question. Paradoxically, the silence, the time elapse between question and answer, can signal to the child that they have indeed been seen and heard.