It's important to learn from guilt, not wallow in it, parenting columist Ian Munro writes.
It's that feeling that hits us from time to time about 2am when we should be well asleep. Guilt.
Even when our children are adults with children of their own we can still be vulnerable.
With no user guide for being a parent, no training beyond our own parenting and often with no ongoing support, we tend to stumble through parenthood a lot of the time.
Even our instincts can let us down as the pressures of 21st-century living play around with our values and our natural sense of what would be best in any given situation. And there are now so many new situations that we never faced ourselves as youngsters, which leaves us with no personal experience to call on.
This also makes it hard for our own parents to offer relevant advice and support in dealing with some of the big issues.
We live in large communities, but practise being parents in isolation. We can't throw away our first few attempts at rearing children if we "make them wrong''. We are stuck with our "burnt biscuits'' or "misshapen clay pots''.
Some of us may have had the good fortune to be able to practise on nieces or nephews or much younger siblings but for most of us, to mix metaphors, there's no rehearsal. It's opening night the moment baby is born.
So it's easy to get it wrong and to feel guilt. However, guilt can have a positive side if it's telling us, for example, that we've been self-indulgent or are doing things that are hurting the family. As long as we do something about it.
However, it can also beset the conscientious who want to get it right and at times don't. And that's most of us.
There aren't too many parents who don't want to do the best for their children. But we can have unrealistic expectations of ourselves and our children or be overly critical of what we have done.
Hindsight is great for picking where we got it wrong or missed the obvious. And great for loading on the guilt. The thing is to learn from it rather than to wallow in it.
Children are very good at picking our more vulnerable spots and quickly learn the buttons to push to induce feelings of guilt.
We might have very good reasons why we are unable to buy something, go somewhere, be on the sideline, be in town and at home every night and so on.
However, a youngster won't necessarily see it from that point of view, and neither will teenagers if it suits and they think they can play the guilt card to get what they want.
More next week.
