Oh, the joys of parenthood! Like it or not, the perfect parenting manual does not exist. As a matter of fact, most parents would agree that a lot of trial and error comes with the successful upbringing of little ones. Get a good chuckle or two in as these parents share their most memorable parenting fails.
All content has been edited for clarity.
Get Back Here!
“One time, my three-year-old daughter was running down the driveway in front of our house at a pretty good speed toward the street. We live on a court, so it wasn’t typically risky but a car was coming through, and we had been repeatedly going over the lesson of not leaving the driveway.
My daughter showed no signs of stopping, despite our frantic yelling.
I jumped into action and started a full-tilt sprint from twenty yards away in an effort to get to her before she made it to the street.
The good news is, I made it. The bad news was that I wasn’t able to slow down in time, and in the process, overestimated my footing and ended up knocking over my daughter before stumbling to the ground myself. The concrete gave both of us cuts on both of our hands. Of course, this all led to a nice crying session.
She had real tears too, I think.
I felt horrible all night. But, my daughter forgave me in about an hour though.
Three-year-olds are awesome like that.”
You’re Fine!
“My daughter wouldn’t stop whining and complaining about her ear hurting. She was about to turn four years old, and her brother was not even one. I was frustrated because I was certain that her crying was going to wake her younger brother up. I gave her Tylenol and put her in the living room so she wouldn’t wake him, and more importantly, so I couldn’t hear her crying so I could get some sleep.
I had to get up at six to get them ready to go to daycare and preschool. I also had to get ready to go to work and my job was fifty miles away on the other side of Los Angeles.
Their father had to be to work at seven, so the wrestling with the kids in the morning stuff weighed heavy on me, but thankfully he picked them up at four in the afternoon and prepared dinner. His job was full-time with benefits, and he wasn’t capable of doing all the pediatrician stuff that came with parenting. That was my bailiwick, especially since I had a Ph.D. in molecular biology.
When I got up she was still whining. My anger grew because I ended up calling in sick. Then I called the doctor to schedule an appointment.
I took a shower and got dressed, then I went to get her ready to go to the doctor and to get the baby ready for daycare. My daughter was still laying in her bed, but she was not crying or upset. I was livid. I had already called in sick, but then she was acting completely fine.
‘Why aren’t you crying?’ I demanded.
She said, ‘Because my ear doesn’t hurt anymore, Mommy.”
I yelled at her, ‘What? I’m missing a day of work because you whined all night and now it doesn’t hurt?’
That’s when I saw the thin trickle of yellow fluid flowing out of her ear. I instantly why her ear didn’t hurt anymore. I quickly dressed her and the baby then flew down the freeway to the doctor’s office.
‘Oh, no, no, no! What have I done?’ She cried all night and I thought it was just an earache like before, so I waited until morning and now her eardrum has ruptured!’
The doctor said, ‘So?’
I just looked at him. ‘She’ll be deaf!’ I was bawling.
‘No she won’t,’ the doctor said. ‘You shouldn’t let this happen often, but it’s not a big deal. Her eardrum will heal.’
The doctor being nonchalant was not making me feel better. I put her in the front room so I couldn’t hear her crying, while her ear was so badly infected that it burst. I couldn’t even imagine how much that must have hurt.
I felt like the worst mother in the world.
She’s thirty-five now and rubs this story in, not that she remembers it. She has her own stories about how I was the worst parent ever.”
Crying Wolf
“Our two-year-old daughter realized that if she cried after going to bed, we would sometimes come in to console her. Once we realized what was happening, we started telling her to lie down on her pillow and go to sleep, which she would eventually end up doing.
One evening, however, she cried extra hard and started coughing. As usual, we called out for her to lie down and go to sleep. For a brief moment, the crying stopped.
Then it started again.
We could see on our baby monitor that she had gone to lie down on her pillow, then got up crying again. From our bedroom, we told her to lie down and go to sleep.
After the third fit of crying and a bit more coughing, we went to investigate.
When we entered the room she was still sobbing. That’s when we saw what was next to her pillow.
It took all our might not to gag when we saw what actually happened.
We were greeted by our sobbing toddler, half covered with vomit from the pile which was next to her pillow. The pile which we had repeatedly told her to lie in. As an obedient child, she had gone to lie down in it every time, and finding it extremely uncomfortable she cried out to her parents for help.
I can’t put into words how miserable we felt as parents. To say the least, she got very special treatment for a while after that, mostly to relieve our guilt, but also to try to prove that we really did love her.
Luckily we haven’t failed anywhere as close to that since. But it’s something I will never forget.
I hope she does.”
Locked Out
“I was riding solo with my son when he was almost two years old. He and I were in a truck doing a tour of interior British Columbia.
I was on the Coquihalla highway, mid-mountain, and I had to use the restroom extremely badly. So, I took a random exit and found a bush where I could relieve myself.
By the time I found my spot, it felt like I was about to burst. I leaped out of the truck and shut the door.
As soon as I started to go, I heard a soft ‘click’. My heart sank into the pit of my stomach once I realized the grave mistake I made.
My kid hit the auto-lock button with his foot while I was going number one. I could not get to him, and we were in the middle of nowhere in the mountains, truck running and all.
I won’t lie, I belted out a theatre-worthy, ‘Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!’ when I realized. I yelled and freaked-out instructions, miming poorly to my son how to unlock the door.
He of course was laughing his head off!
I smashed through the back with a rock. I actually cried when I sat down in the driver’s seat next to him.
My son looked nothing short of a monkey as he continued to laugh at me uncontrollably
Hard lesson learned.”
Pushed To The Limits
“I signed my oldest son up to play football at the age of six. I agreed to be an assistant coach and worked with the players to get them ready for the first game of the season. I watched my son at practice being confused and lethargic, so I decided that we would start working out at home.
At home, I tried to get my son to run around the cul-de-sac and he wouldn’t. He wasn’t overweight or out of shape, he would just start crying and saying he couldn’t do it. At the time, I felt like I needed to educate him on hard work and spent twenty minutes with him crying, trying to encourage him to run up and down the block.
We made it, and he continued crying, but I felt it was a good lesson. He crawled into bed with his mother and was distraught. He started sucking down water like he had been running in a desert. My son would also run to the bathroom and drink from the sink every few minutes.
My wife was extremely concerned and urged us to go to the hospital.
Within two hours, the doctors came back with horrifying results. They diagnosed my son with Type One diabetes, and he was suffering from ketoacidosis.
In those two hours, I went from being the parent of a lazy child, coaching his team, and taking time out of my weekend to help my child exercise, to being a parent that had been torturing a suffering child.
His body literally did not have the energy to exercise, and I was getting frustrated at him and pushing him to do more. I told him to stop crying. I told him that he wasn’t dying. I told him that it was easy and that he needed to try harder.
We couldn’t have known.
I was doing what I thought was right. If he didn’t have this condition, I probably was doing something good. I didn’t say anything horrible to him. I was encouraging him, despite how agitated I was and I wondered what the heck his problem was inside my head.
None of it mattered at the time. I felt like I was a horrible, failure of a parent.
I could not reconcile my frustration with his ‘laziness’ and crying, with my lack of knowledge of his condition. I replayed that day in my mind a hundred times, and it ripped my heart out. I’m listening to him cry in my head, and every negative thought became a dagger.
Seven years have passed. He’s now a healthy young man and plays on Varsity at the Midget level. He’s happy, and I’m still coaching. I recognize that I shouldn’t consider this a failure as a parent, but the scar is still there.”
An Exception To The Rule
“I had just had a discussion with my one-year-old- daughter about how there were places she was, and was not allowed to go. One of these places was a drawer that contained a bunch of rags, cloth diapers, and baby clothes. A day before this incident, she had taken everything out of that same drawer and spread the contents all over the room.
Shortly after this conversation, I saw her attempting to dig in the drawer I had forbidden her to rummage through. I immediately gave her an intimidating glare, raised my voice, and said, ‘no.’
I was about to take her away from the drawer and put her somewhere else, but before I got a chance, my daughter broke down crying, only this tantrum wasn’t like any of her others.
Her outburst was that of a person who has been wrongfully treated. Between sobs, she said, ‘Puklu, puklu,’ which translated to, ‘Spit-up, spit-up,’ while pointing at her little brother who had spit up all over himself and the floor while her mother and I were in the other room. Big sister Maria was digging in the drawer to get a rag to wipe up her little brother’s spit-up.
Immediately, I apologized to my daughter. I realized that I should have never jumped to conclusions before finding out all the details, and for treating her unjustly.
I then let her continue what she was doing. She immediately brightens up, retrieved a rag, and cleaned her brother and the floor. Sure, I could have done a quicker and better job, but it was more important to let her follow through with the good deed she had begun, unequivocally knowing that she had my full support.
I was quite worried for some time that this would have a negative impact on my daughter, but fortunately, she inherited her resilience from me. This was a growing opportunity for us both. She learned that even grown-ups make mistakes, and had to say, ‘I’m sorry.’
I learned that when parenting and dealing with non-life-or-death situations, never jump to conclusions without all the facts.”
Try This On For Size
“My son was hungry and grumpy while I was driving us to get dinner. It was just the two of us that evening. He was about nine years old, and would not stop talking and most of it was negative ramblings like, ‘I hate it when…’ or ‘It’s so unfair…’
He kept up this incessant gripe while I was trying to get to where we were going, and I was also hungry and tired.
He launched into his hundredth, ‘You know what’s the worst, mama?’ Then he grumbled about some trite issue with Minecraft.
I lost it.
I turned to him and said that what he was complaining about was not even close to the worst thing that could happen to someone. I told him there are much worse things in the world. I told him that just that day, the worst thing was how a three-year-old little boy’s body was dragged out of the sea by soldiers because his family tried to get to a better life in a different country.
I said THAT was the worst. Then I went on a rant about all of the horrible things that were going on in the world. Things that were far worse than his dumb Minecraft shenanigans.
My poor son. He started bawling at the horrible images I described. Right away, I knew I’d crossed some parenting line of tact and patience.”
I See Dead People
“When my daughter was three, she had the habit of waking up at six-thirty in the morning, seven days a week. Her older siblings slept in on the weekend. My daughter hadn’t gotten the hang of using the TV remote, but she could reach the button to turn on the television.
So just before bed on Friday nights, I would turn the channel to Nick Jr. and set the volume to a reasonable level. That way she could just turn it on and watch TV for a while and let the rest of us sleep until much later in the morning.
Well, one Friday night, my wife had been watching a program on AMC and we forgot to change it. Fast forward to six the following morning. My daughter shook me awake and said, ‘Daddy, there are scary guys on TV. I don’t want to watch it. It’s really scary stuff.’
So I went to the family room. As it turned out, AMC was doing a 24-hour Walking Dead marathon, and she had been watching the scene where Rick Grimes was hacking a walker open with an axe so he and Glenn could smear themselves with gore for camouflage.
So, yeah. That was a parenting fail. Luckily she only had nightmares for a few days.”
Slam Dunk!
“I once threw my sick three-year-old son in the toilet.
He had norovirus which is basically the stomach flu. I had already been through it myself and knew the symptoms well. So when I heard him start to make slight heaving sounds, I was well aware of the chaos that was about to ensue.
Being the good, loving father that I was, I immediately thought, ‘How can I avoid having to clean up a bunch of nastiness?’
I knew I only had seconds before my son would start spewing like he was a character in The Santa Clarita Diet.
I lept into action. Running full speed, I scooped him up like a rag doll and made a beeline to the bathroom.
Just as I got to the bathroom doorway, I tried to slow down, but my sock-covered feet started slipping on the tile floor.
I knew I had no chance of catching my balance while my arms were holding a sick child. So as I was falling, I brilliantly decided that I could still give him a gentle landing right in front of the toilet and he would be able to handle his business.
What actually happened was that I tossed him a little too far past the front of the toilet and his head went straight into the middle of the bowl.
I don’t know if I believe a miracle actually happened, but it seemed like nothing short of one that my son grabbed onto the front of the bowl and held himself up enough to stop his face about an inch above the water line.
Somehow, he and I both were completely uninjured. He was able to lift his head back up and the stomach bug immediately did its part, causing him to empty his stomach into the toilet without a drop getting on the floor.
I sat there thinking, ‘Whoa. That just happened.’
I won’t be holding my breath for a father of the year award.”
So That’s How It’s Going To Be?
“I lost my cool in front of my four-year-old. I got up to feed the dog and get myself something to eat. My child decided to throw his meal everywhere. I had spent the day cleaning and seeing him do that sent me into a total rage.
I yelled and I sent him to his room. He came back and said he didn’t like me and that he wanted to be with their father instead.
I lost it again. Their father hadn’t contributed financially in months and only showed up for the scheduled visits. As you can imagine this makes scheduling a nightmare never showed up for half of them and had the nerve to ask me to cover for them.
In my anger, I said the things you aren’t supposed to say about another parent. The unvarnished truth was that even if I called him, they weren’t going to show that I was the only person who showed up every single day to take care of them. I became the parent who that let complete aggravation with the other parent seep in and I didn’t know what to think next.
It was a very bad day for me that day indeed.”
Graveyard Shift
“I set my daughter up for a criminal career.
Some weeks ago, we had to exit the bus on the way to visit my grandmother because my daughter got sick from the rocking. She was five at the time. Usually, we waited for the next bus. but Google Maps showed me a shortcut through a cemetery that cut the walking time to a manageable hour. So we decided to walk.
It was an overcast day, but it was not the fear of rain, but the fear of my grandmother’s unbounded wrath that quickened my steps. My grandmother would treat coming too late for lunch the same as exposing my daughter to starvation.
When we entered the cemetery, at first, my daughter found it to be a lovely place to have a picnic. She darted from gravestone to gravestone, and I read everything engraved on them to her.
But her mood worsened when she realized there was no playground in the ‘park.’ Then it began to rain, and she became hungry. To make matters worse, Google failed me. The designated path ended in front of a closed iron gate.
The gate wasn’t a real obstacle. I was confident finding a way over it would cost us more than a minute. I was about to throw my rucksack over the fence when my daughter asked, ‘Papa, is this allowed?’
I was always honest with my daughter, so I said, ‘No, but it doesn’t take long.’
She recoiled visibly, her face a mask of terror. She took some steps backward, arms raised to ward against the evil.
Involuntary I looked behind me to rule out a horde of the undead as the cause of her fear. Only then I kneeled beside her and tried to soothe her, ‘Normally it is not allowed but this an exception. Papa allows it.’
But this made matters worse. She repeated, ‘I cannot do this!’ over and over again.
She wouldn’t tell me her reasons, so I assumed her problem was with breaking a rule. She was raised as a good child that always obeyed after all.
I hugged her and tried to explain that you are allowed to break the rules sometimes.
‘You are not allowed to steal apples. But if you are starving, it is ok. Sometimes it is ok to ignore rules.’
My reasoning didn’t convince her, and her mantra degenerated into a primal staccato, ‘No, no, no, no!’
The clock was ticking, so I tried again. ‘You love Aladdin, do you? He is a thief, isn’t he? He steals things, but he is still the hero, right?’
‘But Papaaaaa, when a policeman sees us. We will go to jail.’
I was about to reassure her that the rain would cover us as we broke the rule just this once.
It was at this moment, I realized what I was doing. After teaching her to be a good girl for years, I was about to undo all of my efforts in a single weak moment in a rainy cemetery, establishing the ethical groundwork for a life as an outlaw without rules.
I pulled back from my mania and asked her instead what she would do. She wanted to find another exit. I was not convinced. All-Knowing Google must have sent us there for a reason. But I relented.
It turned out, the closed gate was only a side entrance for personnel, and the main entrance was exactly one thousand feet away and open. We were free at last.
‘Papa, I told you so! There is ALWAYS another way,’ She beamed.
Sometimes children have to educate their parents.”
