Struggling Parents Reading Letters From their Kids is Incredibly Moving

Parenting is a daily struggle and a daily gift. Only those who have kids understand how much time you spend feeling as if you did nothing right. You feel as if you aren’t putting in enough time for your kids. Perhaps you are working too hard so that you can provide them with a comfortable and worry-free life. This makes you wonder whether or not you are spending enough time with them. Perhaps you yelled at them because you were mad at yourself and having an off day. Perhaps you feel you aren’t as good a mother or father as you could be since your divorce. Perhaps you have four small kids and you struggle daily wondering if you’re providing them with the kind of attention that they need, the kind of experiences that they deserve and the kind of love that they deserve.

We all worry and we all assume that we are failing. We all fail daily to live up to our own expectations of motherhood and fatherhood. Just this weekend my husband and I decided on a whim to take our kids to Disney for the weekend. We booked a big suite at a gorgeous resort, spent our days swimming, playing in the resort waterpark and floating down the resort’s lazy river. And we spent our evenings at Disney. Our 15-month-old twins were exhausted, we were on the go constantly, and our kids ended up being a bit annoyed with us that we didn’t spend more time in the pool. Really; part of us wondered if we failed as parents by giving them too much on a regular basis. Another part of us just wondered if we failed by not asking them if they wanted to go to Disney or if they wanted to swim. And another part of us was annoyed at them for not loving every second of our long weekend. We feel like we failed. But then our kids said to us after getting home, “Mommy, daddy, thanks for always having fun with us and for taking us on that really cool bike ride yesterday.”

So, okay, we spent all that time at the resort and at Disney, and their favorite part of the trip was the 30-minute Surrey bike rental and ride around Disney’s Boardwalk that cost us $20. Seriously; but okay. We will take it. They had fun and that’s all that matters.

This is a video of parents who feel that they’re not doing the best they can do. They feel that they, too, are failing at parenting for whatever reason. They struggle; we all do. But then they get to read letters from their kids that tell a different story. It’s touching; and it’s something that we should all remember.