Error-genic

"Parenting," as my father says, "is a job you can only do wrong."

Image found here

 It may seem overly cynical to say so, but I've had a variety of encounters throughout my life that would confirm this very belief. I have worked with and known parents who could be described with adjectives such as good, bad, perfect, mediocre, wonderful, awful, intense, amazing, and even crazy. No matter how I've come to know these parents, they all had one major thing in common. All of their children have had "issues."

In fact, that might just be the prevailing theme in life. Everyone has issues. We all have something we struggle with, some weakness that needs bolstering, and some sensitivities that need considering.  Babies are born into our world ripe for learning behaviors from their predecessors. Their brains are literally programmed to observe and mimic what they see. These learned behaviors impact thought development, which creates internalized responses, and before you know it there's a whole new generation of neuroses walking the earth.

It's an endless cycle that can only be circumvented with acceptance. This is our fate. Whether guarded, defensive, fearful, or reactive, we all have our vulnerabilities. Often times these issues have been selected from a preordained set of environmental, hereditary, and social dynamics. There's little anyone could do to avoid creating issues. It's possible that special focus and attention may have prevented development of a specific sensitivity.  However, it's more than likely that hyper-attentiveness in one identified area would actually create neglect in an another unrealized realm; causing a whole different set of difficulties.

This is not to say that we should all just throw up our hands and surrender to our flaws and shortcomings.  Truly what I point to is the opposite. I bring up our inevitably flawed experiences, in an attempt to point out that we're all striving for improvement.  This experience is not unique to any particularly sick set of people.  We're all working on change and betterment of ourselves, because the future depends on us.