I was grateful to be interviewed recently for a Catholic Weekly article on school refusal and the distress it can cause for children, families and schools.
One of the comments I made was that parents do not need to be perfect. That idea has stayed with me, because many of the parents I work with are carrying an enormous amount of pressure.
When a child is struggling with school refusal, anxiety, behaviour, relationships or other complex difficulties, parents can feel responsible for finding the right strategy, making the right decision and preventing things from becoming worse.
Alongside all the practical questions, there is often a much more personal one:
“Am I doing a good enough job?”
I understand something of that question myself.
Now that my own children are growing older and launching out into the world, my wife and I sometimes find ourselves looking back and wondering whether we gave them what they needed.
Sometimes this happens when they come up against the inevitable difficulties that life throws at all of us at one point or another. Later, when the house is quiet, we find ourselves talking about the years when they were younger. We remember particular moments, the pressures we were carrying at the time, the ways we tried to respond, and the things we can now see more clearly.
We wonder whether we were present enough, what we got right, and where our own limitations may have affected them. When we see our children encounter the inevitable challenges of adult life, it can stir memories and questions about our own parenting.
This is why I find the message of Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson’s book, The Power of Showing Up, so encouraging.
Their central insight is remarkably simple, although living it can be difficult: children need us to show up.
Showing up involves physical presence and a particular quality of emotional presence. It means being available, curious about what is happening beneath behaviour, and willing to remain in relationship when things become difficult.
This is profoundly reassuring because it brings the interpersonal and relational heart of parenting back into focus.
When difficulties become complex, parents can understandably become consumed by questions about how to get a child back to school, whether they are being too firm or too accommodating, which consequences may help, and what might happen if the situation continues.
These questions matter. Beneath them, a child may also be searching for reassurance that the parent is still with them, can see their struggle, and will keep returning even when neither parent nor child handles the situation well.
The research on attachment and child development consistently points to the importance of a child having at least one person who reliably shows up for them.
That relational security shapes far more than childhood happiness. It influences emotional development, relationships, resilience, confidence and the capacity to find one’s place in the world.
Parenting will include frustration, misunderstanding and moments when we respond from fear, exhaustion or our own unresolved experiences.
Children develop security through relationships in which repair remains possible. They need parents who can return and say:
“I became overwhelmed.”
“I don’t think I understood what was happening for you.”
“I’m sorry for how I responded.”
“Can we try again?”
Rupture and repair teach children that relationships can survive difficulty. Mistakes can be acknowledged. Trust can be rebuilt. Love can remain present when things become uncomfortable.
Repair is one of the ways children learn what healthy relationships look like.
For Catholic parents, our mistakes can carry an additional spiritual weight.
We may look at our impatience, failures or missed opportunities and feel that we have fallen short of our vocation. We may believe that we have failed to be the loving, faithful and generous parents we were called to become.
We may even hear Christ’s words, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” as a judgement upon all the ways we have fallen short.
The meaning of “perfect”, teleios, carries the sense of maturity, completion and becoming fitted to one’s true purpose.
Christian perfection is the gradual work of grace through which we become more fully the people God created us to be. It is the transformation of the heart into a heart increasingly capable of love.
For parents, our failures remain within the reach of that grace. They can teach us humility, deepen our compassion and give our children the experience of a parent who is able to acknowledge harm, ask forgiveness and return to love.
Our children need parents who keep showing up, remain present, become willing to repair, and trust that grace can work within imperfect relationships.
For families facing school refusal or other complex difficulties, practical guidance, professional support and collaboration with schools may all be important. There is also great encouragement in remembering that your presence matters.
You will not have every answer. Parenting asks us to keep showing up, listening, learning and finding our way back to the relationship.
That may be one of the greatest gifts we can offer our children.