It's amazing how, as a parent, you can have an impact on your family home when you're not even there, and sometimes that impact is quite negative My name's Richard Shorter, I'm the Non-Perfect Dad who is courageously honest about his parenting
And I'm gonna share my parenting successes and fails from this week (upbeat music) Okay, so last week, I spent a bit of time away, traveling with work, and I normally have an alarm that goes off quite early in the morning, to enable to get up, do my exercise, my morning meditation quiet time, and the reason that alarm goes off early, is I know that I've got to jump out of bed and turn it off quickly before it disturbs anybody Only I went away this week, and I forgot to turn it off Which means that I managed to disturb the entire house, without being there, and get myself in trouble without even knowing it Oops
Thankfully, my wife is very gracious, and I don't think it quite woke up all the children But certainly, that was my fail from this week A bit of absentmindedness led to them having a shorter night's sleep My success this week is that we've had a run of birthdays recently in the Shorter household And one of my children loves baking, and loves baking cakes
And so, I, they asked if they could bake the cake for this celebration And, they are a brilliant chef, but it does make it a lot harder time-wise, ingredients-wise, having to find the time to do it with them, and especially in a really really busy birthday preparation week But I felt, do you know what, actually, this is really important that they get to participate in this birthday, and get, have the opportunity to make this cake And so, even thought time-wise, it wasn't the most convenient thing, family-wise and character-wise, it was the most important thing to do And the cake was brilliant, because they're a great chef, and even though the kitchen was a bit of a bomb site, and getting the ingredients didn't work quite as well as either of us had hoped, I'm really really pleased that they got the sense of pride of being able to participate in that celebration
When we are courageously honest as parents, it enables us to see that our good always outweighs our weaknesses It helps us minimize our weaknesses and increase our strengths, which means that we give to our children the character that they need to be world-changers It means we give to them the self-esteem and the self-confidence to go out there and handle the pressures that they face later in life The creativity and the time pressure of baking a cake means that they can take those skills into other areas of life as they grow older Thank you so much for watching
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