MOMS, PERFECTION ISN’T REQUIRED N O I T C PERFE By Sharita Hanley
truth the book emphasizes is that perfection is not required. Your Children are Going to Mess Up “Parents need to know that their kids are going to mess up. That’s number one,” Darlene divulges. “Anybody that tells you they’re kids walk on water just needs to wait because the day will come when they realize they don’t. It’s no different than who we are, really. For some reason, we think our kids need to be these wonderfully perfect humans with no weaknesses and all strengths, but that’s not who we are, so why would they be that? You kind of have to go, ‘This is who you are,’ and choose to love the real deal.” You’re Going to Mess Up Too In a similar fashion, you’re going to have some blunders too. “You know, perfection isn’t achievable in anything we do,” Darlene explains. “I believe part of having a good relationship with your child and building something that will endure is embracing your imperfection because when you screw up—and you will—when you go back and say, ‘You know what? Mom wasn’t very great today. I’m really sorry,’ you’re teaching your child that they don’t have to be perfect, they just have to try. In that alone, you’re teaching a valuable lesson to your child.”
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ou really do feel the pressure as mom to get it all right,” Darlene Brock admits. As the former COO of ForeFront records, an author, entrepreneur, and the president and co-founder of the Grit & Grace Project, an online magazine and platform for women, on top of being a wife and mother, she knows all about the pressures today’s women, especially moms, tend to feel. Her latest book, Raising Great Girls: Help for Moms to Raise Confident, Capable Daughters (Perfection Not Required) is her response to that pressure. “It was a germ years and years ago in my head and heart,” she shares, explaining her motivation for writing the book. “And it was really about my girls growing up and realizing they were in a culture where there’s so much confusion in the marketplace on what a woman is supposed to be. And so I watched them, my daughters and their generation, become more and more confused on things like: Am I only good if I have a career? Am I only valuable if I act this way? or Am I only of worth if I follow whatever the culture tells me? I realized I really wanted to help women be the best at what God created our gender to be. But my starting place needed to be helping moms raise them to believe the truth about themselves.” Decades later, Raising Great Girls was published. A down-to-earth, real-life modern-day manifesto, the book breaks down the various roles moms take on as they journey alongside their daughters into womanhood. Perhaps the most significant
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She continues, revealing two of her own “mom-fail” experiences. “So, we were at a Christmas concert that my eldest daughter’s fourth grade class was performing in at the school,” she shares, telling me she dropped her daughter off earlier so she could attend the last practice and prepare. “Well, I get there and look at the stage and the group—I mean the entire grade level are wearing red shirts except my daughter,” she laughs. “She’s wearing a white shirt with something on it. Of course, all the parents were there with their video cameras, and I thought, Oh crud! I guess I didn’t read the whole announcement.”