Parenting Without Illusions: Myths That Distort Our Understanding of Children and Ourselves

Mistakes and myths in parenting rarely look like obvious blunders — they tend to hide inside familiar assumptions about how things "should be." Dr. Saulitis identifies two as particularly damaging.

Myth one: a mistake is a malfunction, not growth

We are conditioned to treat a child's errors as problems that need immediate correction. Yet look at a child in the first two or three years of life: they make mistakes constantly — and that is precisely how they develop. A mistake is not a sign of failure; it is a sign that a person is doing something new for the very first time.

Adults who demand flawlessness from themselves and their children are, in effect, demanding that development stop. A living, growing person is a person who makes mistakes. Someone who never makes mistakes is, figuratively speaking, already "in the grave."

The common parenting error here is an intolerance of trial and failure — the impulse to hand over the "right" answer immediately rather than allowing the child to move through their own experience.

Myth two: a mother grieves the loss of a child "in her mind"

Society, and even some professionals, tend to frame a mother's grief over losing a child as primarily a psychological experience. This is a profound misunderstanding.

A mother experiences the loss of a child at the bodily and emotional level first — the psychological dimension comes last. The body reacts before the mind does, because the child was literally felt as part of the mother's own body. This is why support focused exclusively on "acceptance" and cognitive processing often falls short or arrives too early: it bypasses what actually hurts most.

For a father, the picture is reversed: bodily involvement is largely absent, and the psychological component becomes prominent much sooner. This does not mean a father suffers less — it means the experience is structured differently, and the support needed is different too.

What this changes in practice

Understanding these two myths helps parents:

• stop breaking children by correcting every mistake, and instead see error as a normal stage of learning;
• stop expecting a grieving mother to "pull herself together" before her body and emotions have run their course;
• stop projecting their own way of grieving onto their partner — a mother and a father in loss need different kinds of support.