Hi, I'm Monica Packer, and you're listening to About Progress, where we are about progress made practical.

Sometimes parenting makes me feel like I'm the main character from the musical and the book

Jekyll and Hyde. Out of nowhere I am triggered into becoming a different person than I really am.

A person I do not like, and a person I really do not want my kids to remember me as.

Here's a thing though. We all know what that looks and feels like.

Does that mean we get a free pass then? No. But it does mean we are not alone and

having moments or even full seasons where we need to

realign our behavior with our true selves. Perfectionism within parenting is tricky and exacerbates this whole thing, especially when we have an idealized picture of what a good parent looks like, a picture that we basically hit ourselves over the head with over and over when we can't measure up no matter how impossible that picture is.

When perfectionism controls our parenting, become more over reactive we criticize more readily

both for ourselves and our kids we feel more resentment and we are burdened with guilt

So how do we shift past that? and we are burdened with guilt.

So how do we shift past that?

How can we better anchor into our values

and behave accordingly as parents?

And what do we do when we have those moments when our Jekyll turns into our hide?

These are the questions I helped a progressive from our community answer.

Her name is Kate and as a mom of small kids living very far from

family support she's finding herself stuck in her own self-comparison and

disappointment especially when she has moments where she is not

herself in her parenting. We talk about the part perfectionism plays in the cycle and

what to do about it. That's all coming up, but first a quick break for our sponsors.

I planted tulip bulbs for my first time ever last fall and I have been so delightfully

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