Best Parenting Advice Ever: The HUGE Mistakes My Parents Made and How You Can Avoid Them

One day my parents and I were sitting in the living room watching TV. It was about a year ago, so I was twenty-four. My father was in his big blue lounge chair, with the five or six mismatched quilts piled up on his lap, like always. My mother was seated comfortably on the couch, her legs tucked neatly and casually behind her. I sat on the small couch, my legs tucked not so neatly, but just as casually, off to my right, with the comfy blanket over me. I'll admit, it was nice. The three of us are rarely all home or awake at the same time, and when we are we're rarely getting along. It was nice to have a moment to just sit and watch TV together.

A commercial came on in which a teenage girl smokes pot and kisses some boys but then her night is rewound to the point right before she leaves the house, where her mother holds up a small bag of pot and says, "What's this?" And the girl is caught. The point of the commercial is that if the mother had never caught the girl or confronted her then she would have gone out to do the bad things like smoke pot and kiss boys. The commercial compels me to ask my parents a question I've always wondered about. I break the silence with it.

"How come you guys never talked to me about sex or drugs?"

My parents laughed. "We didn't realize we had to," my father said, haughtily, as though I had asked, How come you guys never told me how to blink?

"Yeah, seriously," my mother agreed. "You mean you didn't know that sex and drugs were wrong?"

I was really shocked, and appalled. "Well, I mean," I stuttered, not really knowing what to say.

I realized then that there was nothing to say. My father was reading his tax papers, my mother, the newspaper. Neither of them would ever realize their mistake, nor admit it. It was at that moment that I came to the sad realization that every daughter or son must come to at some point in their lives: parents aren't perfect.