Your best is always good enough.

Last week, I wrote about the idea that academic interventions and mental health treatments don’t always come with guarantees.  (If you missed it, you can find that post here.)  

I mentioned that as parents we want security in our investments. We want to know that if we put in our best efforts — time and money and energy — that the results for our children, teens, and young adults will match our expectations and we’ll be able to clearly measure our progress towards our goals.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I was on the phone a few months ago with a friend / colleague, and in reflecting on work he had done with a family facing a particularly challenging set of circumstances he said to me, “I did my best, it just wasn’t good enough.”  

In that moment, I heard the tired voices of so many parents who have picked up the phone and called me, exhausted from years of phone calls and appointments and teachers conferences and therapies and interventions and evaluations. They so often feel like they have failed their children because the “results” weren’t what they expected or hoped for. 

And what I said to my friend that day is now what I say to all of those parents (and to you, if you need to hear it): 

Your best is always good enough.  

Sometimes it just doesn’t create the change we are looking for.

Go ahead and read that again. 

Your best is always good enough.  

Sometimes it just doesn’t create the change we are looking for.

We can all only do what we can. No matter how we lean in or what boundaries we set, we can’t control how other people show up.  

We can't control what someone had for breakfast, who they sat next to on the bus, the fight they had with their sister over the iPad, the new unit in math, the substitute gym teacher who didn’t know about their sprained ankle – you get the picture.  We’re humans and we don’t live in vacuums.  We live in a messy, messy, world with other messy, messy, humans. 

Photo by Kitan Rajput on Unsplash

The other truth is that it’s often the combination of a whole set of actions and interventions that will make a difference. It’s consistency with what we do at home, the language we speak with teachers, the timing of important conversations, and our willingness to adapt and change as our kids grow and develop.  

And we still need to be open to the results being different than what we envisioned. 

As we get to know ourselves and our kids differently, we can see how they show up in the world and meet them there. If we try to paint a picture of exactly what we want the future to look like, we will always be disappointed.  But if we can stay open to the possibility of multiple outcomes being "good" or "right" or "successful" then our world gets a whole lot wider, more interesting, and easier to be in.

The best all of us can do, really, is to keep showing up, being authentic, looking at the hard parts and celebrating the good ones.  Sometimes the results we get aren't what we thought -- even when we bring our best to the table -- and that's ok.