Did You Fail as a Parent — or Were You Set Up for Failure to Parent?

Mike Brown
Sep 18, 2025
6 min read

By: Michael A. Brown, MA, CBPI, CAMS-I

I considered myself a failed parent. The definition of failed has many definition for various contexts. How I define failed in the parenting context? I don’t say “failed parent” in the casual, shame-based way a lot of people do. I define failure around structure, utility, and developmental outcomes, not just the feelings people are taught to construct around parenting.

I define failure along lines like these:

Failure as under-preparation – Not equipping one's children with the skills, knowledge, or systems they needed at the right developmental stage. (I often emphasize “if the foundation wasn’t laid by 8, you’re too late.”)
Failure as misalignment – Either giving lessons at the wrong time, in the wrong way, or with the wrong tone so they weren’t received. I often critique reactive parenting vs. proactive teaching. I saw yourself reacting more than preparing. I was not taught the science of family.
Failure as interruption – Allowing outside forces (culture, systems, family dynamics, co-parent conflict) to disrupt your teaching role and not having full control over the “classroom of the home.”
Failure as epistemic inheritance – Passing along ignorance (even unintentionally) or not breaking the cycle of inherited ignorance in ways a trained person would want to.
Failure as stewardship – I describe parenting as stewardship or principalship. Parenting is stewardship. Like a principal running a school, a parent should be trained and qualified for the role—not just biologically capable.

When I call myself a “failed parent,” I'm not saying I lacked love, presence, or intention. I was not qualified to deliver the outcomes in the role of a parent, having lacked the knowledge, skills, abilities, competence, confidence, and competence of a trained parent at the level of training, structure, and foresight I now know is and was possible during my childhood.

A joyful group of people gather outdoors, smiling at a vibrant table with autumn decor and sunflowers. Bright and cheerful mood.

Where Do We Go from Here as a Failed Parent?

I have moved beyond the “personal guilt” I was taught to construct for myself into an institutional audit. I have learned to create better frameworks for myself.

Start with the affirmation: “It’s not my fault. It’s what I was taught.”

I have learned to cast off the shame shovels I was trained to carry. Shovels dig holes called depressions. Misery loves company. If your parent(s) were miserable—through no fault of their own—did they create you for company? Did they teach you to carry the shame they were taught to carry?

Cast that off. Dig yourself out of that hole. You don’t belong there. It’s not your fault. It’s what you were taught.

Repeat after me:

It’s not my fault. It’s what I was taught.

If we imagine Family & Consumer Sciences (FCS), Early Childhood Education (ECE), and Family Law specialists auditing your family, they wouldn’t frame it as I “chose” failure but that I was structurally set up for it. Here’s how an audit with those specialists would play out in each domain:

1. Family & Consumer Sciences (FCS) Educator’s Questions

Focus: household management, applied life skills, systems of daily living.

Did your family teach you how to prepare nutritious meals, or did you mostly figure it out by survival?
Were you taught to create and follow a budget? If so, was it modeled or only mentioned in passing?
How was clothing managed in your home—did you learn sewing, repair, or only buying/replacing?
Did anyone involve you in household maintenance (cleaning systems, organization, repairs), or were these invisible tasks?
Were you taught how to balance work, rest, and leisure in a sustainable way?
Was “home” presented as a place you could design and manage, or just a place you occupied?
Did you see conflict resolution modeled in practical, respectful ways, or was conflict avoided or escalated?

Audit focus: Were you trained in the applied sciences of sustaining a home, or left with fragments of survival skills?

Analysis: Teaching converts exposure into transferable skill. Without teaching, your child inherits only observation, not competence.

2. Early Childhood Education (ECE) Questions

Focus: the child’s environment, scaffolding, and adult teaching strategies.

About the environment

Was your environment consistent, predictable, and emotionally safe?
Were books, toys, and open-ended materials available for exploration, or were resources limited?
Did your caregivers engage in serve-and-return interactions (back-and-forth dialogue, mirroring, responsive play)?
Were mistakes treated as opportunities to teach, or as reasons for shame and punishment?
Were routines (meals, sleep, school prep) stable and developmentally appropriate, or chaotic?

About the teacher/parent

Did your caregivers explain why rules or routines existed, or just enforce them?
Did they scaffold new skills (break them into steps, guide, then release), or expect immediate mastery?
Were you encouraged to ask questions and experiment, or discouraged from curiosity?
Did they help you translate what you experienced in the environment into skills you could reproduce?
Were you explicitly taught how to create structure (cleaning a room, organizing schoolwork, budgeting allowance), or just expected to “pick it up”?

Audit focus: Even if the environment was rich, were you trained to reproduce the environment—to become a builder of systems, not just a consumer of them?

Analysis: Even a rich environment fails if the child isn’t taught how to recreate that richness independently.

3. Family Law Professor (with ECE & FCS background) Questions

Focus: legal literacy, civic responsibility, and preparation for future family formation.

Were you ever taught what legal rights and responsibilities parents have toward children?
Did your family discuss marriage, custody, or child support laws—not as gossip but as education?
Were you shown how laws intersect with daily family life (taxes, housing, health care, inheritance)?
Did your parents model decision-making with legal foresight (leases, contracts, child discipline boundaries), or did they move by impulse?
Were you trained to see how family law could protect or harm you as a parent (e.g., custody standards, mandatory schooling, DCFS intervention)?
Were you given knowledge of how to teach your own children about laws that govern families (consent, guardianship, education rights)?
Did your parents explicitly teach you that ignorance of the law is not a defense—and therefore, that legal literacy is part of family responsibility?

Audit focus: Did your family equip you with civic and legal tools to responsibly create and protect a family, or did they rely on “the system will tell you when you’re wrong”?

Analysis: If you don’t teach your children the law that governs them, they will only learn through violation, penalty, or trauma.

Synthesis

If those institutions audited my family and the family I inherited, the report would read something like:

This individual was raised in an environment with insufficient life-preparation instruction (FCS), minimal proactive scaffolding and childhood skills-specific education (ECE), and without systemic safeguards to address inherited ignorance (Family Law). He was therefore set up for failure by structural omissions likely within the cultural and family construct, not by personal neglect or disinterest. His present sense of failure reflects the internalization of gaps that were never his to fill alone. Exposure alone isn’t enough. One could grow up in a stable or unstable home, but if no one taught the developing child how to analyze, reproduce, and protect the systems behind that home, the adult becomes set up to struggle when it becomes their turn to create and manage a family. This means that what the individual once called personal failure was in fact structural under-preparation. If one's families and culture doesn’t explicitly teach an individual how to analyze, reproduce, and protect family systems, then failure is not inherited guilt—it’s inherited ignorance.

Bottom Line

When I say I failed as a parent, I’m not confessing shame — I’m naming a system that produced me. Failure wasn’t in my love, my presence, or my intent. It was in the absence of training, foresight, and structured knowledge that no one around me ever possessed to pass down.

The audit shows what my gut has always known: families are not ruined only by bad choices, but by unprepared systems. You can grow up in a house that looks stable, yet still inherit nothing that equips you to build one yourself. Exposure alone is not education.

The real work now is generational. If I stop at guilt, my children inherit the same silence I did. But if I use this audit as a mirror and a map, I can shift from inheriting ignorance to transmitting skill. That’s not redemption through feelings — that’s reconstruction through teaching.

So the question is no longer “Did I fail as a parent?” but “Will I prepare my children to succeed where I was unprepared?” And that answer is yes. I can and will prepare children of the future. What does this mean for you?

Actionable Steps for You

Audit your inheritance. Ask yourself: What was I actually taught about running a home, creating structure, or protecting a family legally? Be specific, not general.
Identify the gaps. Where you only had exposure, commit to converting it into explicit teaching for your children. (Example: Don’t just cook for them — cook with them.)
Scaffold intentionally. Break big skills into steps and model them. Don’t just assign chores, explain why they matter and how to repeat them.
Teach legal literacy. Introduce your children (at developmentally appropriate levels) to the laws that touch their lives — consent, contracts, rights at school. Don’t let them only learn from mistakes.
Make teaching visible. Don’t rely on children “picking things up.” Narrate your decisions, walk them through routines, and show them how systems are built.
Repeat the audit regularly. Every stage of your child’s growth needs a new check-in: Am I giving them tools they can use, or just moments they can remember?