Bad Habits You're Accidentially (Or Not So) Teaching Your Kids

From the moment we become parents, our heads and hearts are filled with fantastic dreams for our children, and for ourselves. We wish for them the best in life, and we make promises to ourselves about how perfect we are going to be, how cute their nursery will look, and how well we'll extract joy from each moment — and then real life takes over.

We discover that we are not perfect, we give our Pottery Barn dreams over to broken Ikea buckets and milk-stained laundry, and we find that we are too tired half the time to notice if we are awake for all those moments we were supposed to get cold-pressed organic joy from. We are not going to be perfect, and by this time we realize that perfection is boring anyhow, but we try our best and we love our kids with every muscle in our imperfect bodies and souls.

So, with all of that in mind, let's take a minute to reflect on how we can get back to that first promise — the one that's driven by wanting to help our kids live their best possible lives. Are there some less than ideal habits that we're teaching them by example? Click through for ideas of how we can turn our attention to some little patterns that we slip into in our parenting haze, and set a new goal to clean them up for ourselves and our kids.