Mother’s Day is here and as Father’s Day approaches, I’m thinking about the challenges of being a parent. Although there are plenty of books and TV shows from which we’re informed about how to raise the perfect child, some people I know have relied on how their parents brought them up. Others, like me, learned that raising children has been mostly about reacting to their different behaviors.

Several years ago, when my wife was pregnant, I asked a friend of mine what he and his wife did to raise their son. “I remember the day we brought him home from the hospital,” he said. “I put him down in his crib and my wife and I looked at each other and I said to her, ‘What do we do now?’” My friend looked at me with a smile and said, “What you will find is from the day your child wears diapers until the day he puts on his graduation cap and gown, the answer to my question about what you do next will be answered by him. Raising kids is all about your reactions and decisions to what they want and need every single day.”

And let’s be honest. There are no perfect parents and no perfect children. In Mitch Albom’s novel, “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” he begins a chapter with the most profound words that describe parenting that I have ever read.

“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”

As children, we expected our parents to oblige our requests. Give us what we want, not punish us when we were bad, and love us without conditions. So, if that program is followed, what can happen? This remark was said to me by a school guidance counselor, “The entitled child will grow up to be a spoiled brat who can’t hold a job because he can’t take orders from anyone.”

The nature of how kids are raised has changed dramatically during my lifetime. When I was a child back in the ’60s, many moms and dads enforced our appreciation for them with a stern hand and a commanding voice. “You have a roof over your head, clothes on your body, and food on the table. Be happy you have that. Not everybody does.”

But we weren’t happy about that. A friend of mine told me, “I could have gotten all of that in an orphanage.”

She wanted love from her mother that she never had gotten.

I never had my father’s love because he was always sick. I never got encouragement from my mother when she was drunk.

After I graduated high school, staying home was not an option. Get out. Get married or find a place to live. Get a job or join the army or go to college, which I chose to do, and it was on my dime that I paid off the loans in 10 years.

Somewhere in the ’80s and ’90s, the philosophy of parenting changed. Helicopter moms hovered over their children and decided how to make their kids happy. We went from you have to win to get a trophy to everyone gets a trophy for just being on the team.

Parents were concerned about their child’s self-esteem. They blamed teachers for their kids’ failures. They gave their sons and daughters whatever they wanted and then some. Kids didn’t play outside by themselves anymore. They were driven to Little League games, to scout meetings, and to amusement parks for birthday parties. Trick or treat on Halloween changed from kids walking the neighborhood by themselves to a parking lot where they were given candy out of the trunks of a circle of cars. Parents ruled and dictated every minute of their world.

Sometimes, moms do too much and dads do too little. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. “Wait until your kids become teenagers,” I was once told. “You will matter to them as much as the bottom of their shoes.”

Thankfully, that has not been the case with my kids.

In my day, we had to find a way to become independent and we did. Today, there is a rising number of adult children still living at home with their mothers and fathers. “They can’t or won’t cut the umbilical cord,” is how a child psychologist I knew had put it.

Mothers, fathers, and custodial grandparents get too much credit and too much blame. We bring no experience to the role of being parents. It’s on the job training. Like the game of baseball, we succeed some and fail often.

Sometimes we hit home runs for our kids and sometimes we strike out. Rather than say, “I’m sorry” to our child when we do wrong, we try to exert our parental power over them to excuse our wrongdoings that usually make the relationship worse.

None of us picked who would become our parents. We got what we got - good, bad or somewhere in between. When we look back into our childhoods, we might have had expectations from our moms and dads that were not realistic, considering the dysfunctions they might have carried into their parenthood. When we became parents ourselves, we quickly discovered that raising our kids wasn’t as easy as we had thought and how fast the years go by. We don’t own our children. We just rent them for a while until we send them out into the world.

I look back into Albom’s words. “All parents damage their children.” Mine did. I did. As children of our parents and parents of our children, we can stop blaming ourselves for what we did wrong. What we can now do right is repair the cracks in the glass with a permanent glue filled with love.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com