Maybe you were expecting a blank slate. Maybe you were hoping it would skip a generation. Maybe you were hoping they’d figure it out sooner than you did.

But of course they haven’t. They struggle like you struggle. They take shortcuts. They have this tendency or that one. They don’t listen. They’re hard-headed. They have that proclivity. In short, they are just like you.

It’s terribly unfair, Churchill would write (putting the words in the mouth of the ghost of his father): We expect our kids to have our virtues without our faults. That’s not how it works! In fact, as another great British writer would say, Mom and Dad,

“They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.”

We can’t expect our kids to be perfect. We can’t expect them, as we said recently, to have already won battles over vices that we are still fighting ourselves. We have to be patient. We have to encourage them. We have to show them that they can learn from our mistakes, but don’t expect them to just magically not make them. Parenting isn’t about raising perfect kids—it’s about guiding imperfect ones with patience, humility, and the understanding that they’re just like us: a work in progress.