Being a Good Parent Sucks

Yeah, I said it.  Trying, anyway, to be a good parent kind of sucks.  To do what truly is the best for your kid makes them mad, you "don't understand" and if you are in the unfortunate position of having a divorced situation, the "other" parent always understands more than you.  My daughter got in trouble at school & was issued a Saturday detention.  Now, she's a good kid, but she made a bad judgment call, so they hit her with Saturday school.  As I was tempted to let that be the only punishment, wrongly thinking "that was punishment enough", I stopped to think about what a bad idea it was to think that way.
Remember when you feared about the punishment at home because you knew whatever you got at home would be ten times worse than at school?   It seems like many of us are taking it way too easy on our kids.  I am certainly not talking about capital punishment, but teaching our kids real consequences.  Sometimes consequences suck.  Sometimes, you screw up at your job with a bad judgment call and you get fired.
Raising my daughter to be a successful adult is a huge priority to me.  Realizing that what we teach our kids when they are young should be about what they can expect as adults in this big, sometimes not-so-nice world.  It's all about making the right decisions and guiding them into doing so...even when they tell us we suck.