Your oldest is twelve now. Last week she said something about how she used to feel when you would put her in her room to cry it out at six months old, because that was what the book said, because that was what every book said in 2013. You did not know then what you know now. You did not know about co-regulation, about cortisol cascades in infants, about how the nervous system gets shaped by repeated experiences of unmet distress. You did the thing the experts said to do. The experts were wrong, or at least incomplete, and your daughter paid some price for their incompleteness and your trust.
Or it is something else. The spanking you did before you read the research. The sugar you let them eat before you understood the metabolic load. The screens you handed over because you needed an hour. The school you fought to keep them in because you thought it was the best option, before you saw what it was costing them. The therapy you did not get them because you did not yet see what was happening. The way you handled the divorce. The way you handled the death. The way you handled your own depression while they were watching.
You have been parenting with whatever you knew at the time. What you know now is more. What your child will know when they parent will be more still. This is the structure of human knowledge across generations. Each parent operates with the best information available, much of which turns out, in retrospect, to have been wrong or incomplete. Holding yourself responsible for not knowing what was not yet knowable is a category error. It treats your past self as if they had access to your present self's information, which is the literal impossibility on which time runs.
This does not eliminate the harm. The harm is real. Your daughter's nervous system was shaped by the cry-it-out months in ways you did not intend. Your son's relationship to food carries the imprint of the meals you fought over. The damage exists. The question is what to do with the fact of damage you caused in good faith, on the basis of information you trusted, that turned out to be less complete than you needed.
The first move is acknowledgment. Not flagellation, not minimization. Plain acknowledgment. The thing happened. It had effects. Some of those effects are visible now. You can see them in your child's body, behavior, words.
The second move is locating responsibility accurately. You are responsible for what you did. You are not responsible for the inadequacy of the knowledge available at the time. These are different things. If you treat them as the same thing, you either crush yourself with impossible standards or you exonerate yourself by denying the harm. Both miss the actual structure. The accurate position holds both — yes, I did the thing; no, I could not have known what I did not know.
The third move is differentiated repair. Some of what you did not know is now knowable, and you can adjust forward. Some of what was done cannot be undone, and the repair is acknowledgment rather than correction. Your daughter may not need an apology for cry-it-out; she may need you to be the parent now who has integrated what you have since learned. Your son may need the acknowledgment of the food fights, named directly, without you fixing everything backwards. The repair is calibrated to what the child actually needs, not to what your guilt wants to deliver.
The fourth move is grief. Forgiveness without grief is bypass. You have to actually feel the cost of what you did before you can release it. This is harder than self-flagellation, which is a kind of substitute for grief. Flagellation feels like taking responsibility but actually delays the feeling. Grief is the genuine reckoning. It hurts, it takes time, and at the end of it you can put down what you have been carrying because you have finally felt its weight.
The fifth move is forward orientation. The past is what it is. The future is where your remaining parenting happens. Self-forgiveness is not an event; it is the ongoing practice of letting your past self be a previous version, operating with previous information, while your present self continues to update and apply what is now known. The child still in the home benefits from a parent who is not chronically self-attacking. The adult child still in your life benefits from a parent who can hear hard things without collapsing into apology or defense.
What forgiving yourself does not mean. It does not mean dismissing your child's experience. If your adult daughter tells you that something hurt her, "I did the best I could at the time" cannot be the response. The response is to hear what hurt, acknowledge it specifically, and resist the pull to defend yourself. The self-forgiveness happens inside you, on your own time, supported by your own resources. It does not get performed at the child.
The Law 0 frame: you are human. Humans operate with partial information, in conditions of uncertainty, doing the best they can with what they have. Sometimes the best is not enough. The not-enough is not a moral verdict. It is the condition of being a person in time. Grace toward the past self who did not know is not betrayal of the child who was affected. It is the prerequisite for continuing to show up as the parent the child still needs you to be.
You did not know. Now you know more. Tomorrow you will know more still. Some of what you do today will turn out to have been incomplete, and your future grown child will, in some moment, name the cost. You will hear it. You will say what is true. And you will keep going.