Parenting fails that keep me awake at night

I used to consider myself a pretty good parent, but in recent years I've come to realize how often I've failed my children. And it kills me inside. A few examples:

• My 9-year-old son really isn't all that comfortable riding a bike. I taught him to ride a couple of years ago, but we didn't practice much and there aren't sidewalks in our neighborhood and he never got very confident and...seriously, this just tears me up. I'm going to rectify it this summer, but he's 9! Geez, he should be riding all the time, but I think he's still afraid of falling. Big time fail on my part.

• We never got our 14-year-old daughter into softball when she was little and now she wishes she could be playing summer ball with her friends. Which I guess she could, but it would be an awfully big skill gap to overcome. Melanie was so shy when she was little and never seemed all that interested in softball, and her older siblings were only lukewarm about the sport, so...I don't know. Maybe we just didn't want to be bothered with signing her up, taking her to practices and games, etc. I really wish we had gotten her into softball.

• My 16-year-old son wishes he still played hockey and the only reason we made him quit was for our own convenience. Well, in our defense, it would have been awfully tough for him to maintain full hockey and soccer schedules every fall, so we made him make a choice. He chose soccer because that was his established sport, but he was really starting to like hockey. And I love hockey. The problem is, once you stop playing it, your skating skills diminish rapidly, and in hockey if you can't skate you don't rate. We should have sucked it up and let him do both sports.

• My kids are sometimes rude and disrespectful to their mother and I've just let it go too many times. They all do it on occasion, but I notice it especially with one child in particular, who needs to be smacked when he/she does this. I yell at him/her from time to time, but I'm not sure it does much good. I gotta man up on this one.

• My kids don't go to each other's events enough. From an early age we should have made them attend each others' games, concerts, school plays, etc. to show support, but it has always been easier to let them stay home or go to grandma's house or whatever. And now they have no tolerance/desire for going to a sibling's event, which doesn't feel right.

• I do too many things for them instead of making them learn. The right thing to do is to make them stop whatever they're doing and, for instance, come into the mudroom and pick their stuff up off the floor. But it's so much easier for me to do it myself. "Next time I'll make them do it themselves," I say. But I never do. And as a result, they'll never learn to do it if they know Daddy will do it for them. Not good. Back to parenting school for me.