My costliest mistake as a parent was trying to make my sons’ world more like mine.
All tagged parenting
Days Like These: A Father’s Wish
I wish for another day where we celebrate at a table more crowded than the year before.
The Steady Years: Strengthening Marriage in Comfortable Times
How do we strengthen our marriage, when our week-to-week is steady and consistent?
2023: The Year of ‘Not Helpless’
2023 taught me a powerful lesson: facing fears and owning up to my choices proves that, really, we're never helpless.
The world needs more people to function as artists in everyday life.
We survived by learning to make adjustments.
How often we adjust our style is a good leadership metric.
Constantly being angry is what I find hardest about being a father.
There’s a secular lesson to take from Matthew 11: don’t over-regulate children. I want to try, at least, to simplify.
Thank you, teachers, for everything you do and have done - for me, for our three sons, and for all children. We have all yearned for the rain to drench our gardens, and you have made it pour.
The keys are sleep and paying attention. So obvious, but so elusive.
To break the cycle, I must engage in self-purification that results in direct action.
I had a profound realization on a morning walk, on a perfect fall day.
I cannot break my sons’ innocence early by asking them to dance with my heaviest emotions.
If I choose to shirk responsibility, what am I?
I don’t want to make noise about the sacrifices I’ve made, but I don’t want my sacrifices to be insulted by ungrateful children. I don’t want my children feel deep shame or know intense suffering, but I also want them to have opportunities to build inner strength. In some ways I need to tell stories about sacrifice, but in other ways that’s counterproductive.
What’s a parent to do?
It seems to me that a simple, relatively cheap, way to radically change the performance of an organization is to take consequential processes that are implicit and make them simple, clear, and explicit.
Bo, Myles, and Emmett - if you ever find this remember that you are not here to justify us as parents. Remember to love each other. And remember our prayers for you.
It’s bittersweet to realize your kids are growing, but that time is passing.
Passing on tragic flaws is part of being a father. Can I stop any of my sins from becoming intergenerational?