“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
James Baldwin
If fatherhood has taught me anything, it’s that my kids rarely do what I say.
They do what I do.
It’s unsettling, really—like watching your habits walk around on tiny legs.
The first time I heard my son sigh the same way I sigh when I’m frustrated, it hit me: this is how it happens.
This is how little humans learn what being big looks like.
Not through my words, but through my example—every patient pause, every eye roll, every time I remember (or forget) to say “thank you.”
It’s a humbling kind of mirror.
Because as much as I want to raise kind, curious, decent people, the uncomfortable truth is that I can’t just tell them to be that way.
I have to be that way.
Which is tough when I’m tired, running late, and someone has just spilled yogurt on the couch.
But the truth is, kids don’t really listen—they absorb. They study you like a foreign language and learn your syntax by heart.
And that’s both beautiful and terrifying.
It means that every day, whether I realize it or not, I’m showing my boys what it looks like to be a man.
Not a perfect one.
Just one who keeps trying.
They’ll see me lose my patience. They’ll see me apologize. They’ll see me fail at things that matter and sometimes at things that don’t—like building Ikea furniture or pretending I understand Pokémon.
But I hope they also see me show up.
For their mom.
For them.
For myself, even on the hard days.
I’m not trying to raise perfect kids. I’m trying to raise kids who know what to do when life gets imperfect.
That means being honest about my own flaws—and then doing the work to grow past them.
It means laughing when I mess up, forgiving myself out loud, and letting them see that becoming better is something grown-ups still do, too.
My sons won’t remember every word I say.
But they’ll remember how I lived.
How I treated people.
How I treated them.
And that’s the part that keeps me awake sometimes—not the weight of it, but the wonder.
That every day, in quiet ways, I’m shaping the men they’ll become.
It’s daunting. It’s sacred.
And it’s everything I never knew I always wanted.
