It wasn’t until many years into his coaching career that Pete Carroll really settled into his philosophy—the system by which he built his teams, and his athletes around. It seems simple but it’s actually a profound one. As he describes it: Always compete. Compete.

Isn’t that what sports are about? Where’s the innovation there?

According to Carroll, competition isn’t about beating someone or something. It isn’t some contest between two opposing individuals, groups, or teams. It isn’t a zero-sum game. It isn’t something you do on Sundays. Competition, Carroll says, is all about doing your best. It’s striving to reach your potential. It’s focusing on doing “things better than they have ever been done before.” That’s the mentality a competitor approaches every day with: Am I better today than I was yesterday? Yes? Then I won. 

Your job as a dad—whether you coach one of their teams or not, whether they play sports or not—is to help instill this mindset in your kids. They have to learn how to compete. Every day. In everything. We’ve talked about Jeannie Gaffigan and her husband Jim, how they started competing as parents, seeing who could get the kids to bed fastest, or get up earliest to make breakfast. We’ve talked about how your kids will rise to the level of your expectations—and that’s true for their expectations of themselves too. 

No one gets better just because. Getting better takes work. Improvement requires drive. Winning requires competing. Well, are you teaching them that? More importantly, are you modeling that?

Kids need opportunities to compete. They need contests to better themselves in—whether it’s trying to memorize every state capitol faster than they did yesterday or running across the yard more times than they did last time. They need to grow up in a house where everyone is trying to grow somehow, in something. Where everyone is expected to perform at their best. 

If you can make that happen, they’ll be a winner.

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This change we’ve made, this decision to become dads—it has uprooted everything. It’s like we were hit, suddenly, with a crossfire hurricane. The house is a mess. The schedule is grueling. There is never enough sleep, never enough time in the day. 

Even the cool, quiet dark is pierced by the shriek of a man who has stepped on a pile of Legos… and the shriek is coming from your mouth. Yet to be good at our jobs, to be good at this fatherhood thing, we need stillness. We need time to reflect. We need focus. We need calm to restore and reboot us. 

Where will we find it? It won’t be, as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius remind us, in fleeing to the country or to the sea. It won’t be those measly two weeks of vacation or by cutting and running. No, we must find the stillness within the chaos. It might not feel like these moments of quiet can exist with all the crying babies or arguing teenagers, but they can. 

We must go within. We must find it, early in the morning before the house is awake. We must drink in those minutes after the kids are in bed—really drink it in, don’t defer it in favor of Netflix. We must take time with a journal. We must enjoy that cute, but preposterously slow, walk from school to the car, or from the car back into the house. Soak up the garbage time. Soak up the quiet. Store these moments in your soul so you can have them always. 

You must find the stillness. So much depends on it. 

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By now, you’ve almost certainly lost count of how many questions you’ve been asked by your kids. From the moment they can talk, that’s what fatherhood is—answering questions. Some you can’t wait for them to ask, some you hope they’ll never ask (or ask their mom), some so absurdly, brilliantly child-like you never could have guessed they were coming in a million years. 

Samuel Edison, the father of Thomas Edison, once remarked of his son—who few thought was a genius as a child—that Thomas was “forever asking me questions and when I would tell him I didn’t know, he would say, “Why don’t you know?” 

Out of the mouths of babes. What a perfect indictment expressed so innocently. Your kid is 5. Or 13. Or 30. But you’re much older. It makes sense that they don’t know things. But you? You don’t have an excuse! Too many of us let our curiosity atrophy as we get older—we close our minds the minute we close our last textbooks. Kids are a great reminder that our learning should never cease, that we should never be satisfied not knowing the answers to things—or at the very least knowing where to find the answers. 

If we want our kids to have an “everything is figureoutable” mentality, we’re going to have to model it ourselves. We have to show them that we’re curious, that our education is still ongoing, that we’re constantly questioning and discovering and exploring too.

Why don’t you know? There’s no good answer. So keep learning. Keep thinking. Ask yourself that question. If you want to raise a “why child” you’re going to need to be a “why adult.” 

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F. Scott Fitzgerald knew the long term damage of being spoiled rotten. Not only was he a prime and painful example himself—as we’ve written about—but as he observed and studied the rich men and women of the Jazz Age, he saw how indulgent people quickly became the “careless” monsters that he portrayed in The Great Gatsby. 

In Fitzgerald’s stories, the rich are always expecting life to be easy, expecting their money to exempt them from consequences; they’re selfish, naive, insufferable, and superficial. As the subjects of his stories, this makes them fascinating heroes and anti-heroes, but Fitzgerald also wanted us to know who the real villains were: the parents and the families that raised them. As he depicts in one memorable exchange in The Offshore Pirate, a story about a young, beautiful girl who refused to listen to her guardians:

“You’ve grown unbearable! Your disposition—”

“You’ve made me that way! No child ever had a bad disposition unless it’s her family’s fault! Whatever I am, you did it.”

This truth applies to all of us, not just fathers and families whose incomes put them in the 1%.  We must blame ourselves or no one, remember? If our kid’s not a hard worker, that’s on us. If our kid’s a bully or acts like they have an advanced degree from “dick school,” that’s on us. If our kid has an attitude or gets into trouble, that’s on us. They’re kids. It’s our fault for not teaching them better… and it’s even less excusable if we throw up our hands and say, “That’s just the way they turned out.”No, whatever they are, we did it. And it’s not too late to make improvements. 

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The world is a scary place right now. Your retirement accounts have taken enormous hits. Events are getting cancelled. Government officials are failing, publicly and embarrassingly, to protect us. Nobody knows quite what the next few weeks or months will look like. 

But one thing that is certain? Your kids need you to be calm. They need this as much as they need anything right now. Because this wasn’t their fault. Because they haven’t been through stuff like this before. Because they are looking to you for guidance, for an example of how to be and behave. 

If you’re freaking out, if you’re letting your anxiety run wild, what will they think? More importantly, how is that helping them in any way? People in the sway of their passions or fears don’t make good decisions. They don’t inspire confidence. They are not their best selves. 

Well, this is a moment that requires the very best of you. It requires you conquering your fear, discarding your anxiety, and focusing on the task at hand. It requires you to truly be there for your kids. To make good decisions, in the calm and mild light of good philosophy.  This is where you teach them what leadership and citizenship look like. This is where you teach them how to be strong and calm precisely when a situation most calls for it. 

They need you to be calm. So step up. 

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On their deathbeds, fathers think about a lot of things. They think about the world they’re leaving to their sons and daughters. They think about how they parented. They think about the mistakes they made. They think about what they did right. They are warmed by the thoughts of their children, and, if they are lucky, they find themselves surrounded by them, the hospital bed serving as the final crowded table we have talked about here. 

The question for you to think about today, on a day hopefully quite far from that moment, is what decisions are you making now and how will you think about them then? Think about what most dads regret as they come to the end of life: They regret not spending more time with their kids. They regret not telling them how proud of them they were (not doing it nearly enough). They regret taking things too seriously, they regret letting petty differences or petty problems loom larger than the love that they felt in their hearts. They regret not being present, spending all that energy trying to organize perfect “quality” time when there was so much ordinary, wonderful garbage time to be had. They regret not “engaging with the slime” because they cared too much about keeping the house clean. They may regret spoiling their kids, not teaching them the right lessons, not having the conversations that needed to be had. 

Well, you’re lucky. Because you’re not on your deathbed right now. Because it’s not too late. Nor is it ever too early. Today you can adjust and change to make sure you don’t have those regrets—or at least you can seek to minimize them. 

You only get one go at this. Learn from the people who have come before. Learn from your own parents. Try to get it right. Before you regret it. 

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Each of us, no matter how old or successful, has things we wish we knew how to do. We wish we could speak another language, or change the oil in our own car, or play the guitar. It’s not that we aren’t up for learning these things now—more so even than when we were young—but it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, as they say, even when the dog wants to learn. 

It can be a frustrating experience. Sometimes, when the desire is deep enough but the capacity for comprehension is not, it can even produce resentment toward our own parents for not encouraging or teaching us these skills earlier—when we had less going on, when our mind was more pliable, when we had the time. 

The French philosopher Jean de la Bruyère (who we’ve quoted before) has spoken about the importance of laying the foundation for language learning in our children: “when the soul naturally receives everything, is deeply impressed by it, and when the memory is fresh, quick, and steady.” 

That is, as early as possible. It’s true for more than just picking up française or español.      

When we’re young our mental maps have yet to be fully drawn. Our neural pathways are still being carved. Our brains are lumps of clay waiting to be molded--by exposure, by experience, by accident, by parents. When we’re young, our view of the world has not yet been colored by the kind of preconceptions, desires, and passions that seem to define what is possible for adults. Kids aren’t tied down by the familiar and they aren’t yet burdened by the responsibilities that adults know too well. They can be excited easily with games, they are impressionable, they are not yet jaded, and, most of all, they have time. They have so much time. 

You have to recognize that they are clay in your hands. You have to help them seize this window. You have to help them open their minds. 

Jean de la Bruyère said that language especially will “clear the way for the acquisition of solid learning.” But so will dancing, learning to tie a tie, computer programming, drawing, piano, and a million other skills. More is better, as we’ve said before. Help them develop range. Let them learn to love not only the benefits of range but the pride of depth and the process of acquiring both. 

It’s not too late. But earlier is better. 

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Sometimes it’s good to acknowledge our biases. And one of the biggest biases in our lives is our kids. Not just a bias in the sense that we prefer them, but a bias like one of those ones that cognitive behavioral scientists point out that prove we’re totally and utterly irrational.

We love our kids and love makes us crazy. It is irrational. And that’s okay. In Herman Hesse’s beautiful novel Siddhartha, the titular character—who had spent his whole life in the solitary pursuit of enlightenment—suddenly finds himself a father. This changes him. Makes him feel all sorts of things he had never felt before, feelings that, in many ways, he had denied and pushed away for so long as part of his journey. 

“He was madly in love, a fool because of love,” Hesse writes of Siddhartha, but also of you and every other parent who’s ever lived. “Now he always experienced belatedly, for once in his life, the strongest and strangest passion; he suffered tremendously through it and yet was uplifted, in some way renewed and richer.” 

Our kids make us drive. They drive us crazy. They mess with our minds and our priorities. Love does that. Mad, mad love is powerful, skewing things. But it’s also a wondrous, special thing. It makes us suffer, but it also rewards us. It uplifts us. It changes us, sure, but they change us so much for the better.

It’s good to acknowledge that.

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Imagine that you’re gone and able to look down now and see your kids from above. Or imagine that somehow you had magical powers and could see inside their heads and read their thoughts. What is it that you would never want them to witness? What is it that you would never want them to feel?

Not failure, obviously, because you know that’s a part of life. Not suffering—within reason—because that too is a part of life, as the Buddha says. But you would never want them to feel stupid, or feel unloved, or feel that they had to earn your approval. You would never want them to feel worthless. Or find out that they really needed you but were afraid to come to you for help. You would never want them to think you were too busy for them, or that you cared about their success more than their happiness. 

This is basic stuff, right? Okay, but honestly, if you really looked at your behavior, do you think you contribute to those exact feelings? They came to you and instead of listening… you rushed right in with judgement or a lecture. You criticize far more than you compliment. You are cold or easily disappointed… because you’re still dealing with your own issues. You lost your temper. You say harsh things. 

Every father does this. We make our kids feel a way that if we heard their boyfriend or their boss made them feel that way we’d drive down and kick their ass. We do it because we’re not aware enough, because we don’t take our influence seriously enough. And that’s not okay. We can do better. We have to do better. 

Imagine you could see the world from inside your kid’s heart and head. Now look at their father—look at the way you act towards them. It’s not the picture you want to see, is it?

So change. Now. 

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If you’re in your 30s, then your parents raised you through the global financial crisis, SARS, the bursting of the tech bubble, and 9/11. They saw two wars in Iraq, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Black Monday. If you’re in your 40s, they experienced that and the crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, stagflation, Chernobyl, and the final saber rattling of the Cold War. If you’re in your 50s, then your parents raised you through Vietnam and Watergate and the Berlin Wall. If you’re in your 60s, they raised you through the Civil Rights movement, the counterculture revolution, the draft, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassinations, MLK’s assassination, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. If you’re older than that… well, now we’re getting into even headier territory: the war in Korea, the Iron Curtain, the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, and god knows what else. 

You think that was easy? You think there weren’t moments where they shut the door and wept out of anger or fear? You think they didn’t spend a lot of nights sitting up in bed, talking quietly to their partner about what was going to happen, about how (and if) they were going to make it? They were scared. They were overwhelmed. They wondered what kind of world this was to bring you up in. 

And then you know what? They put on a smiling face and made you breakfast. They went to work. They saved their money. They prepared for your future. They loved you. They protected you. They soldiered on. 

You come from that tradition. You come from parents who didn’t have it easy… and grandparents who had it harder, and great-great-great grandparents who definitely had it worse. What we face today is tough. These are real economic, political, and medical crises. But we’ll get through it. We’ll get through it as our parents did. We’ll keep smiling. We’ll keep protecting. We’ll keep doing our job. 

Because we have to. We have a tradition to uphold. 

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.