Men Raising Men

My boys are 28 and 23 now. The hands-on years of raising them are behind me, and what's left now is the privilege of guiding them and watching them grow as men and into who they were destined to be. I've been asked what I learned along the way. My honest answer is that I didn't have a recipe. I had a journey, and a handful of things that were important to me and mattered more than I knew at the time. Here they are, a collection of thoughts I share:

 

It started with my wife. Lorinda and I worked hard to stay on the same page. Boys read the room faster than you think, and if the two of you are not aligned, they pick up on mixed signals. Also, we learned to talk about as much as we thought necessary upfront, so the message the boys got was as clear as it could be. A single voice, so to speak.

How I saw them shaped how they grew. Fatherhood was never a power struggle or hierarchy for me. Strong clans have many leaders, and I always felt the boys deserved a seat at the table early on. I felt power struggles always caused issues, so I stayed away from them.

I learned to choose my battles. Principles over destruction. Before digging in on an argument, I'd ask myself if this was the one I was willing to break the relationship over. Most of the time, it wasn't. I saved the hard “Dad” approach for the things that actually mattered.

Integrity is saying, doing and thinking the same thing, and boys have a built-in radar for the gap between what you preach and what you practise. I was their compass, and I had to hold myself to the standard I held them to. I failed at this at times. They saw me fail, but what they remember is that I owned it and kept going. I think that's when they learned that becoming a man of character is a journey, not a performance.

We talked. I talked to their friends too. Some of our best conversations happened on the way to rugby practice, when no one had to make eye contact, and everything was on the table. It was the open channels, more than what we talked about, that paid dividends later on.

And I learned that it takes a village. There were seasons when my boys tuned me out, and in those seasons, the other voices in their lives mattered enormously; coaches, uncles and friends' fathers. I tried to influence that circle as best I could, because when they weren't listening to me, I still wanted whatever guidance they got to count.

I figured my boys didn't need a perfect father; they needed a present one. A real one who showed up, owned his mistakes, and kept choosing them.

The relationship I have with them today is the result of a thousand small, ordinary moments I didn't know were the important ones at the time. That's the part no one tells you. The big lessons are rarely delivered in big moments. They're built quietly, over years, in the cars and kitchens and sidelines of an ordinary life. That's what it looked like for me.