I went into my conversation with Dan Peterson expecting to talk about kids.

Dan is a counselor who has spent years working with children and families, and much of his work centers around helping parents understand behavior, build stronger relationships with their kids, and create healthier homes.

So naturally, I figured we'd spend a lot of time talking about what kids need from us.

We did.

But the longer we talked, the more the conversation kept turning back toward the parent.

Toward me.

Because one of the uncomfortable truths of parenting is that sometimes the problem isn't figuring out how to change your kid.

It’s somehow figuring out how to change yourself to be the parent your kids need.

Dan has three kids.

And like anyone with more than one child quickly discovers, the idea that you'll develop your parenting style and then apply it equally to each kid doesn't survive very long.

They're different people.

Different personalities.

Different temperaments.

Different needs.

Dan talked about one of his sons being particularly emotionally intense. And that intensity can naturally bring out impatience in a parent.

But that's the catch.

The kid who most easily makes you impatient may be the kid who most needs you to become patient.

Dan put it simply:

Become the parent your child needs you to be.

I love that because it flips one of our natural assumptions about parenting.

We spend so much time thinking about the person we're trying to help our kids become.

More responsible.

More confident.

More disciplined.

More resilient.

But there's another person being formed in the process.

Us.

Your kid isn't an assignment you're supposed to complete.

He's a person you're supposed to get to know.

And sometimes getting to know him means letting go of who you expected him to be.

Before we have kids, we start writing stories about them.

Sometimes before they're even born.

We'll throw the baseball in the backyard.

We'll go fishing together.

Maybe they'll love the same music.

We'll take camping trips.

They'll go to college.

They'll get married.

We'll have this kind of relationship.

We create an entire person in our heads.

Then an actual person shows up.

And he has his own ideas.

Dan said part of his work with parents sometimes involves helping them grieve.

Not because they've lost their child.

Because they've lost the idea of their child.

The imaginary version.

The kid who loved baseball might hate sports.

The kid you imagined taking hunting may want absolutely nothing to do with it.

The kid you thought would follow your path might choose something you never considered.

And there's something strangely difficult about letting that imaginary kid go.

Not because you don't love the real one.

Because you loved the dream, too.

But if we hold onto that dream too tightly, something dangerous can happen.

We can spend so much time trying to turn the kid standing in front of us into the kid we've been carrying around in our heads that we never become particularly interested in who he actually is.

There's a big difference between:

Why aren't you interested in the things I thought we'd do together?

and:

Okay. What are you interested in? Show me.

That second question requires curiosity.

It also requires humility.

Because our children weren't born to fulfill the story we wrote for them.

They get to write some of it themselves.

Parenting might be one of the best personal-development courses you'll ever take.

Because your kids will find every unfinished part of you.

You want to become more patient?

Great.

You could read a book about patience.

Listen to a podcast about patience.

Write "BE MORE PATIENT" in your journal.

Then tomorrow morning your kid can't find his shoes, you're already ten minutes late, and he suddenly remembers there's something you were supposed to sign last night.

There's your class.

Parenting doesn't let us keep our personal growth theoretical.

Our kids expose our impatience.

Our need for control.

Our expectations.

Our insecurities.

The things we inherited from our parents without ever really examining them.

Even the things we thought we'd already worked through.

And they'll give us another opportunity to work on all of it tomorrow.

That's one of the things I find increasingly interesting about fatherhood.

We're obviously raising our kids.

But they're doing something to us, too.

I'm not the same man I was when my son was born.

I shouldn't be.

The person who became a dad all those years ago didn't know what the person raising my kids today would need to know.

I'm still learning.

Still adjusting.

Still getting things wrong.

And sometimes discovering that I'm teaching my kids something I never intended to teach them.

I told Dan a story about my son.

We were in a gas station that had an Oklahoma version of Monopoly, and he kept tapping the box.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

I asked him to stop.

Then he did it again.

So I corrected him again.

Eventually he looked at me and said something that stopped me cold:

"I can't be like you."

That wasn't what I said.

It wasn't what I meant.

It wasn't remotely what I was trying to communicate.

But somehow, somewhere between what I intended and what he experienced, that's the message he'd received.

Dan understood immediately.

Kids are constantly constructing meaning from us.

From what gets our attention.

From what gets ignored.

From when we're available.

From when we're not.

And Dan had learned that lesson himself.

Years ago, he worked at a therapeutic school.

A kid would come up when things were going well and want to talk.

Dan was busy.

There was work to do.

There were other kids who needed him.

So the conversation might have to wait.

But if a kid completely melted down?

If someone started throwing chairs?

Suddenly Dan dropped everything.

Now that kid had his complete attention.

Eventually Dan realized what he might accidentally be teaching:

Mr. Dan cares about me when I'm at my worst.

Nobody ever said that.

Nobody intended to teach it.

But kids notice where our energy goes.

And man, that's uncomfortable to think about as a parent.

How often does the kid behaving quietly get less of us because he's making our life easy?

How quickly does the kid creating problems suddenly get our full attention?

How often do we point out the C on the report card before mentioning the three As?

How many things are our kids learning from us that we've never actually said?

That's the scary part.

We don't get to choose every lesson our kids learn from us.

Sometimes they learn from what repeatedly gets our attention.

Toward the end of our conversation, Dan and I started talking about our own fathers and grandfathers.

And I think there's a temptation in conversations about parenting to turn previous generations into villains.

Our dads didn't talk about feelings enough.

They didn't say "I love you" enough.

They weren't affectionate enough.

Maybe some of that is true.

But it's also incomplete.

I told Dan about my grandfather.

After my grandmother died, I remember him getting emotional and telling us, "Thank you."

Those words don't look like much written on a page.

But I knew what he meant.

That may have been about as close as he knew how to get to saying everything he was feeling.

The love was there.

The vocabulary for expressing it was different.

And I think that's true for a lot of men.

Dan talked about his own family in similar terms.

Our fathers learned how to be fathers from men who learned from the men before them.

Every generation inherits something.

Some of it is worth keeping.

Some of it needs expanding.

Some of it needs leaving behind.

I've realized that my son needs affection differently than I did.

He needs the hug.

He needs me to say it.

So I hug him.

I tell him I love him.

That doesn't require believing my father failed me.

It doesn't require resenting my grandfather.

It simply means my son is a different kid.

And I'm trying to become the father he needs.

Maybe that's what generational progress actually looks like.

Not rejecting everything our fathers gave us.

Not blindly repeating it either.

Appreciating what they gave us.

Keeping the good.

Adding what was missing.

And giving our kids a slightly better starting point than the one we had.

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Dan a question I've started finding more interesting the longer I'm a dad.

Twenty years from now, when his kids are adults, how does he hope they describe him?

His answer wasn't complicated.

He hopes they know their dad cared deeply about them.

That he loved them.

That they could come to him.

And even when Dad didn't know the answer, he'd help them figure it out.

That's a pretty good definition of success.

Because maybe becoming the dad your kid needs isn't about finally mastering fatherhood.

Maybe there isn't a version of this where you figure everything out.

Your kids keep changing.

Their needs keep changing.

You keep changing.

The job is to pay enough attention to the person standing in front of you that you're willing to keep changing with them.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how quickly our kids are growing up.

Maybe we should remember something else, too.

Your kids are growing up.

So are you.

Check out Dan’s website

Until next time—
keep the fires burning.
– Clay

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