As each of you have grown up and moved out of our home, I often wonder what I have not taught you that you really needed to know. Each time one of you announced that you were moving out and everything inside of me started tearing up, I realized my shortcomings and inadequacies as a dad. It is times like that which remind me of how and where I have “missed the boat.”

I don’t want you to think about today’s writing as a melancholy “I should have” statement because that is not the point. The reality is that I cannot transfer everything I learned as a child to you, even though at times I wish I could desperately. You need to learn your way. The reality is that as a parent I was often NOT sure about what to tell you and what to avoid. I simply did not have answers. At the times she needed to be, God placed your mom there to fill in the needed blanks. As a parent you too will find times when you simply do not have answers, the capacity to make things better or solve their problems. At those times, I think it is ok to let your children endure frustration and seek their own answers.

Yes, I made many mistakes, but one of the most problematic in my mind was trying to solve all your problems for some of you. Many dads are like me, wanting to fix everything for their family. Not that this is bad, but it leaves little to the imagination and creates an unrealistic expectation from the child. Children must, at some point, learn to deal with life’s challenges so they can maintain their own sanity. Often when I solved your problems for you, I deprived you an opportunity of being creative and learning to reason through the source of a problem. So by providing solutions, I missed opportunities to help you have a basis for confronting, reasoning and meeting challenges head on. They were put off for another day. I did not understand that real love (at times) embraces pain, stress and frustration rather than providing answers. It’s like learning how to analyze, deduce and solve a math problem.

So the point of my musings today is that I realize that passing on everything I knew was not what you needed and it would not always make your life better. To give you all the right instructions and answers would require that I be God – and I am a far cry from that, as you well know. If God wanted you to have all the answers so you and your children were perfect, He would have given them to you. So it is obvious that giving you all the answers and solving all your problems is NOT what is best for you. What IS best is for you to make mistakes, but to grow from them. Beating yourself up for the mistakes in life would rob you of the embarrassment factor that will cause you to get better. Neither you, nor your child, need to be perfect – you need to accept your imperfection because you will generally learn more from those mistakes than you will from a flawless performance.

Don’t let fear, doubt or hatred creep into your psyche and rob you of the joy God offers when you wake up each morning. That’s how God planned the process and it is a good process. Don’t blame yourself for your children’s mistakes – they are an opportunity to learn, AND grow YOU as well as them. Please don’t think this is an excuse or justification for my imperfection – I feel it daily as I see some of my mistakes lived out in your lives. See this message as the truth that God knows what you need to be the person He created you to be, much better than your dad.

Love Dad