At the moment, I’ve been a father for a little over three years which means I’m an expert and I know everything about being a parent. Just kidding, I feel as thought I have a long way to go and I’m not sure I’ll ever get there. In the mode of “I’m teaching them, but they are really teaching me,” here are a few of the life lessons that I’ve picked up on while raising my two sons.

1) Change Occurs Fast

I’m not sure that there is a truer cliché phrase when it comes to being a parent than “The days are long,
but the years are short.” When you are raising two high energy boys, the days can seem like a scramble
and sometimes all you want to do is get to the end of the day. Telling your son to get his hand out of his
own butt several times a day can be exhausting. Then you look back and pictures of them and you
realize how much they’ve changed in such a short time.

They grow and change so fast that it’s hard to keep up. The same thing happens in life. Changes occur all
around us and it’s up to us to continuously adapt to those changes. We also should be careful to take a
breath and soak in what’s going on around us. Life is made of up a million small moments, every once in
a while, pause a second to really experience it.

2) Life Happens in Front of You, not Your Phone

I’m very guilty of this and it’s something that I’m continuously trying to work on. I get it, our phones are
very addicting and if we put them down for too long, we might miss something (although probably not).
My kids are growing up in front of me and they deserve my full attention. It’s OK to put the phone down
in another room and not check it for a few hours, there are fewer emergencies than you think. Do I
really want the primary memory of my two sons to be their father staring into a phone?
The real magic happens in front of you. It might be something funny that my son says or does. Even if
you don’t have kids, there may be a beautiful sunset to take in or an opportunity to have a new
experience or connect with a loved one.

3) Ask for Help

“I can’t do it Daddy!” is a phrase that I hear from my son pretty frequently. He may try to do something,
but if he can’t, he will ask for help. Unfortunately, I think we lose that skill as an adult. It may be pride or
imposter syndrome kicking in but asking for help when you need it is not a weakness. It is alright to say
you don’t know and ask someone who does know the answer. Is it better to fumble around, waste time
and have a worse outcome? Is it better to give the wrong answer quickly or to give the right answer
later?

4) Have Fun

One of the cool traits of kids is that they mainly want to do anything that is fun. Their whole life revolves
around play. Admittedly, as adults we can’t have fun all the time, but we should look for ways to
incorporate more fun into our lives. How can we make work for fun? How do we surround ourselves
with more fun people? Ultimately, we get one chance at life, so why not make it as fun as possible? It’s
what your five-year-old self would do.

Those are a few of my life lessons that I’ve taken away from my kids. I hope that as they grow
older that there are more things that I can learn from them. I’ll promise to take more of the small
moments in, put my phone down more, ask for help when I need it and to have more fun. I hope you do
too