If I Could Do It Over
I was driving home from a work call, catching up with a friend of mine on the phone, when the conversation turned somewhere I didn't expect.
He started telling me about the ways he's had to rethink fatherhood over the years, the mistakes, the course corrections, the stuff nobody warns you about. Then he said something that stuck with me the rest of the drive. "If I could do it over, here's what I'd do differently."
That's not a sentence you hear very often from a guy who seems like he's got it together. So I listened.
He broke it down into four things.
1. Have dinner together at the table, as much as you possibly can.
Not in front of the TV, not scattered around the house eating whenever. At the table, together, every night you can manage it. He said it sounds small, but it's one of the only guaranteed slots in the day where everyone's actually in the same room with nothing else competing for their attention.
2. Spend intentional time together, every week, on purpose.
He called it family night. Board games, activities, hobbies, nothing involving a TV, a tablet, or a phone. Not "whatever's on" time. Planned time. He said the difference between intentional time and leftover time is the difference between actually knowing your kids and just living alongside them.
3. Study the Bible together, not just read it, actually study it.
He reads it regularly with his kids, goes through it verse by verse. Sometimes they'll watch something about what's going on in the world or the culture right now, break it down together, and he listens to what his kids actually think and question before they go back to the scripture to see what it says and how it applies to their real life. Not a lecture. A conversation.
4. Guard them from social media.
He was blunt about this one. Kids are exposed to more garbage than they need to be at ages they're not ready for it. Let them be kids. Let them stay innocent a little longer. Let them be healthy.
He wasn't handing me a parenting philosophy he picked up off a podcast. This was a guy who'd lived some of it wrong, changed course, and was telling me what actually mattered on the other side of it.
I've been turning it over since. None of it was a schedule hack or a productivity trick. Every single one of those four things was about being present instead of just being in the house. Being part of your kids' lives instead of just the guy who provides for them.
That's the whole reason Recess After Work exists. Not because I've got this figured out, my friend clearly has more of it figured out than I do, but because I want to be the dad who actually shows up when I hear "play with me," not just the guy who paid for the house they're playing in.
If you've got your own version of "if I could do it over," I'd genuinely like to hear it.