Fatima

Many of us became parents without anyone ever teaching us how to be one. We grew into it through trial and error, carrying forward whatever our own parents modelled (or failed to model), often without understanding the “why” behind the things we do. I try not to leave my son to figure these things out the same way. At 7, I already explain to him how and why I do certain things as a father and as a husband, and what he should do when he faces similar situations later. He asks questions. I answer them as honestly as I can. Some of it is intentional, some of it is just life happening in front of him. For instance, when he complained about me travelling again for work, I told him, “I am crawling now so that you can fly later.” He didn’t fully get it then, but the point was still made. I’ve also allowed him to disagree with me, apologised to him when I was wrong, and taken corrections from him, where he is clearly in the right. Those small things have built his confidence and communication. We talked about contentment; that some people will have more than him, and he will also have more than some people, so he doesn’t grow up measuring his life against other children’s parents’ spending. These and more are valuable things to pass on to the next generation when he comes a parent or father. These are small, deliberate conversations and actions that many of us never got to have with our parents. They are simply me trying to show him, in real time, what responsible fatherhood and husbandhood look like, instead of hoping he somehow figures it out when he has his own family, like we did. Parenting is a skill, not pure instinct. Most people are clueless about it because nobody prepared them. If we do not deliberately teach our children how to parent while they are still children, by explaining our choices, modelling responsibility, answering their questions, and showing them both the duties and the boundaries of family life, many of them will enter parenthood the same way most of us did: unprepared, reactive, and repeating avoidable mistakes. The work of raising the next generation of parents starts now, not when they have children of their own.