By Paul E. Skidmore III, Hillsborough County, FL
The question I ask myself more than any other
Every parent I know worries about keeping their kids safe, fed, and doing okay in school. Fewer people talk about the harder question underneath that: what kind of man is this kid actually going to become. That question sits with me every single day. Not in a heavy, anxious way. More like a compass I keep checking.
I don’t think there’s a finish line here. I think it’s a thing you build one ordinary day at a time, and you don’t always get to see the results while you’re building it.
The world doesn’t hand you a manual
I grew up as a latchkey kid. Nobody sat me down and walked me through how to handle disappointment, or how to treat people, or what it means to keep your word. I picked most of it up along the way, through things going right and things going badly wrong. That’s not a complaint. It’s just how it went for a lot of us.
The problem is, when nobody teaches you directly, you end up teaching yourself in whatever direction life happens to push you. Some of that direction is good. Some of it isn’t. I don’t want my own kids relying on luck the way I had to.
So I try to be intentional about it now, even in small moments. A kid doesn’t learn what integrity means from a lecture. They learn it from watching whether you actually do what you said you’d do, especially when it’s inconvenient.
Sports taught me something, but not the thing people assume
People assume sports build character because of the competition, the winning and losing. That’s part of it, but it’s not the part that mattered most to me. What sports actually gave me was structure. Somewhere to put my energy. Teammates who depended on me showing up.
For my own kids, I care less about whether they’re good at a sport and more about whether it gives them that same thing: a reason to be disciplined, a group of people counting on them, a coach who isn’t me telling them something true. Boys especially seem to need outside voices confirming the same lessons a parent is trying to teach. It lands differently coming from someone else.
Raising a son with autism has changed how I think about “strength”
One of my kids is autistic, and it’s pushed me to rethink what being a strong man even means. I used to think of it in fairly simple terms: toughness, not complaining, handling things on your own. Spending time learning about autism, and watching my own son navigate a world that isn’t built with him in mind, has stretched that definition.
Real strength, in his case, looks like patience. It looks like communicating in a way that takes real effort. It looks like advocating for himself in situations where the easy thing would be to shut down. I don’t want any of my sons thinking strength only looks like one thing. It shows up in different shapes, and I’d rather they recognize all of them.
The mistake I try hardest not to make
The mistake I watch a lot of dads make, myself included at times, is confusing being perfect with being present. You don’t need to have all the answers. You need to actually be there when the question comes up.
I’ve messed up plenty. I’ve been short with my kids when I shouldn’t have been, missed things I wish I’d caught sooner. What I try to do instead of beating myself up over it is just show back up the next day and try again. Kids don’t remember the one bad moment nearly as much as they remember the pattern of whether you kept coming back.
What I actually want for them
I don’t need my kids to have a specific job or a specific life. What I want is for them to be good to the people around them, to know how to fail without falling apart, and to keep growing instead of getting comfortable. That last one matters to me a lot. I don’t think you ever get to a point where you’ve learned enough. The day you think you have is usually the day you stop getting better.
If I can get my sons to understand that early, before life forces the lesson on them the hard way, I’ll consider that the win. Everything else is details.