Dale:  I want to give this tip a little bit differently than how people would typically give on the show. And hopefully this isn’t too rebellious of me, but that’s what I do, right?

My tip would be this:

I think a lot about, what am I going to do with my son when this situation arises, or if this should happen.

And I think it’s really important to be proactive with the way that you’re raising your kids. 100%, I think that that’s a good mindset, but, also there’s this mindset of peace, of acceptance of what’s happening in this child’s life, because they’re figuring their own shit out (for lack of a better term.) 

How are we nurturing leaders? Not, how are we imposing our will onto our kids to make sure that they don’t have the same problems we did. 

I was talking to one of my best friends, and he was explaining that one of his roles in his daughter’s lives is to be somebody that essentially helps them to right the ship.

When they do something wrong, to sit with them and say, “okay, so that was wrong, but what are we going to do better next time?” 

When I would do something wrong, my dad would come to me and just listen. He wouldn’t say, “what’d you do and what’d you learn from it?”

He would just listen. He would listen, and he would be empathetic inside of that situation and he would understand this fact:

At 18-years-old and even at 21-years-old, there is no one on this earth that has it all figured out, or that is so self-aware and situationally aware that they can take advice from a father and somehow compute that and change their life in that moment.

When you travel back in time and tell your 18-year-old self, the one thing that you wish you knew then, that 18-year-old looks you dead in the eye, turns around in silence, gets in his car, chugs a beer, throws it out the window, does a donut in the driveway, flicks you off and drives away.

Because that’s who we are.  And we have to come to terms that our children are literally clones of us.  So it doesn’t really matter how proactive we are about what we think is going to happen.

It’s about their journey.

So my tip is to enjoy all the suck, embrace it, and enjoy it.  There might be tears in that enjoyment — I know there was with my dad and I because I went through some pretty rough things at a couple of points in my life.

But I could always count on my father to listen.

I came to a realization that my dad would never judge, my dad would never give advice that was unwarranted.

Because a lot of us think that way, “Oh God, I don’t want to tell my dad, because he’s going to say these things that I already know he’s going to say.”

So just embrace it. Just love your kids. Let them figure out how they’re going to rise back up.