My nine-year-old told his brother he couldn't play right now because he was "slammed."
Nine years old. Slammed.
He was sitting on the living-room floor with a half-built Lego set (that was the crushing workload) and he delivered the line with a little exhale I recognized instantly, because it's mine. The word is mine. The exhale is mine. The whole tiny performance of importance is mine, coming out of a fourth-grader.
I laughed. And then, about ten seconds later, I stopped laughing.
Because I have given that kid a hundred small lectures about kindness, effort, patience, gratitude. I have taught him constantly.
And I can't point to a single lecture that stuck the way "slammed" stuck: a word I never once taught him, that he absorbed straight through his skin just by living near me.
The two curriculums
Every parent runs two schools at once, whether they know it or not.
The first school is the one we're proud of. It has a curriculum: the dinner-table talks, the teachable moments, the values we say out loud. Work hard. Be kind. Put your phone down. Don't sweat small stuff.
The second school has no curriculum, no schedule, and no tuition, and it's the only one they never skip.
It's just us, observed. How we actually talk about work when we think it's adult conversation. What our face does when we check email. Whether we reach for the phone at red lights. How we treat the waiter, the slow driver, our own body, their mother. What we do when we're wrong.
The first school teaches what we believe. The second school teaches what we are. And when the two schools disagree, the kids believe the second one every single time.
I tell my boys screens aren't that important, while checking mine at their games "just for a second." I tell them rest matters, while narrating my own busyness like a badge. I tell them how you treat people is everything, and they watch, with the pitiless attention of small anthropologists, how I talk about the colleague who frustrates me.
They're not listening to me. They're studying me. There's a difference, and the difference is everything.
Your kids don't become what you tell them. They become what you are, and they're taking notes on the version of you that shows up when you're not teaching.
Gary
I think about a colleague from years ago, I'll call him Gary, who had a rule I found strange at the time.
Gary was a talker in the OR like the rest of us, but he never once, in all the years I worked near him, complained about his job in front of his kids.
Not "never complained." He wasn't fake. He'd tell them when a day was hard. But he refused to perform misery about work at the dinner table, because, as he told me once, "They're going to work for forty years. The first thing they'll ever know about work is how it made their dad act at dinner."
His kids are grown now. Both of them, from what I hear, love what they do. Maybe that's coincidence.
But I've come to believe Gary understood something most of us miss: he wasn't just living his relationship with work. He was broadcasting it, on a channel his kids could never turn off, so he decided to be intentional about the programming.
Meanwhile, I know what my channel has been broadcasting some seasons. "Slammed" told me exactly.
The audit
So I've started doing something uncomfortable. I call it the audit, and it takes one question:
If my sons grow up to treat their bodies, their work, their stress, and the people around them exactly the way I do, not the way I tell them to, how do I feel about that?
Run your own life through that question and I promise it will find you. It found me fast.
There are parts of my answer I'm proud of: they see me exercise, they see me apologize when I blow it, they see how I treat their mom.
And there are parts that made me wince: they have absolutely seen me answer "how was your day" with a sigh and a scroll. They've watched me preach presence while being a hologram at the kitchen counter, body present, mind at the hospital.
Here's the strangely hopeful part, though. The second school never closes, which means the syllabus can change today.
Every repaired habit gets broadcast just as loudly as the bad one did. The kids don't need a perfect model; honestly, a perfect model would teach them nothing about being human. What they need to catch is a person noticing and correcting, because that's the actual skill their whole life will run on.
The night after "slammed," I told my son the truth: that he'd learned that word from me, that I use it too much, and that I was going to try to stop acting like busy was a personality.
He looked at me like I'd apologized for the weather. But he heard it. Class was in session either way.
The bottom line
I don't want to hand any parent a new anxiety, because the second school can become one: the idea that every eye-roll is being recorded for someone's future therapist.
Breathe. Kids are not tape recorders; they're pattern detectors. One bad day teaches nothing. The pattern is the lesson, and patterns are exactly the thing you have the power to change.
And some of what they catch, you'll never control anyway. They're their own people, wired their own way, and they'll edit everything we give them. Good. That's the job working.
But the pattern you run every ordinary evening, that's yours. That's the class you're teaching tonight, whether you prepared a lesson or not.
So here's my question for you this week: If the people watching you closest became exactly what you are, not what you say, what's the one pattern you'd want to change before they finish taking notes?
Reply and tell me. I can't write back to everyone, but I read every single one.
That's all for this week.
See you next Saturday.