I tell people all the time that kids are walking around carrying little mirrors, and every time you look at them you are seeing yourself reflected back. Sometimes that reflection is great and it fills you with pride. Sometimes it stops you cold and you think, I should never have done that in front of them, because now they are holding onto it and playing it back in a way you never intended.
My oldest son is a perfect example of this. I am a sarcastic person by nature. I make a lot of jokes, some of them a little brash, and in our house everyone understands the tone and the intent. But my oldest picked up the sarcasm before he understood what sarcasm actually was, and he started using it outside of our family context where people did not have the same decoder. He was never meaning anything harsh by it, just like I was never meaning anything harsh by it, but the delivery without the context landed completely differently than either of us intended. I had to slow down, recognize that the example I was setting needed some adjustment, and have a real conversation with him about what sarcasm is, when it works, and when it does not. That conversation would never have needed to happen if I had been more thoughtful about what I was modeling in the first place.
There was another moment that went the other direction entirely. When my oldest was about three years old, my wife and I went to pick him up from daycare and the teacher pulled me aside to tell me that Adam had said the s word. I was genuinely puzzled because I do not curse, so I asked her to explain. Apparently a spider had been crawling toward one of the little girls in the class and my son looked at her and said, do not worry, I will shoot the spider for you. The s word was shoot. I showed the teacher the badge and the firearm on my hip, told her that my son absolutely knows what a gun is and understands that it is there to protect people, and that I was not only unbothered by what he said but genuinely proud of him for stepping up to protect a young lady. Because that is exactly how I am raising him.
Same mirror. Two very different reflections. Both of them mine.
The Only Thing You Can Actually Control
Sergio Altomare built a self-storage and private equity business alongside his wife, raised his daughter Stella in a home where both parents were fully engaged in building something, and arrived at a conclusion about fatherhood that I think is one of the most honest things any dad can say out loud. The only thing I can do is inspire and influence. I cannot make people do anything.
That is a hard truth to sit with if you are wired like most entrepreneur dads, because we are people who solve problems and drive outcomes and hold teams accountable for results. We are used to being able to pull levers and see things move. But your kids are not a team you manage. They are human beings you are shaping, and the shaping happens almost entirely through what they observe, not through what you instruct.
Sergio made a specific decision in August of 2021 that I think illustrates this better than any advice I could give. He stopped drinking, not because he had a problem with it necessarily, but because he did not want a glass of wine to be part of the mental image his daughter carried of him. He thought about what she was going to remember and he made a choice accordingly. That is not a dramatic story. It is a quiet, deliberate act of a man who understood that the mirror his daughter was carrying was being filled by his daily habits whether he was paying attention or not.
More Is Caught Than Taught
I do things differently every single day because my kids are watching, and I want to be honest about what that actually means in practice because it is not always glamorous.
It means I do not go out and golf as much as I might want to, not because golf is wrong but because I know what I would be missing if I did. It means I do not sit on the couch and check out when there are kids in the house who are absorbing everything around them. It means I do not let the business slide because they deserve to see what it looks like when a man takes his responsibilities seriously and follows through on them. And it means I am constantly paying attention to my emotional responses, my work ethic, the way I treat their mother, and the way I carry myself under pressure, because all of that is curriculum whether I intend it to be or not.
Most dads think parenting is what happens during the intentional moments, the conversations, the lessons, the advice. And those matter. But the actual formation of your child happens in the thousand small moments where you are not thinking about parenting at all. The way you talk about money at the dinner table. The way you respond when something goes wrong at work. The way you treat the person behind the counter at a restaurant. The way you handle being wrong. Your kids are cataloguing all of it and building a picture of what a man is supposed to look like, and that picture is going to be the wireframe they carry for the rest of their lives.
Building a Business Without Losing Your Family
Sergio and his wife run their businesses together and share the same office space, and the question of how to build something alongside your spouse without letting the business consume the marriage is one I am still working through myself. I will not pretend I have it perfectly figured out because I do not.
What I do know is that most couples who build together get into trouble in one of two ways. The first is that they never separate work from home, so there is no relief valve, no space where they are just husband and wife instead of business partners. If every dinner conversation circles back to what is happening at work, you are not eating dinner with your family. You are having a business meeting at a table where your kids are sitting. Over time that wears on everyone, including the kids who are absorbing a version of life where work is never actually off.
The second problem is communication, or more specifically the failure to figure out how to communicate with your spouse in a business context versus a marriage context. How you give feedback to an employee is not how you talk to your wife. How you resolve a disagreement in a business negotiation is not how you resolve a disagreement at home. These are different relationships that require different registers, and if you try to run your marriage like a business or your business like a marriage you are going to create problems in both directions. Figuring out each other’s strengths, respecting each other’s lanes, and communicating with the right tone for the right context is foundational work that most couples skip because they assume love is enough to sort it out. It is not. Love is the reason you do the work. Communication is the work itself.
What to Do With This
Audit your daily habits the way your kids would see them. Spend one week watching yourself through your child’s eyes. Not what you intend to model but what you are actually demonstrating. How do you handle frustration? What do you do with your downtime? How do you talk about other people? How do you talk about money? What gets your attention most consistently? That audit will tell you more about what you are teaching your kids than any parenting book ever could.
Make one specific change based on what you see. Sergio stopped drinking. You do not have to make a dramatic gesture. You just have to pick one thing you noticed in the audit and change it deliberately. One habit, one pattern, one response that does not reflect the man you want your kids to remember. Start there.
Separate work from home on purpose. Set a boundary that is real and that everyone in your household knows about. Whether that is no work talk at the dinner table, a hard stop time on business calls, or a rule that weekends belong to the family, the specifics matter less than the fact that the boundary exists and you actually hold it.
Figure out how to disagree well with your wife. Your kids are watching how you and their mother handle disagreement, and whatever they see is what they are going to replicate in their own relationships someday. You do not have to be perfect. You just have to be honest about whether the way you handle conflict is something you would want your kids to carry into their marriages.
Give them something worth mirroring. That is ultimately what this all comes down to. You are going to be reflected back to yourself through your children whether you are ready for it or not. The only question is whether you like what you see when it happens.