The Beauty and The Burden of Giving More Than We Got

There’s a quiet promise many of us carry as fathers: “I want to give my kids more than I got.”

And usually, we’re not talking about (just) stuff. Not bigger houses or shinier toys. We’re talking about presence. About patience. About emotional safety. We want to be available in a way we might not have experienced ourselves.

It’s a powerful instinct. And a generous one. But if we’re not careful, it can also become costly—especially when we try to give what we never properly received, without building the reserves to sustain it.

That’s the danger: trying to parent from a place of depletion. It’s like putting everything on a credit card—one with compounding emotional interest. The more we push ourselves to give without looking after ourselves, the deeper the energetic debt becomes. Eventually, the repayments show up as stress, resentment, burnout. And often, the ones who feel it most are the very people we’re trying to care for.

(One of the barriers to looking after ourselves is that it feels selfish. Looking after ourselves isn’t selfish. It’s foundational. If we want to show up fully, we have to fill up first. Otherwise, we’re not leading from strength—we’re leading from fumes. Read this to help with that).

The truth is, many of us are trying to model something we never got to see.

• We didn’t grow up watching men have hard conversations about their emotions.

• We didn’t see them take a breath and re-center before reacting.

• We didn’t hear them apologise—not just for mistakes, but for how those mistakes made others feel.

But here’s the thing: most of them didn’t see it either. They weren’t holding back because they didn’t care. They were doing the best they could with what they had. In many cases, they just didn’t know another way.

That’s not blame. That’s context.

And it’s what makes our generation’s task both the problem and the privilege. We know better now. So we can do better. Not best - we don’t know best - we know better). We can be more conscious. More open. More connected.

We can’t retroactively fix the past. But we can choose what kind of fathers we want to be today. And when we do it with care for ourselves as well as our families, we give our kids more than we had—without losing ourselves in the process.

We’re not broken men trying to fix our children. We’re growing men, learning to raise our kids and ourselves at the same time.

That’s hard to do. It takes courage. It takes commitment. And chances are - it’s well worth it.