Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective

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A question I often ask myself lately is wether I am the person that I want my children to grow up to be. Children, and human beings in general, learn mostly by imitation. We look at how others behave and we try to emulate their behaviour. Small children copy everything their parents do. The good parts and the bad parts. This is why it’s very important to stop and ask yourself if your behaviour is the right behaviour you want emulated in your children.

"Do you want your children to be like you?" This simple question is useful to reflect, discover and fix our imperfections. We are all full of all sorts of bad behaviour. Instead of accepting our faults we should strive to fix them, so that we don’t pass them onto our children.

Accepting that one has an imperfection is the first necessary step towards improvement. Some are easy to fix while some might take years. But we need to first accept that we have them and then try to fix them.

Every one of us has mountains of undiscovered potential. Sadly, we often don’t believe in our own potential. We think we already reached the end of our abilities. This is why children are amazing. They have so much potential. And it's so visible, beautiful and exciting. It is our duty as parents to help them reach their potential.

But to achieve this difficult goal, to help them reach their potential, we must first believe in our own yet-to-be-discovered potential. And we must do the hard work of fixing our imperfections and becoming the person that we could be. It won’t be easy, but it will all be worth it when our children grow up with the memory of parents whom not only loved them but also helped them realise their own potential.

I hope to one day have the wisdom, strength of character, intelligence and resilience of my father. And I hope that one day my children will aspire to be like me.

If you liked this article, follow me on twitter. I write about once a month about software engineering practices and programming in general.

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