Let me paint a picture.
Something small happens. Your kid pushes a button. Maybe they’re being defiant. Maybe they said something that rubbed you the wrong way. Maybe it was nothing, genuinely nothing; and somehow you still went from zero to full explosion in about four seconds.
And then comes the part nobody talks about.
The guilt. The internal monologue. “Why did I do that? I know better than this. I said I wasn’t going to be that dad.” You replay the moment. You feel terrible. You apologize. You tell yourself tomorrow will be different.
And then it happens again.
Here’s what I’ve had to sit with in my own parenting journey, and honestly it changed the way I parent more than anything else I’ve ever learned: your reaction in that moment had almost nothing to do with your kid.
The thing that’s actually driving it
In Buddhist philosophy there’s a concept called samskaras. The simplest way I can explain it is this - they are deep wounds woven into you from past experiences that create automatic reactions in the present. Like a car on autopilot. The moment happens, and before your brain even has a chance to process what’s going on, you’ve already reacted.
You’re not reacting to your child.
You’re reacting to something that happened to you a long time ago that your child accidentally stepped on.
I’ll give you a real example from my own life. A few months ago I was in Barnes and Noble with my son. I was trying to pick books with him, something I genuinely never got to do with my own father. My mom actually joked about it recently. She said “remember when we used to drop you off at the library and just leave?” And she laughed. And she’s right. That was just how it was.
So here I am, trying to create something for my son that I never had. And he looks at the books I picked and says “I don’t know why you’re wasting your money, I’m not reading those.”
I went to town. Full explosion.
When I sat with that moment later and actually looked at it honestly, I realized something. Part of his reaction might have been a little ungrateful and he acknowledged that and apologized. That part is true. But the other part that’s also true, the part I almost completely missed; is that I was furious because he was dismissing something I desperately wanted at his age and never got. That had nothing to do with him. That was entirely about me.
That’s an inner child wound showing up in real time. Simple as that. And I almost parented right over it without ever seeing it.
Why willpower will never be enough
Think about how many times you’ve told yourself you’re going to be more patient. Really committed to it. And think about how many times that commitment held up when things got real.
Willpower works until it doesn’t. And the reason it keeps failing isn’t because you lack discipline. It’s because you’re trying to use a conscious tool to override an unconscious pattern. Those two things are not operating on the same level. You cannot think your way out of something that isn’t happening in your thinking mind.
In Zen they talk about the space between stimulus and reaction. That tiny moment that exists between the thing that happens and how you respond to it. They say that’s where your freedom lives.
And I believe that completely. Because I’ve felt it. There are moments now where I catch it before it catches me. Where I notice the reaction rising and I actually get to choose.
But here’s what I’ve learned: that space doesn’t expand through willpower. It expands through self-knowledge. The more you understand what’s actually driving your reactions, the more that space opens up. The less you understand it, the faster it closes.
The practice that actually helps
You don’t need a complicated system for this. You need 5 to 10 minutes and a willingness to be honest with yourself.
After a reactive moment, or just at the end of a day, sit with this question: what did I need in that moment as a child?
Not what did my kid do wrong. Not how could I have handled it better. What did I need when I was his age that I didn’t get?
That question alone will start to surface things that no habit tracker or morning routine ever could. Because you’re not tracking behavior anymore. You’re tracking the root of the behavior. And that’s where actual change lives.
I put together a free shadow work and inner child guide specifically for dads with prompts exactly like that one. Click this link if you want to check it out.
This Friday on YouTube I’m going even deeper into something that most dads in this space completely avoid talking about: why you can’t seem to stay consistent with your own practices even when you know they work. That one drops Friday at 11am.
And if you missed last week’s video on the identity gap and why feeling like a fraud as a dad isn’t a parenting problem, that one is worth watching first. See Below.
See You Soon.
Odeani