Apologize to Your Kids. Forgive Your Father

This one moves in three parts: the apology you owe your kids, the dance you’re still in with your own dad, and the forgiveness that sets you free. It starts with a familiar scene, a father raising his voice over homework and suddenly recognizing it, because he lived the same moment on the other side of the table as a kid. Psychologist Dr. Kelly Flanagan, Ryland Englehart of Cafe Gratitude, and restaurateur Michael Chernow each take a piece of the same question, and together they cover more ground on fathers and forgiveness than almost anything else in our archive.

Why apologizing is a gift, not a failure

Flanagan’s answer starts by reframing what most parents get backwards. A parent who’s perfect, who never makes a mistake, actually sends kids the wrong message: that mistakes aren’t allowed.

“To make mistakes and then apologize is actually a gift that you’re giving to your kids.”

The apology itself is what teaches a child they don’t have to be perfect either. That’s a different frame than most men grew up with, where an apology from a parent was rare enough to remember for decades.

Prove him wrong, or make him proud

Englehart traces a wound that isn’t dramatic, just a father who wanted him to be a better writer, and a boy who kept feeling his father’s quiet disappointment at the dinner table. He names the pattern most sons live inside without ever naming it:

“Fathers want their kids to be great, and they want them to be better than they are… it oftentimes results in a lifelong [pursuit] of what that man is aspiring to become, to prove his father wrong or to make his father proud.”

Englehart is careful to frame it with gratitude, not blame. The dance with his dad is still running today, decades in, and naming it is what let him start making amends instead of just repeating it.

The forgiveness that finally arrived

Chernow’s answer is the heaviest stretch of this one, and worth sitting with. His father died while Chernow was deep in addiction, their relationship already fractured. For years, he says, he hated him. Making peace came later, unexpectedly, in the middle of a breathwork session, when a single thought surfaced without warning:

“Every decision that I’ve ever made in my life, good and bad, has been in an effort to get my father to tell me he loved me.”

What followed wasn’t a tidy resolution. It was permission to stop chasing something his father could no longer give him, and to build, in his own home now, the thing he’d been missing.

Hear the full conversations: Dr. Kelly Flanagan here, Ryland Englehart here, and Michael Chernow’s here. For the full list of books this community keeps recommending, click here.