So here's one of the ways that I almost destroyed my relationship with Casey.

It was little stuff.

Casey would do something, not up to my standards, and because I had control issues and I know how things are supposed to be,

and you do everything with excellent son and how are you ever going to be successful in life if you can't follow through on simple instructions.

It just seemed like I was never happy with him and nothing I just said was false or wrong. It's just that it isn't motivating. It doesn't work. It destroys a kid.

So Casey would disappoint me, which wasn't hard, and I'd stand a few feet away and just slowly shake my head in disappointment.

Just that small little body posture,

suddenly shaking my head in disappointment

and I thought I was communicating,

hey, your dad's disappointed,

you should do it a different way, do better.

And what Casey told me a few years later was this, Dad, all I felt was demeaned, like I was

an utter failure and disappointment. And the truth is that you sent the message that you never

really accepted me, that I was constantly

disappointing you, and so I just gave up. And that's when we were at the lowest point of

our relationship. It was a simple shaking of my head and it nearly destroyed my son, his

confidence in our relationship. And that was all about my control issues, right? This is this

way I've always done it by God it served me well and you

should do it that way as well and I fell into that trap that we often do as

parents of thinking my job is to walk around catching our kids doing things wrong or what I perceived as wrong

even though I later realized sometimes they were just preferences right so my job is

walk around catching kids doing things wrong and then correcting your kids.

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