Well, my son is now five.

I woke up in the morning, threw in a quick workout, cycled to the mall, picked up his birthday cake, came home to set up for the party, and then he turned five. This feels extremely strange because I vividly remember doing something similar on his 4th, 3rd, 2nd, and 1st.

So here I am, passing the half-a-decade mark of being a dad, and what do I have to show for it?

Thinking about it, I’m struck by how much I’ve improved. It’s a weird thing to say because we tend to picture parenting as something you either do or don’t do (yes, there are absent parents). In fact, parenting has never really been thought of as something practicable, like a sport or skill, as something you can get sharper at. But it is, of course, because there’s a huge difference between parenting and parenting well.

Being a dad is a kind of vocation that demands hard, intentional work. And like the mastery of any skill in life, it does not happen overnight. Neither does it happen by accident, nor simply by parenting for many, many years.

At our recent creative-culture camp in Chiang Mai, Thailand, my wife and I were privileged to meet five dads from the five participating families (it could have been six, but one family had to pull out). The thing was, we had never had five dads. It was usually one or two or none at all because it was always the moms who brought the kids for such "experiences." So I told the team that this was kind of like a breakthrough moment for us, and that it altered the entire dynamic of the camp, in a positive sense obviously. In any case, it was a joy to see grown men in their 30s and 40s investing the time to reconnect with their wives and kids, but more importantly, to see that families could spend time in a safe space to discover what truly matters.

What about my own experience as a father? If I could be honest, I haven’t always been the dad I hoped I would be, with the last five years being nothing but an emotional, arduous process of figuring out not just my kid, but myself. How it was never about what is in it for me but what is in it for him. How it’s about practising and emphasising virtues that you clearly lack in your own life. How it’s about realising that every action, good or bad, gets mirrored back by the very kid you’ve been telling not to emulate.

From my position as a camp facilitator, I could observe the unique way each dad dealt with his kids, how they conversed and played, and how they handled the "ugly" side of things. This vantage point offered me a chance to reflect on my own journey with my son, which turns out to be the biggest blessing of all.

I realised that if we want to be good parents, it’s not enough to parent. We have to question, challenge, verify, and reflect upon every action we take. We have to hold ourselves accountable for the things we say and take responsibility for the expectations we set for them. We have to follow closely and care about the trends that are disrupting family unity (AI, social media addiction, hustle culture) and engage in an honest, ego-bruising review of how they are first impacting our own wellbeing. And like the mastery of any sport or skill, we have to practice and engage in trial and error. We have to commit, invest, sacrifice, and more importantly, as Lawrence of Arabia famously said, not mind that it hurts.

Only then can we get better at it.

And that’s really the idea behind all our overseas creative-culture camps, with the final one the year happening this November-December in Taipei, Taiwan. It will take place across three full days, and I’m so excited to bring the dads and moms and kids through the cultural aspects of one of the most beautiful nations in the world.

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