This past weekend I was watching our new favorite Christmas movie on Netflix, “The Christmas Chronicles.”
It is not new this year, but it was last year, and we probably watched it 10 times last year. This year it hit me a little different now being on the other side of 50 podcast episodes. It’s a great story about Christmas, loss in a family, but most importantly it highlights one of the most important gifts we give our kids.
The belief in themselves.
In the movie, the dad was a Firefighter and lost his life-saving others. And it cripples their son who didn’t get to say some words to his father, and now he is feeling lost and looking for meaning in all the wrong areas.
Luckily, he has a younger sister who isn’t ready to give up on him or Santa, and they begin an adventure about saving Christmas and bring everyone home.
There was a word at the end that came to the surface for me more than any other theme, and that is “confidence.”. As a father, this is one of the most significant responsibilities we have; we must raise confident men.
In the movie the son has a knife his dad gave him and on it, it says “A Pierce always sees it through” and it has a special meaning towards the end of the movie where the son reconnects with the lessons his dad gave him and how he can best stand up on his own.
It’s a great example of how our legacy lives well beyond our life and how the lessons we teach them can carry our family well beyond our time with them.
How many people do you know in your life that struggle to believe in who they are? I see a lot, including myself and it’s a daily practice for me to acknowledge that I have everything inside of me to change my life for the better.
I am a big believer that when we build strong, confident men, who understand their own power to create a life of there choosing, we give them the power shape the world.
The same confidence applies to raise strong confident women, that when a girl believes in herself more than what others say around her, she can step through anything.
If you look around our society today, many people seek confidence externally either through Instagram, Facebook, or ego. It looks good on the surface, but it leaves them empty on the inside because without that external validation it can often be challenging to deal with hardships.
It takes that internal self-love to move through difficult times. No amount of Instagram followers is going to help you move through the death of a parent.
Confidence is a crucial cornerstone of raising kids to be good adults, and as Military Dads we have a lot of life experiences we can use and leverage to help build that confidence up in our kids.
Remembering that when a child has the confidence to believe they can change the world by just being themselves, something crazy happiness, they generally do.
