Fact Check Me: How the Hell Do We Make Good Humans?

How do we make sure our kids turn out right?

Not perfect. Not prodigies. Not those walking GPA billboards everyone pretends to be raising.

No — just whole. Just human. Just less damaged than we are, because let’s be honest… we’re all carrying dents from shit that never should’ve happened. And pretending those dents made us “stronger” is just a poetic way of saying, I never healed properly.

We don’t need to repeat that cycle.

Our job — the whole job — is to send our kids into the world like finely tuned race cars. Not duct-taped jalopies stumbling across the start line, half-broken before they even hit eighteen.

You tune a race car with intention. Precision. Care. You don’t throw it down a gravel road and hope trauma makes it “resilient.”

You build it. You prepare it. You give it a full pit crew. Maybe a karate teacher in the mix — someone to round out the corners and tighten the bolts you didn’t even know were loose.

Because here’s the truth:

We can’t fully fix ourselves.

But we can damn well compensate so our kids don’t start life already bleeding from wounds we walked into.

So what does it take?

It’s not complicated. It’s just hard.

You love those little bastards like your life depends on it — because theirs does.

You drive them everywhere they need to be. Even when you’re tired. Even when you don’t want to.

You don’t yell when they talk back — or at least you work like hell to catch yourself before you do.

You give them everything they need, and almost everything they want, because kids who have enough grow into adults who aren’t starving for validation, attention, or chaos.

You hug them. You kiss them. You ruffle their hair.

You show them respect long before they earn it back — because that’s how they learn what respect even feels like.

You apologize when you screw up.

Hell, sometimes you apologize when you didn’t screw up.

Not because you’re weak — but because you’re teaching them that relationships matter more than ego.

You sit with them. Even if it’s just a show on Netflix that you don’t give half a shit about.

You go to their games and clap like they just won the Olympics even when they’re objectively terrible. Because sometimes mediocrity is the soil where confidence grows.

You make their world safe.

And in that safety, they learn courage.

They learn vulnerability.

They learn how to be people.

You raise kids who know their emotions instead of being hijacked by them.

Kids who can talk about fear and anger the same way they talk about homework.

Kids who aren’t confused by difference, but curious about it — because you taught them the differences we share are what make life interesting.

And then?

You let them go.

You open the garage door and release the machine you spent eighteen years engineering — tuned, polished, loved, steady — and you watch them tear into the world and take it by the balls.

The youth will rule.

They always do.

But the next generation? They’re going to rule with empathy, with intelligence, with balance — because of us.

So don’t fact check me.

Just take a bow, my fellow parents.

Take a damn bow.