I remember my first night at university, living away from home for the very first time. My phone rang, and it was my mother. She knew I was anxious about talking to new people and that I probably wouldn’t have ventured out of my room yet, so she just phoned so that I wouldn’t feel alone.
What’s stayed with me all these years isn’t that she called. It’s the particular feeling it created — that I was held, even from a distance. That someone who knew me completely was thinking about me in that exact moment. I hadn’t asked her to call. She just did, because that was who she was, who she always had been as I was growing up, and who she always would be even as I emerged into adulthood.
I think about that now when I look at my own children. I wonder, sometimes, what they’ll remember. Which ordinary moments will surface, years from now? If my own experience with my parents (and psychology) is anything to go by, it’s likely to be the following, and there’s a good chance they’ll apply to you, too.
1. The unique bedtime ritual you create.
It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It doesn’t have to be Pinterest-worthy or particularly imaginative. It just has to be yours — warm, consistent, and repeated night after night until it becomes as natural as breathing.
The particular question always asked: “What was the best bit of your day?” The funny knock before coming in. The specific way the duvet is tucked. The way “Doug” the stuffed dog always goes on about how much he likes peaches (don’t ask). The song, or the phrase, or the door left exactly two inches open because that was the rule, and deviating from it was simply not acceptable.
These rituals are not memorable as individual events — no child lies awake at forty-three, treasuring their bedtime ritual. What they carry is the feeling those bedtimes created: that the world was manageable, that this was a safe place, that someone would be there tomorrow.
That feeling becomes neurologically encoded through sheer repetition. It becomes, in the most literal sense, the baseline of what safe feels like — and they will spend the rest of their lives, often without knowing it, oriented toward recreating it.
Whatever your ritual is: keep doing it until they tell you it’s time to stop.
2. The times when you get it wrong and apologize for it.
In the long list of things parents worry about, apologizing to their child rarely features — and yet it probably should. Not because parents are getting everything wrong, but because the moments of genuine repair are among the most formative a child can witness.
When a parent apologizes — really apologizes — it teaches several things at once. That adults make mistakes. That accountability is possible without the world ending. That love doesn’t have to be conditional on getting everything right.
Psychologists talk about rupture and repair — the cycle of things going wrong between people and then being put right. It turns out this cycle, handled well, is actually one of the strongest builders of secure attachment.
A child who watches their parent say, “I shouldn’t have shouted at you earlier. That wasn’t fair. I’m sorry,” absorbs something they’ll carry into every relationship they ever have: that conflict doesn’t have to mean abandonment. That love doesn’t require the pretense of perfection. That people trust and respect you more when you own your mistakes.
That might be one of the most useful things a parent can give a child who is about to go out into a world full of other imperfect humans.
3. The times you tell them you’re proud of them for something small.
Not the A grade. Not the winning goal. Not the performance or the prize or the measurable achievement that was easy to point to and celebrate. This is about something more subtle and considerably more powerful.
It’s about the moment you notice something small — the way they were patient with a younger sibling, the way they kept trying at something that wasn’t coming easily, the way they handled a socially tricky situation with more grace than most adults would have managed — and you named it. Specifically. Out loud.
“I noticed how kind you were to him today. That took real patience.”
That kind of pride lands differently because in a society that’s obsessed with worth = performance (and don’t get me started on that rant), it separates a child’s value from their output. It tells the child: I am paying attention to you — not just your results.
In my humble opinion, that distinction is one of the most psychologically protective things a parent can offer. Children who grow up knowing they are seen beyond their achievements develop a far more stable sense of self — one that doesn’t crumble the first time they fail at something.
4. The way you talk about yourself when you think they aren’t listening.
This one tends to stop people cold, and it should. Most parents are careful about the language they use around their children. Far fewer think about the language they use about themselves — and that, it turns out, is where some of the most significant modelling happens.
A mother catching her reflection before the school run and mutters, “Ugh, I look awful today.” A father waving away a compliment with “Oh, I’m useless at that.” Neither registers it as a significant moment. The child in the room registers both.
Children don’t just inherit genetics. They inherit emotional habits. The internal monologue of a parent has an uncanny way of becoming, without anyone noticing or intending it, the internal monologue of the child. And there’s no judgment here — most of us were handed these habits by our own parents, who got them from theirs.
The good news is that this runs both ways. The parent who says “I’m really proud of how I handled that” or “I’m not great at this yet, but I’m getting better” is laying down tracks their child will run on for decades. You don’t have to be relentlessly upbeat. Just conscious. Pause before the self-deprecation and choose the version you’d want them to say about themselves one day.
5. The moment you stop what you’re doing and really listen.
Picture a Tuesday afternoon. Your child appears at your elbow while you’re in the middle of cooking, replying to an email, or staring into the middle distance after a long day. What they want to tell you feels, from where you’re standing, fairly minor. From where they’re standing, it’s everything.
The act of genuinely stopping — not the distracted “mm-hmm” while you stir the pasta, but actually turning around and saying “tell me” — does something pretty epic to a child’s developing sense of self. Psychologists call this attunement: the experience of being truly met by another person. When a child feels it, they don’t just feel heard. They feel like they matter.
Of course, we can’t be fully present all the time. That’s unrealistic. Most of us are juggling a gazillion responsibilities at once, and as such, we’re all guilty of the half-present response. Myself (very much) included. The point here isn’t perfection — it’s patterns.
Children who experience being genuinely listened to across hundreds of ordinary moments build something powerful that carries them through adulthood: the belief and confidence that their thoughts and experiences are worth expressing.
6. The moment you let them fail and don’t try to fix it.
Every parenting instinct is oriented toward protection. When your child is hurting, the urge to smooth it over, to fix it, to make it stop, is not a flaw — it’s love, in its most visceral form. This point isn’t a criticism of that instinct. It’s an exploration of what happens when, occasionally, you override it.
The child who didn’t get the part in the school play. The friendship that fell apart. The project that didn’t win. The parent who sits with them in that disappointment — who doesn’t rush to “you’ll be fine, it doesn’t matter” — but instead stays present in the discomfort alongside them, is sending a completely different message. Hard things are survivable. You don’t have to avoid difficulty to be okay.
Children who experience manageable failure, with a parent beside them rather than solving it for them, develop a fundamentally different relationship with challenge. They build resilience — not the performative “dust yourself off” kind, but the inner knowing that they can feel something hard and come through the other side. Holding space while your child cries is genuinely one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. But the psychology of resilience teaches us that it’s also one of the most important.
7. The times you’re silly with them and forget to be the adult for a moment.
The spontaneous kitchen dance. The Lego session that somehow became two hours. The elaborate funny voice for their favorite stuffed dog, who is still, seemingly obsessed with peaches (again, don’t ask). The moment something made both of you laugh so hard that something came out of someone’s nose, and neither of you could look at each other for the rest of dinner.
These moments do something that the more earnest parenting behaviors can’t quite replicate. They create a specific kind of safety — the child learns that joy is something that can be shared with this person, not just rules and routines and guidance. It signals vulnerability and authenticity, which research shows creates a closer bond and more open communication between parent and child.
And there’s also something important here about a child’s own permission to be joyful. Children who grow up with a parent who can be truly, unselfconsciously silly tend to have a freer relationship with fun. They get early permission to not take everything so seriously — and that permission, granted over hundreds of small ridiculous moments, is a gift that follows them everywhere.
Frankly, the willingness to be a bit ridiculous might be one of the most underrated parenting skills there is.
8. The way you handle your own hard times in front of them.
There seems to be a widespread and damaging belief that good parents shield their children from life’s difficulties. That we should hold it together, put on a brave face, and never let them see us struggle. The psychology says otherwise.
Children who only ever see a parent in full control don’t learn how to feel difficult things — they learn to suppress them. They absorb the message that composure is always required and that hard feelings should be managed out of sight.
In contrast, a child who watches their parent cry during difficult times, and then watches them lean on people they trust and slowly move forward, is absorbing something far more useful: that difficult feelings are survivable, and that asking for help is something the strongest people do.
Of course, there needs to be an important caveat here: there is a meaningful difference between a parent who is honest about their own difficulties and a parent who makes their child responsible for carrying them. One gives them a window into real life. The other parentifies the child by handing them a weight they’re not built to carry yet.
You don’t have to be unbreakable. You just have to be real, and appropriately so. Children can handle more truth than we tend to give them credit for — what does more damage is often the version of reality where hard things don’t exist, and no one ever talks about them.
9. The way you speak about other people and what it teaches them about the world.
Children are building their map of the world in those early years, and we parents are the primary cartographers. As such, what we say about the neighbors, the people on the news, the frustrating colleague, the autistic child who behaves differently than other kids — all of it is cartography, whether you realize it or not.
No judgment here—everyone vents, and we all have our own biases and life experiences that color how we view things. Everyone has said something in the kitchen that they’d prefer their child hadn’t filed away and helpfully repeated at full volume to the subject in question.
But the question worth sitting with is simply: what’s the general weather of how you talk about other people? Is it mostly curious? Mostly fair? Mostly kind? Or is it suspicious, judgmental, and closed-minded? Because that weather, experienced day after day across a whole childhood, becomes the climate your child grows up in, and eventually, the climate they create around themselves.
10. The times you let them make a real decision (and respect it).
Autonomy is one of the most fundamental psychological needs a human being has — and it doesn’t switch on at eighteen. Children feel the pull of it from remarkably early, and the moments in which a parent genuinely honors it are ones that leave a mark.
This isn’t about handing a seven-year-old the car keys or letting a child opt out of school because they’d rather watch television. It’s about the parent who asked “What do you think we should do?” and then listened (actually listened) to the answer. The parent who let the child choose the plan for the morning (within reason), or weighed in on a genuine household decision, or was asked their opinion on something and had that opinion visibly, tangibly matter.
It tells them: you are a person with agency in this world. Your perspective has value. You don’t have to wait until you’re older to have ideas worth hearing. Children who receive that message generally grow into adults who believe in themselves — and that’s a fairly good return on asking “what do you reckon?”
11. The moment you choose them over your phone.
I’m not here to make anyone feel terrible about their screen time. Mine is worse than I’d like. We are all navigating this, and it is genuinely difficult.
But. The specific moment this point is about is the one where your child runs in — to show you something the dog did, or a drawing, or a cartwheel they’ve been perfecting all afternoon — and you put the phone face down and give them your full, unhurried attention. Even just for three minutes.
What that communicates is not small: you are more interesting to me than anything on that screen. In a world that is competing relentlessly for everyone’s attention, being someone’s deliberate, chosen focus is an extraordinary experience. Children feel this acutely. They also feel the opposite — the half-present parent, the “wow, yeah, amazing” delivered to a screen.
And what’s more, the relationship we have with our screens is what our children will likely develop, too. And I think most of us would probably agree that it’s not a lesson any parent would consciously choose to teach.
12. The times you read to them, even after they can read themselves.
There is something about being read to that no amount of independent reading quite replicates. The particular voice used for a villain. The dramatic pause before the chapter’s end. The physical closeness of it — a child tucked in beside a parent, both of them inhabiting the same imagined world at the same time.
Reading aloud to a child who technically no longer needs you to is one of the most intimate things a parent can do. Because it signals, clearly and without needing to be stated: this is not about utility. We’re not doing this because you can’t manage it yourself. We’re doing it because we love it, because it’s ours, because this is one of the ways we choose to be together.
It builds imagination and empathy, yes, but more than that, it builds a particular kind of closeness that is, in its own way, irreplaceable. So if you can, find a good book. Do the voices properly. It matters more than it looks like it does.
13. The times you tell them you love them, for no reason at all.
Not at bedtime, as part of the ritual. Not after something went well. Not as a response to them saying it first. Just — unprompted, in the middle of an entirely ordinary moment — “I love you, you know.”
The randomness is precisely the point. Love expressed in response to a trigger — a milestone, a bedtime, a reciprocal exchange — is wonderful, but it carries an inadvertent implication: that love is something that belongs to particular moments.
Love that arrives out of nowhere, attached to nothing, signals something different and considerably more powerful. It says: this is not situational. It is not earned or conditional or timed. It simply exists, constantly, whether anything is happening or not.
A child who receives that kind of love — the kind that shows up uninvited on a random afternoon for absolutely no reason — internalizes something that becomes the bedrock of how they move through the world. They don’t have to perform for it. They don’t have to maintain it. It is simply there.
Of course, words alone are meaningless without the actions to back them up, but sometimes our children do need to hear them. The knowledge of our unconditional love, instilled through our actions and a hundred unprompted “I love you, you knows,” may be the single most enduring thing a parent can give. Everything else, in many ways, grows from it.
Final thoughts…
You will get things wrong. Every parent does. But here’s what the psychology keeps coming back to: it’s the accumulation of small, ordinary moments — the listening, the repairing, the showing up, the being real — that shapes a child far more than the big gestures or the perfect decisions. You don’t need to get everything right. You just need to be there for those small moments. Because, as with most things in life, it’s the small things that have the biggest impact.
