Your Kids Are Keeping Score. They Just Never Tell You Until It's Too Late

On why the experiences you choose now are the dividends your kids collect for the rest of their lives and yours.

(Photo: My son and I in New York watching the historic Knicks finals in May.)

Puddle Jumpers came out on May 12th. I was in New York for the launch, running the kind of schedule that book releases produce. Back-to-back podcast interviews, some in-person appearances, the particular exhaustion of talking about yourself for ten hours straight, and trying to make it sound fresh every single time.

I had a book signing scheduled at Words Bookstore in Maplewood, New Jersey on a Wednesday night.

Great store. Amazing community. The kind of intimate independent bookstore event that actually matters for a book like this, where the whole point is the conversation, not the spectacle.

My son Tyler and I talked and agreed to meet up in NYC and get last-minute tickets to Game 5 of the Knicks-Cleveland playoff series at Madison Square Garden. When I purchased those tickets I didn’t check my calender and realized afterwards I had my signing on Wednesday at Words book store, the same night. Ahhh, crap.

I want to be transparent about what the math actually looked like in that moment, because I think the honest version of this decision is more useful than the cleaned up version.

The book signing was not optional in any casual sense. It had been promoted. People were coming. Moving it was going to create logistical headaches and disappoint the bookstore on a suboptimal rescheduled date. Wednesday was the right night for foot traffic. Friday, where I eventually moved it, was not.

The professional case for keeping the Wednesday signing was real and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

And then I thought about something I read in Bill Perkins’ book Die With Zero, which I come back to regularly and recommend to anyone who will listen.

Perkins makes a case that sounds almost offensively simple until you actually sit with it. Your life is not measured in dollars or achievements or LinkedIn endorsements.

It is measured in the memories you collect and the experiences you actually have. And more specifically, it is measured in the memories you create with the people you love at the precise seasons of life when those memories are available to be made.

Tyler is 19. He is at the University of Oregon studying business and finance. He is building his own life with his own schedule and his own priorities and his own gravitational pull toward his future.

The windows when we can both be in New York, when the Knicks are in a playoff series (1999!?), when there are two tickets sitting in my pocket, do not stay open indefinitely.

That particular combination of circumstances will not reassemble itself on demand. It existed on that Wednesday night and would not exist again.

The book signing could move. The game, and time with my son could not.

I moved the signing to Friday and decided my son was more important.

Game 5 actually never happened because the Knicks swept in 4 but the signal my decision sent to my son did happen.

What your kids actually remember

I write in Puddle Jumpers that consistency is the enemy of part-time parenting. That it is up to you what kind of parent you want to be. A part-time parent or a full-time parent who is a constant force in your children’s life.

Your kids will remember your parenting legacy forever, and how they turn out is largely up to how you parent.

That is true. And it is worth understanding what the word consistent actually means in practice, because I think it gets misread as a call for quantity when what it is really describing is reliability.

The question your kids are always asking themselves, even when they are at college and have their own full lives, is whether you are going to show up when it counts.

Not every time. Nobody shows up every time. Life is complicated and demands are real and sometimes the job has to come first because the job is what keeps the lights on and puts the kid through college in the first place.

But there are moments when the choice is clean. When it is not actually complicated. When one option is the one that generates a memory and the other one is the one that generates a line item on a schedule that nobody will remember in six months.

In those moments, the decision you make is a signal. And your kids receive it clearly even when you think they are not paying attention.

Especially when you think they are not paying attention.

“It’s these moments that powerfully reveal the return on our investment for all those years of being a consistent parent who shows up every day.” That line is in Puddle Jumpers and I mean it about the big moments like graduation crowds and Lisbon dinners. But I also mean it about standing in Madison Square Garden next to your son watching the Knicks in the playoffs because you moved a work commitment to be there.

Bill Perkins’ central argument in Die With Zero is that most people systematically over-invest in the future at the expense of the present. They defer experiences, defer time, defer the things that actually constitute a life, in service of a future security that often arrives too late to spend on what mattered most when it was available.

“The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered “Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”

For parents this argument lands with particular force because the windows for specific experiences with your kids are genuinely time-limited in a way that almost nothing else in life is.

You get one version of your child at eight years old. One version at fifteen. One version at twenty, standing next to you in a playoff crowd at the Garden, screaming at a referee call with the specific uninhibited joy of a young person who is exactly where he wants to be in this moment and knows it.

That version of my son at 19 does not last. It will shade into the next version and then the next one and each version will be its own gift. But this one, the 19 in New York with his dad at a playoff game (we actually hung out in the city and watched the finals at night together), was available on that Wednesday night and would not be available again in quite the same form.

These are memory dividends.

The idea that experiences, particularly experiences shared with people you love, pay returns over time in the form of the memories themselves. You spend an evening at a playoff game and you get the evening, which is worth something.

But you also get every subsequent conversation that references it, every time it comes up at dinner, every time Tyler tells someone about it, every time you both laugh about something specific that happened in the third quarter. The memory compounds. The experience was not a cost. It was an investment with a return that keeps paying.

The book signing on Friday was fine. The bookstore was gracious about the change. The people who came seemed genuinely engaged with the conversation about Puddle Jumpers. Was it as well attended as it would have been on Wednesday? Definitely not.

The deathbed test and why it works

I have a simple framework I use when I am not sure which way to go on a decision like this. I call it the deathbed test and it is exactly what it sounds like. I ask myself: lying in a bed at the end of my life, which version of this decision would I wish I had made?

I have never once run that test and come back with the answer that I wished I had worked more.

I have never imagined myself at the end of my life and thought, you know what, I really regret choosing my kids over work.

In Puddle Jumpers I write that sometimes life drops a fork in the road right in front of you and you do not even realize it is happening until years later when you reflect on where you ended up. That is true of the big turning points. It is also true of the small ones. The Wednesday night decisions that do not feel historic when you are making them but accumulate over time into the story your kids tell about whether they were a priority.

Tyler knows I moved the signing. I told him. Not to make him feel guilty about it or to bank the sacrifice for future use. Just because it was true and I thought he should know. He looked at me for a second and said, “You didn’t have to do that, Dad.”

I said, “I know. That’s the point.”

Children are extraordinarily sophisticated readers of priority.

They do not process it as an abstract concept. They experience it as a series of data points that accumulate over time into a conclusion about their own worth. About whether they are the kind of person whose presence commands the full attention of the adults who love them. About whether they matter enough to compete with a work commitment on a Wednesday night in May.

This is not a guilt trip directed at parents who are doing their best under real constraints. Most parents are. The constraints are real and the demands are relentless and anyone who tells you that you can always choose your kids without professional consequence is not operating in the same economy as the rest of us.

But there are clean decisions. Moments when the tradeoff is genuinely not that complicated if you are willing to absorb a small professional cost in exchange for a memory that will pay dividends for the rest of both of your lives. In those moments, the decision you make is a signal. And your kids receive it. Every time.

I talk about this in Puddle Jumpers…that your kids need space to fail but you should never abandon them in the wreckage. That same person who stands by during the hard moments is also the person who shows up for the Knicks game instead of the book signing. The consistency between those two things is what builds the relationship. Not any single heroic gesture. The pattern over time. It stacks up.

The pattern says: you are the priority. Not in theory. In practice. On a Wednesday night in May when I had two tickets and a choice to make and I chose you.

A question worth sitting with this week

Think about the last time you had a clean choice between something professional and something with your kid. Not a genuinely impossible tradeoff. A clean one, where the cost of choosing your kid was real but manageable.

Which way did you go? And if you ran it through the deathbed test right now, how does that decision look from the other end?

Not asking to generate guilt. Asking because the answer tells you something useful about the pattern you are building. And the pattern is what your kids remember.

I put all of it in Puddle Jumpers. The framework for these decisions and the philosophy behind them and the twenty years of evidence that the pattern of choosing your kids, consistently and visibly, is the single most powerful thing you can do as a parent.

Link below if you want the whole picture.

Puddle Jumpers