“Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” — Robert Fulghum

We talk a lot about what to teach our children, and we forget that the most important teaching happens without a single word being said.

They watch you.

They imitate you.

They speak as you speak.

They even cough as you cough.

Let's call it the Shadow Curriculum.

Enrollment lasts eighteen years. Attendance is perfect. And you're the only teacher, prepared or not.

It teaches him how to move, what to eat, what to do with money, how to relate to others, and much more.

And after all that, your son grows up to be exactly like you.

Would that make you proud or terrified?

If it's the second one, and you already feel stretched thin, don't worry.

I'm not going to ask you to do more.

I'm going to ask you to do less.

You are the whole network

Behaviors ripple through social networks. Christakis and Fowler's work on the Framingham data found that weight, habits, even happiness cluster among people who are connected to each other.

And for the first decade of your child's life, the household is nearly the whole network.

You're not the biggest influence on the graph.

You are the graph.

"Normal is what you make it. Normal for a kid who walks to and from school every day is different from normal for a kid driven to and from school in a BMW every day. Our mind creates limits around what is normal." — Joe De Sena, founder of Spartan Race

They copy what you want.

Human beings are mimetic creatures.

The French philosopher René Girard spent his career arguing that human desire isn't self-generated.

"Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires." — René Girard

You don't need a study to see it. Just watch your kids want things.

Your son's friend points at a caramel ice cream and suddenly caramel is the only acceptable answer. The flavor was never the point.

When I was seven, my best friend got the Star Wars Death Star for his birthday. I nagged my mother for months to get me the exact same one.

We never played with them together. Why would we need two copies of the same toy? Complementary figures would have made more sense.

But the wanting was contagious.

And they don't only catch it from other children.

When your child sees what you want, that becomes their model for what's worth wanting (what you spend your time on, what you never skip, what you can't live without).

Your consistency is their willpower

Most people have heard of the marshmallow test. Leave a child alone with a marshmallow, tell them they can have two if they wait fifteen minutes, and see what happens.

The famous version of the story is that the kids who waited did better in life.

That part has weakened considerably. When the study was repeated with roughly ten times as many children, a four-year-old's willpower mostly stopped predicting teenage success once family background was accounted for.

Which points at something more interesting than willpower.

Almost nobody has heard of the Rochester follow-up.

Before the marshmallow, researchers made the adult in the room either reliable or unreliable. Half the children were promised art supplies that arrived. Half were promised art supplies that never came.

Then the marshmallow test ran as normal.

The children who'd met the unreliable adult waited an average of three minutes and two seconds.

The children who'd met the reliable adult held out for twelve minutes and two seconds. Four times longer.

Only one child out of fourteen in the unreliable group lasted the full fifteen minutes. Nine did in the reliable group.

Same children. Same marshmallow. Different adult, minutes earlier.

The self-control your child will need as an adult isn't only a verdict on them. It's partly a verdict on whether the adults around them kept their word.

Saying "I train on Sundays" and then training every Sunday teaches delayed gratification more effectively than any explanation of it.

Saying it and skipping teaches something too.

And it isn't only reliability that transmits. Your attitude does.

A boy who watches his father finish a workout he obviously didn't want to do learns something no school teaches.

A shredded father who complains through every rep teaches complaining, with a good physique attached.

Subject one: The body

"The first wealth is health." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

In films you sometimes hear a parent say "do as I say, not as I do."

It would be convenient if we could tell our children to eat their broccoli without needing to eat it ourselves.

But as you know, it doesn't work like that.

What you do carries ten times the weight of what you say.

Do you want them physically strong, capable, and comfortable with what they see in the mirror?

Theory won't get you there.

They need to watch you do it or it won't stick.

Which sounds like another obligation. Another thing you have to add.

It's the opposite.

All it requires is that you pursue your own ideal, in the open, where they can see it.

"No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. What a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable." — Socrates

I've lost count of the workouts where my daughter has copied the movement next to me, or climbed onto my back mid-push-up and become part of the session.

I've never once asked her to. I've never explained why I train. She's five and I doubt she could tell you what exercise is for.

But she knows it's what happens on that floor, in this apartment.

That's the entire curriculum. I didn't teach it. I just didn't hide it.

A witnessed habit pays twice.

Train a little every day and they'll file it under normal.

Eat food that builds a strong body and they'll assume that's what food is.

Sign up for a 5K or an obstacle race and it stops being your hobby and starts being something the family does.

Subject two: the money

"Do not save what is left after spending; spend what is left after saving." — Warren Buffett

The hard thing about money is that they can't see your portfolio.

But they see everything around it.

They see whether wanting something and having it are separated by anything.

A child who watches an object appear two days after it was first mentioned is learning the exact opposite of the marshmallow lesson, in his own home, with you running the experiment.

They see whether a bad month changes the mood in the house.

They see whether you ever say no to yourself.

There's a reason most lottery winners are broke within five years.

Money without a protocol evaporates, and children absorb the protocol long before they have any money of their own.

So the money lesson isn't a talk. It's whether there's a visible system.

Mine is an automatic transfer the day after my salary lands.

She's five, so she has no concept of what a transfer is. What she'll grow up inside is a house where money has somewhere it goes on purpose, rather than a house where it goes wherever it gets pulled.

The words matter less than people think, but they aren't nothing.

"We can't afford it" teaches scarcity.

"That's not where our money goes" teaches that there's a plan.

One is a wall. The other is a door with a rule on it.

But watching isn't the whole lesson here.

Money is the one subject where they eventually need their own account, because a child can't learn allocation by observing it. They have to hold it.

So here's an idea I've been thinking about:

Money in, for something she did. A set amount for every hour of reading. Half invested, half hers.

She keeps the time herself. A kitchen timer, a stopwatch, whatever she likes.

I don't audit it and I don't want to. If she inflates the number, that's a conversation worth having at seven over $10 rather than at seventeen over something that matters.

Paying by the hour rather than by the book matters more than it sounds.

Pay per book and a bright child works out within weeks that six short picture books pay the same as one chapter book.

She'd be right to optimize. You built the incentive. Pay by time and the gaming disappears, along with any need for you to adjudicate whether something counts as a real book.

The split is the lesson. Not all future, not all now.

An adult would struggle with all-future too, which is why most of them never start.

And the spending half is what keeps the saving half growing, because she has to want to open the next one.

Her money, her choice, inside the same rules that already apply in the house.

She can't buy her way out of the food rules any more than I can. But within that, she gets to choose badly. A toy that breaks by bedtime is a useful mistake and a cheap one.

The compounding is irrelevant at her age. $20 becoming $21.50 next year is a rounding error against an ice cream she could have today.

What isn't irrelevant is the contribution. An hour a week becomes a number she can feel, because it moves on a timescale she actually perceives.

The lesson isn't returns. It's that effort accumulates instead of resetting.

And then, eventually, the market value falls.

Everything goes into one low-cost global index fund. One number to look at, and nothing to choose between.

Which means some quarters it falls, and that's the point rather than a flaw.

$240 becomes $180 and she notices, because the only-goes-up rule has just broken for the first time.

Let her see it. A first drawdown at $240 is the cheapest financial education available anywhere, and she'll carry that instinct into a life where the stakes are $30,000.

But she won't read the number. She'll read your face.

Met with a shrug: that happens, it comes back, and market declines get filed under normal weather. Met with any visible tension, and she learns that money is a source of dread. That second lesson will outlive the account by fifty years.

And when it recovers, show her. The drop alone teaches nothing. The round trip is the whole point.

None of which works if you're teaching an investing habit you don't practise yourself.

That's the unreliable experimenter again, wearing a different hat.

I should be straight about this part. My daughter is five.

The burpees I can vouch for after 737 days. The reading plan is designed but untested, and I'll find out in two years whether it survives contact with an actual seven-year-old.

So do less, not more

I promised I wouldn't ask you to add anything.

Here's what I meant.

You cannot model seven things.

A father with a full-time job and small children who tries to demonstrate fitness, nutrition, money, reading, patience, sobriety and emotional regulation all at once will model none of them, because he'll be inconsistent at every one.

And inconsistency is the thing that actually transmits.

An unreliable father teaching five virtues badly is worse than a reliable father teaching one virtue well.

He isn't teaching five lessons. He's teaching one, and it's the Rochester lesson: what adults say doesn't predict what happens.

So the answer isn't a curriculum.

It's one visible habit, done daily, in front of them, for years.

That's less than you're attempting now. Just brought out into the light where your children can see it.

Which one to build first

If you have to pick one, pick the body.

Not because it matters most, but because it's the only subject a child can read before they can read anything else.

Money took me a whole section to make visible, and it still needs an account, a strategy and years before she can understand the number. Patience is abstract. Reading looks like sitting down.

Training is the one thing a five-year-old can see, copy, and climb on top of.

It's also the one with the shortest feedback loop for you, which matters, because you'll quit anything that takes three years to feel like it's working.

So: one movement, ten minutes, every day, in a room where they are.

Not the gym. The gym is invisible to them. It looks exactly like leaving for work.

On the floor, where they trip over you or walk around you.

The bar is deliberately low. It has to survive the week she's ill and you've slept four hours, because the reliability is the lesson.

A father who trains hard three times a week and stops whenever life gets difficult is teaching precisely what the unreliable experimenter taught.

Do less than you think you should. Do it where they can see it. Don't miss.

That's the whole method.

"My dad always..."

There will come a day when your son or daughter describes you to someone in a single sentence.

"My dad always..."

And everything after "always" is a habit you have right now. Today. This ordinary Monday.

"The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken." — Samuel Johnson

So finish the sentence yourself, using the habits you actually have.

"My dad always..."

If you don't like how it ends, you have today to change it. And tomorrow. And a decade of ordinary Mondays after that.

Enrollment has already started. You're teaching either way.

See you next week.

Warmly,

Bjorn