Without a ruler to do it against, you can’t make crooked straight.
Your daughter gets mad, so she slams the door and screams. Your son makes himself a snack and leaves the kitchen a disaster for someone else to clean up. You hear them say something rude to a waiter. You see them write something offensive on social media.
Before you get mad, before you condemn their actions, just take them aside. Ask them, kindly and openly, a question that the bodybuilder Mark Bell says he always asks his teenage kids: “Hey, when have you seen me do that?”
This is a great question. Because it may well be that you have been inadvertently modeling behavior you find repugnant in others. And while that’s no excuse for bad behavior, it’s useful to know if we’ve been tacitly condoning the wrong things to our kids. But if you haven’t, then they have even less of an excuse.
—Seneca