What Do Your Biggest Fans See in You?

The Bible says, “Parents are the pride of their children” (Proverbs 17:6).

Think about that reality for a minute. Though it may not always feel like it, your biggest fans live under your roof. They look up to you. They delight in you. And they’re proud of you.

You have more influence on those little fans than any other “followers” you’ll ever gain. Many studies suggest that our children’s emotional maturity and adult life satisfaction are connected to our emotional presence and how well we showed up as parents. [i] In other words, for our children to enter the world with emotional resilience, we first need to raise the ceiling of our own emotional and spiritual maturity. Our emotional and spiritual ceiling will be our children’s floor.

Don’t let that scare you though. Even if you find yourself in a very difficult season, perhaps on the bottom rung of life, the next rung is all you need to focus on. The trouble is that we often shift our focus away from the next rung and onto the ceiling. And while our kids are looking up to us, we’re looking up at the ceiling. But when you stare at the ceiling from the floor, it looks farther away than it really is. A distance that can leave you feeling hopeless, ashamed, and looking for affirmation in other places.

Instead, start with one small goal to move to the next rung. To show up as the best version of you for your kids. Don’t get overwhelmed by everything you think you need to fix right now, believing the lie that you must have it all together. Every decision you make to keep climbing the ladder is a move toward being famous at home. Why? Because you’re showing your kids what resilience looks like.

Raising your emotional ceiling isn’t as daunting as it might seem. Climbing the ladder of emotional maturity happens one rung at a time, as you shift your focus away from the ceiling and onto the next rung. What rung are you on right now? Where do you feel unseen? In what ways are you trying to get others to follow you, to like you, to see you fill that void? What’s keeping you stuck on that rung?

Perhaps the first place to start isn’t looking up at how far you have to go, but looking down at how far you’ve come, back into the eyes of your biggest fans, who are standing tall looking up at you, their hero.

Even if things at home aren’t what you want them to be right now, your kids are watching, and they’re cheering you on. You “are the pride of [your] children.”

[i] See tables of findings in Mario Mikulincer and Philip R. Shaver, Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change (New York: Guilford Publications, 2016), 155–160, 196, 201, 309–311, 313; see also Kim Leon and Deborah B. Jacobvitz, “Relationships Between Adult Attachment Representations and Family Ritual Quality: A Prospective Longitudinal Study,” Family Process 42, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 419–432,