As a parent I know how powerful my tendency is to want to protect my kids from bad things in the world. In the beginning when my children were young I created a world for them that was mostly good and safe. As the years have passed my filter has grown with them and I now share information about the world, our family and myself that at one time I kept hidden. Teenagers today are more prepared mentally to absorb difficult information than you or I were when we were teens. So, if it is important for you to build a deep relationship with your sons, then I would say telling them is necessary. How you share this information with them however is actually more important than whether to tell them or not. If you’re like most men you may have a story that you want to make sure that your sons don’t see you as frail, that perhaps they can’t handle the idea that you are anything but strong. And yet, the opposite is true. What will be most important to your boys is that you are aware of your own mortality, that you will allow yourself to feel and express your feelings about your medical condition and that you will seek support from others who are close to you. 

 

A colleague of mine says “Children follow our finger, not our words,” and I really believe as parents we forget this truth.    You have a golden opportunity here to show your sons how a man can be strong and vulnerable through adversity. In my experience it certainly takes more courage to face my fears and seek support from others than it takes to ‘suck it up,’ and go it alone. Modeling for them a process for how a man effectively deals with life’s difficult moments will be more valuable as a life skill than protecting them from feelings, yours or theirs. My family is like many others out there and over the years we have experienced suicide, death, divorce, medical emergencies and tragedy.   As a man and a father I have had to work through my own feelings about these events in ways that teach my children that it is normal to feel and it is equally normal to express these feelings with those closest to us. This is the hardest work of parenting; as an adult and father I have to grow up so that I become an example to my children of how they too can grow.