It occurred to me today that I’m an imperfect father.

To be honest, it’s occurred to me a thousand times, or maybe a hundred thousand times, before this.

The other day, I finally got fed up with my children being mean to each other. They are siblings, the three of them, and they treat each other with a malice that they seem to reserve for each other. This isn’t to say that they are overtly evil to each other, for I’d have stepped in a long time ago if this had been true. Rather, they are snide and derogatory in a way that has worn on my nerves for a long time, but I’ve done nothing about it.

So, I got fed up the other day and I sat them all down in the same room together and I WENT OFF. Not in a rage-driven sort of way, but rather, I laid down the law in no uncertain terms and set parameters for future behavior and consequences for violations.

And then, within the hour, I realized something else.

They learned it from watching me. I know that this is true because, after I told them to stop doing it, I tried to stop doing it (to be a good example), and it was so hard. I caught myself doing it within forty-five minutes of telling them to stop doing it.

Do you remember that drug ad, from decades ago, where the father comes in to his son’s bedroom, to confront the teen about doing drugs, and the teen says, “I learned it by watching you”? That was me the other day. I was ashamed of myself, as I have been so often before when I’ve realized that my children are bad because they’ve seen me being bad, and I hate that part of the parenting process.

Saying mean stuff is just something that I do, and it’s wrong.

It’s no wonder that they do this automatically. They’ve seen me do it automatically so often that they, like little copy machines, are now running around the house doing it and I’ve had enough of it.

What a hypocrite I am, for being tired of listening to my kids as they do the things I’ve taught them to do.

So, while I could steer this post into a discussion on hypocrisy, or the perils of parenting, I think I would rather talk about the world that we live in where everyone, myself included, seems way too quick with the negative commentary.

I notice this a lot on Twitter, and other social meda outlets, as well. In fact, it’s so prevalent, people speaking poorly of each other, that it surprises me when I see someone with something positive to say. You know that things are bad when the norm becomes the negativity and the exception to the rule becomes something uplifting and positive.

I think it comes from a need that we all feel, made worse by social media in my opinion, to have something to say. The title of the blog post, “If you can’t say something nice…” is a reference to an old piece of advice from many years ago –> If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

Imagine all of the silence if all of the negativity was just stopped, somehow.

As a teacher, I should know better than this; I have, on numerous occasions, been educated on the importance for teachers to be sure to use more positivity than negativity in my classrooms. I have been present for multiple trainings discussing the ratio of praise to criticism.

I’m left to wonder how I got to be such a negative person. The influence of a society that has become increasingly negative? The pressure that I’ve always felt to have something to add? The lack of value that I put on silence?

And it’s not that I am negative with my own children, at least I don’t think it is. I would hope that my wife would have said something to me if I was being too negative with them. Rather, I think I just say a bit too many negative things, in general.

When I had my three children sat down in the living room, to let them know that I wasn’t going to allow things to continue as they had been, I told them that silence is always a better choice than negativity. Of course, as I was saying that to them, I was yet to realize that they’re getting me as a role model of negativity. What a fool I must have appeared to be to them when I was telling them to be silent rather than mean.

Maybe, my children would have been better off, all these years, with a role model of silence. Maybe I would have been better off, all these years, having kept my mouth shut rather than being so negative.

Maybe our world would be a better place if we would all just keep silent in the absence of something positive to say.