Editorial: Making time important for futures

This morning I went to the Hastings RSA for breakfast.

My usual breakfast is taken at my desk and consists of a banana or whatever else I can grab from the cupboard at home and a cup of tea. I "enjoy" breakfast while staff at Hawke's Bay Today shove pages under my nose and tell me I have five minutes to read them and approve them for publication.

I'm sometimes aware while I'm belting down my breakfast at work that at home, people are still just rising. Maybe they are thinking about breakfast. It is, after all, only 7am.

The tyranny of work has dragged us apart from what was once - still is for some families - a shared daily ritual. Breakfast together.

The reason I was at the RSA (where the breakfast was considerably better than my usual banana and a cuppa) was to join the annual St John's College Father and Son breakfast.

What a great idea - Dad and son having breakfast together, making time for each other and going out to do it somewhere a bit special thanks to the college. That, you have to like.

We were all enjoying breakfast so much that I found myself agreeing it would be interesting to hear what the guest speaker had to say, before promptly reminding myself that the guest speaker was me. A daunting thought.

What do you speak about to a gathering of fathers and sons? What can you say to men, young and not so young, that means anything more than their own experiences together?

I don't believe you can tell them anything that they don't already know so I didn't try. My tactic was to recount my experience of bringing up boys which is ongoing and fun.

The first boy I raised, Henry, is almost 18. The second, Ben, is just 8-months-old. But like a lot of dads, I was struggling to put into words just what the heck I had learned about being a dad to boys in all those years.

In the end I decided that what I had learnt had been taught to me by the boys themselves. Mostly by Henry through sheer time.

What Henry taught me is that time is about the only thing that matters. If you love your sons, then the very best thing you can give them is your time.

And so, I concluded, Benjamin and I owed Henry a heck of a lot.