I don't have a son. But if I did, I would:

If you've already decided I'd make a terrible father, that's probably where I'd start.

He'll only ever get to live one life. His own. Spending it satisfying everyone else's expectations would be a terrible waste of it.

Selfishness and cruelty are two entirely different things. One is taking responsibility for your own existence. The other is disregarding someone else's. Saying yes when your entire body is screaming no isn't kindness. It's self-abandonment. And there's nothing virtuous about abandoning yourself to keep someone else comfortable.

A person who spends his life trying not to disappoint anyone will eventually become the one person he disappoints every single day.

Even on an airplane, you're instructed to put your own oxygen mask on first. Before helping your own child. Because you cannot save anyone if you've already lost yourself.

And if being a good son ever requires him to betray himself, I'd rather he be a terrible son.

At twelve, I spent four hours creating a cheat sheet for an exam that would have taken me two hours to study for. I learned the material better by trying to cheat than I would have by following the instructions.

The school punished me. I broke its rules. Both things are true.

But I would want my son to ask a question before accepting that he had done something wrong: Who did I hurt?

Rules are written by people. People have interests. And the people writing the rules aren't always the people who have to live under them. I'd teach him to distinguish between finding a smarter way to do something and taking something from someone who never agreed to lose it. If he finds a way around a rule, I want to know how he thought of it. I want to understand what he discovered.

And if he can explain why the rule deserves to be broken, he might even convince me to follow it.

Being his father wouldn't make me right. Being older wouldn't make me wiser. And having more experience wouldn't mean I've learned the right lessons from it.

A doctor can have letters after his name and spend twenty years practicing bad medicine. A father can have children and spend twenty years being a terrible parent. Titles tell you what someone is called. They don't tell you what someone is doing.

I'd want him to question my decisions, challenge my explanations, and tell me when he thinks I'm wrong. I'd want him to do the same with his teachers, his bosses, and anyone who expects obedience simply because of their position. And when he asks me why, I'd owe him a better answer than because I said so.

I might know something he doesn't. He might see something I've missed. That's a conversation worth having. The day he stops questioning me because I'm his father is the day I've taught him to surrender his judgment to a title.

And that would be my failure, not his.

I've written books. I've barely finished reading anyone else's. And I wouldn't expect my son to read mine. I'd rather he spend four hours trying to answer a question himself than four minutes reading someone else's answer.

I'd let him get confused. Get things wrong. Change his mind. Start over. Follow a question so far that he forgets what he was originally looking for. I'd want him to discover what he thinks before discovering what everyone else thinks.

Books would always be there. So would teachers, scientists, philosophers, and thousands of years of accumulated knowledge. He could consult any of them whenever he wanted.

But I'd want his curiosity to lead him there. His own questions first. Other people's answers second. And if he arrived at a conclusion that contradicted everything I'd written, I'd be fascinated to hear how he got there.

If his mind wandered out the classroom window, I'd want to know where it went: What was so interesting out there that it made him forget where he was? What was he imagining? What question was he trying to answer?

I'd encourage him to follow it. As far as it wanted to go.

I'd teach him to welcome boredom. To sit with it long enough to discover what his own mind produces when nobody is feeding it something to consume. To discover what happens when the mind is left alone long enough to entertain itself. That's where questions appear that nobody thought to ask him. Where unrelated ideas collide. Where imagination gets to work without being given an assignment.

I'd give him time to stare at the ceiling. To invent impossible worlds. To spend an entire afternoon doing absolutely nothing that anyone could measure. And I'd want him to trust that extraordinary biological machine between his ears, even when he had no idea where it was taking him.

I would rather raise a boy who occasionally escapes reality in his daydreams than a man who never learned to dream and spends his life trying to escape his reality.

My pride would be mine to feel instead of his responsibility to earn.

I wouldn't want him choosing a career because it impressed me. Staying in a relationship because I approved of it. Becoming successful by a definition I handed him before he was old enough to question it.

And if one day he chose a life I couldn't understand, one I wouldn't have chosen for myself, I'd hope I'd have the courage to let him live it without making my disappointment his burden. He wouldn't owe me a return on the years I spent raising him. He wouldn't owe me an explanation for becoming someone different from the person I imagined. I'd want him to know that he could disappoint me without ever losing my love.

And perhaps the greatest measure of my success as a father would be raising someone who no longer needs my approval.

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Because ultimately, I wouldn't raise him to become a functioning member of society. I'd raise him to become someone who can decide for himself which parts of society are worth participating in.

Stay curious,

Benoit