A tree has two halves and you only ever see one of them.
 
Roots are what you give a child inside the house. Wings are what they carry out the door. Some of us were raised with deep roots and never given permission to leave. Some of us were told to go be great by people who never once asked what we were feeling. A lot of us got neither, and now we're raising children anyway — building both halves at the same time, in adulthood, with no instructions.
Roots to Wings is ten chapters, one a week. The first five build the roots: emotional safety, emotional literacy, communication, impulse control, courage. The second five build the wings: responsibility, empathy, judgment about screens, identity, and the ability to celebrate — which sounds soft until you meet somebody who never learned how.
Every chapter runs the same way, so once you've done one you can do any of them. The teaching. A story. The bad example and the better one. An adventure you actually go do with your child. And a family mission that carries past the day.
It works with a notebook and a pen. That's the whole supply list. No app, no screen, no internet, nothing to buy.
And every chapter — all ten, not the easy ones — has a section called When You Can't Be There. For the parent reading this off a night shift, from a deployment, from a hospital bed, from a unit, from four states away because a judge said so. That section wasn't added at the end as a courtesy. It's the reason the book got written.
You can't build the fortress with your hands. You can draw the blueprint and mail it, and your child can build it, and when he sits inside it with a flashlight he'll know exactly whose idea it was.
There's no chapter in here about being a perfect parent. There isn't one about being a present parent either, because presence is not a thing everybody gets to choose.
Presence is not the same thing as proximity.
 
By Joshua Williams.