What My Kids Taught Me About Precision and Patience

You’d think precision is something you learn from math or engineering.
In my case, I learned as much about precision from my kids as I did from any system I’ve ever built.

Not the sterile kind of precision — decimal places and exact units — but the kind that actually matters in real life:

precision in how you say things,
precision in what you promise,
precision in how you show up when it counts.

And I didn’t get that lesson gently.

I got it from watching my own imprecise behavior land on two very different nervous systems — and realizing that the gap between what I meant and what they experienced might as well have been an architectural bug.

Once you see that, “I was close enough” stops being acceptable.

The Day “You Said” Hit Harder Than Any Architecture Review

There’s a specific kind of phrase that will stop you cold as a parent:

“You said…”

The first time it really landed for me was over something small on the surface — timing for a game we were supposed to play after I finished “just one more thing.”

I’d said:

“I’ll be done in 20 minutes.”

To me, that was soft. Approximate. A way of saying “soon.”

An hour later, I finally came up for air and said:

“Okay, I’m ready.”

My kid looked at me — calm, not yelling — and said:

“You said 20 minutes.”

It wasn’t about the game.
It was about the precision of my commitment.

In my head, I heard the systems version of that sentence:

“You set an expectation, then drifted, and now you’re pretending it’s within tolerance.”

In code or architecture, I would never tolerate that:

if a system promises a 200ms SLA and regularly hits 800ms, we don’t call that “close enough,”
if RFS promises memory guarantees it can’t meet, I don’t let that slide,
if AIDF says a behavior is forbidden and it happens anyway, that’s a violation, not a rounding error.

Yet in my own house, I was playing fast and loose with precision because I assumed good intent would cover it.

That moment changed how I think about the precision of my words.

Two Kids, Two Interpreters

Part of what makes precision and patience so non‑negotiable at home is that my kids are wired differently.

One processes quickly, reacts fast, and will tell you exactly how they feel in the moment.
The other hangs back, watches, and often takes time before they’re ready to talk.

Same parent. Same sentence.
Two different interpretations.

If I say:

“We’ll talk about this later,”
“I’m almost done,”
“It’s not a big deal,”

those words don’t just pass through a neutral parser.
They land in two different architecture stacks:

one is checking “Does he actually mean it?”
the other is checking “Is it safe to bring this up again?”

Imprecision — in timing, in tone, in follow‑through — accumulates differently for each of them:

one gets louder,
one goes quiet.

Watching that made something click that I already knew from systems work:

“Precision is not about being rigid. It’s about being predictable enough that downstream systems don’t have to do heroic inference to feel safe.”

At home, the “downstream systems” are my kids’ nervous systems.

That’s a lot of responsibility for a sentence like “I’ll be there in a minute.”

Precision in Systems, Imprecision in Self — Closing the Gap

Professionally, I demand a lot from systems:

RFS must preserve identity and continuity with measurable properties.
MAIA must represent intent explicitly.
AIDF must codify what’s allowed and prohibited.
LQL + LEF must execute under constraints that can be reasoned about.
CAIO must route legally, not just conveniently.

I write:

invariants,
lemmas,
contracts,

and I enforce them with:

tests,
proofs,
CI checks.

Then I’d walk into my house and say things like:

“I’ll definitely make that event,” without checking my real capacity,
“We’ll fix this schedule soon,” without planning a structural change,
“This matters to me,” without adjusting my behavior to match.

The disconnect bothered me.

It was the same pattern I’d seen in organizations:

high precision in dashboards,
low precision in incentives,
zero precision in actual commitments.

My kids didn’t care how tight my code was if my follow‑through with them was loose.

So I started treating my presence as part of the architecture:

if I say a time, I either hit it or renegotiate before I miss it,
if something might slip, I say that upfront instead of over‑promising,
if I know I’m at capacity, I don’t pretend otherwise just to feel like a “good dad” in the moment.

It’s not about never being late.
It’s about never acting like the deviation is irrelevant.

Patience: The Precision of Timing

Precision without patience turns into control.
That’s not what I want.

Patience, for me, has been learning the precision of timing — especially when my kids are overwhelmed.

There have been moments where:

I see a pattern their behavior is part of,
I know exactly what structural point I want to make,
I can already see the future failure mode if we ignore it.

The engineering part of my brain wants to jump in immediately:

“Here’s the pattern,”
“Here’s why this matters,”
“Here’s what will happen if we don’t address it.”

Sometimes that lands.
A lot of times, it doesn’t.

What my kids have taught me is that:

the same truth, delivered at the wrong time, becomes noise or even harm,
the “right” structural insight dropped into an overheated moment can be experienced as an attack,
waiting until they’re ready to receive isn’t avoidance — it’s respect.

Patience, in practice, looks like:

letting emotions run their course without escalating,
circling back later when the system (them and me) is calmer,
picking a smaller piece of the truth instead of trying to refactor everything in one conversation.

That’s precision too — just in time and scope, not just in words.

Where This Leaves Us

My kids didn’t teach me precision by asking for technical explanations of RFS or MAIA.
They taught me by reacting — directly or quietly — to the gap between what I said and what I did.

From them, I’ve learned that:

being off by “just a little” in your commitments accumulates into distrust,
imprecise promises feel like instability when you’re not the one in control,
patience is often the difference between a truth that lands and a truth that does damage.

Those lessons now sit right next to my work:

when I design memory semantics in RFS, I think about how my kids remember patterns of my behavior, not just events,
when I define invariants in AIDF, I think about the rules at home that actually hold, not just the ones I talk about,
when I iterate on MAIA’s model of intent, I think about whether my “dad intent” is showing up clearly in how I interface with them.

If they never care about any of those projects but grow up feeling like:

my words meant something,
my timing respected their reality,
my structure made life more stable, not less,

then they will have taught me more about precision and patience than any theorem.

Key Takeaways

Kids experience the precision of your commitments far more acutely than you do; “you said” is an architecture review of your behavior.
Two different kids interpret the same imprecise promise differently, which raises the bar on how predictable you need to be.
It’s inconsistent to demand strict invariants from systems (RFS, MAIA, AIDF, etc.) while being loose about your own promises at home.
Patience is a form of precision: choosing the right time, scope, and tone for truths you already see clearly.
Treating presence, timing, and follow‑through as part of your “life architecture” aligns your identity across work and family.
The real measure of precision and patience isn’t how you talk about them, but how safe the people around you feel inside the systems you create.

What I Hope My Kids Learn From Watching Me Build
Protecting Stability — At Home and In Systems
Raising Children While Reinventing Yourself
Thinking in Systems Because Life Punished Disorder
The Real Reason I Refuse to Build Fragile Systems