Abel Tasman & a Dad’s Perspective

Chris here.

As a father of four boys, I will take all the advice I can get! So spending time with community groups with a passion for kids has been an incredible part of this journey for me. When these places have talked about instilling good confidence in children and different ways to do it, I listen. They talk about giving kids the opportunity to explore and to have time to reflect and learn about themselves and what their strengths are. They talk about pushing kids out of their comfort zones so that they can achieve beyond what they thought was possible. They have spoken about how important it is to belong. It has made me think about what type of men I want my boys to become and how I am influencing/ guiding them to grow in that direction.

I hope that my boys can be kind, resilient, creative and passionate. I want them to know who they are as people and make their decisions based on who they are, rather than who society or their peers say they should be. I want them to have empathy for others and I want them to be strong. I hope that if they can grow in this way then they will have a better chance of being happy, and sharing that happiness to the people close to them.

We had the opportunity a couple of weeks ago to spend a Sunday afternoon taking our boys for a walk in the Abel Tasman. Going through the footage got me thinking about how incredibly fortunate we are to be able to spend so much time together as a family on this trip. We are literally with our boys 24 hours a day. But the truth is, even though we are always together it’s often on adult terms. We charge from place to place and work constantly, planning filming and editing. Any spare time we have gets filled with making sure the boys get through their correspondence schooling. Even though we are together a lot, we often don’t spend as much quality time investing in growing our boys as we would like.

This was a four-hour walk full of quality time and I loved it.The boys were able to explore and learn. They got to laugh and struggle and to overcome. As a father, every time we do something like this as a family I feel like I get to know my boys a bit more. I feel closer to them as people and I feel like we are travelling together. Hopefully, when I have 4 teenage boys this will count for something…….. Our youngest Theo is six years old so this was a pretty staunch effort for him I reckon