What 25 Years of Fathering Three Very Different Children Taught Me About Strengths
A reflection on fatherhood, family profiles & the moments that changed how I saw my children (and myself).
#achiever #developer #maximizer #strategic #ideation #adaptability #competition
My daughter was 15 when she asked me one of the most disarming questions I’ve ever received as a father.
She asked whether it was ok for her not to go to Junior College. Whether she could, instead, pursue design at a polytechnic - Early specialisation. A different path from the rest of the family.
And I’ll be honest: my first internal response was not calm.
I thought about future earning potential. I thought about the fact that her older sister had achieved exceptional academic results. I thought about what it would mean if she stepped off the path the rest of us had walked. My #achiever wanted measurable outcomes. My #analytical & #deliberative mind ran the risk assessment.
And then I remembered that she had asked that question after taking her CliftonStrengths assessment. She had language for herself that most 15-year-olds don’t have. And she was placing that language alongside what she loved.
She wasn’t asking me to lower the bar. She was asking me to find the right bar for her.
That moment changed something in me as a father. It is the moment I keep returning to when I think about what strengths-based parenting actually means (not as a theory, but as a decision with weight).
THE FRAMEWORK THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
I’ve spent 12 years as a Gallup-certified Strengths Coach, working with individuals, teams & orgnsations across Singapore. The tool of choice is CliftonStrengths (a psychometric assessment that identifies 34 talent themes: patterns in how a person naturally thinks, feels & behaves).
What makes CliftonStrengths different from most personality frameworks is the granularity. It doesn’t put you in a box. It gives you a ranked fingerprint (34 themes, in a unique sequence, specific to you). No two profiles are exactly alike & that specificity matters - because it means you stop describing people in broad strokes & start seeing them in precise ones.
In my professional work, the moment I consistently watch for is when someone reads their profile & says “yes – that’s exactly me” - something shifts. They stop apologising for how they’re wired. The person who always needs more time to decide realises they’re not slow (they have strong #deliberative). The person who can’t stop generating ideas realises they’re not unfocused (they have strong #ideation). The framework turns self-criticism into self-understanding.
What I didn’t fully anticipate, when I started this work, was how much it would change me as a father.
THREE CHILDREN. THREE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT WIRING DIAGRAMS.
My wife & I have three children (now 25, 23 & 17) & if I’m honest, before I had a strengths framework, I was parenting all three of them through onelens: mine.
My dominant themes are #achiever, #ideation, #strategic & #analytical. I am wired to drive forward, generate possibilities & measure progress. Left to my own instincts, that’s what I would have pushed my children toward as well.
But the profiles told me that each of my three children is wired almost entirely differently from the others (& in several key ways, differently from me & my wife).
My Eldest: Learning to Read a Language I Didn’t Speak
My eldest daughter’s dominant themes include #adaptability, #empathy, #intellection & #developer. She is present-moment oriented, deeply reflective & attuned to people. She grows others almost instinctively.
Her #achiever sits at position 32 out of 34. My #achiever sits at position 1. You can imagine the early friction.
My instinct was to push her towards excellence (to ask what she was working toward, to measure progress, to encourage drive). But that’s not how she flourishes. She flourishes by being present, by understanding, by investing slowly & deeply in people over time. Pushing her toward my pace wasn’t helping her. It was asking her to perform in conditions that worked against her nature.
What I had to learn (& it took longer than I’d like to admit) was that her way of being in the world was not a slower version of mine. It was a completely different & equally valid version of excellence. My job was not to redirect her toward my pace. It was to expand my definition of what flourishing looks like.
I didn’t need to fix her. I needed to broaden myself.
My Middle Child: The Moment I Said Yes
This brings me back to that conversation when my second daughter was 15. Her dominant themes: #communication, #maximizer, #ideation. She is expressive, excellence-oriented & deeply creative.
In secondary school, she struggled like many other creatively-wired children do when the curriculum doesn’t fit their strengths. Her results were solid (around the 75th percentile), but the conventional academic path wasn’t where she came alive.
When she asked me that question, she wasn’t asking me to lower my expectations. She was asking me to “locate the right expectations”. When I held her #maximizer (which doesn’t do average, which drives toward exceptional) alongside her #ideation & her love of design, something clicked.
#maximizer doesn’t settle for mediocrity. It takes something already good & pushes it toward great. Together with #ideation, it’s the core competency in a design context.
I said yes & I’ve watched her build something genuinely excellent in the years since.
The most loving thing I could do was let her be excellent in her own direction (not mine).
My Son: Understanding Why He Walked Away
My youngest (now 17) leads with #strategic, #input, #analytical & #learner. He is a thinker. Precise, pattern-oriented, quietly formidable - he processes internally.
For a while, he played basketball (the game I love). Then he stopped. He didn’t want to continue on the team.
A father with high #achiever may read that as lack of grit. Push through. Don’t quit. But when I understood his #competition theme (which in CliftonStrengths is specifically about winning relative to others, not simply about effort) I saw it differently.
People with strong #competition don’t play for the experience. They play to win. And if winning isn’t a realistic outcome, the activity loses its meaning. My son had done the #strategic-#analytical calculation. He assessed the court & concluded he couldn’t win there. Walking away wasn’t a failure of character. It was, in fact, clear thinking.
I needed to understand his wiring before I could respond well to his decision. That sequence (understand first, respond second) is the one I would have gotten wrong as a younger father.
WHAT I WISH I’D KNOWN EARLIER
If I could write a letter to my younger self (the father I was in those early years before I had this framework), I’d include three things that would have changed how I showed up.
1. Other people’s wiring is not a problem to fix. It’s a language to learn.
I spent years trying to redirect my eldest toward my pace. What I was actually doing was refusing to learn her language. The gap I was trying to close wasn’t in her. It was in my understanding of her.
2. The most dangerous thing you can do as a parent is make your definition of success the default setting for someone else’s life.
When my second daughter asked to take a different path, I had to consciously unhook my definition of success from hers. That is harder than it sounds when your own #achiever is running the show.
3. When your child stops, look at the thinking before you judge the stopping.
The response that matters most as a parent always comes after understanding (not before it). My son’s decision to leave basketball was precise & intentional. I almost missed that entirely.
THE THING ABOUT THE BOTTOM OF THE PROFILE
Here is something else most people don’t talk about with CliftonStrengths: the bottom of the profile is just as informative as the top.
We tend to focus on what people are. But knowing what someone is genuinely not wired for is equally clarifying & often the more immediately useful insight in parenting. Because the instinct to push a child toward what they lack is a very natural one & that can do a lot of quiet damage.
My eldest, for example, has #achiever at 32 & #competition at 25. Pushing her to be more driven, more output-focused, more competitive (which would have come naturally to me) would have been asking her to operate against her grain. It will not be her growth edge. Rather it is a total mismatch.
My son has #command at 32 & #significance at 33. He is not wired to seek visibility, to lead from the front, or to be motivated by how others see him. Nudging him toward conventional markers of teenage leadership (school prefect, team captain, speak up in class) would have been nudging him away from himself.
The bottom of the profile doesn’t show you what your child needs to fix. It shows you where to stop pushing — and start listening for a different kind of signal.
That shift (from asking “why aren’t you more like this” to asking “what does this tell me about where they actually thrive”) is one of the quietest & most important moves a strengths-based parent can make.
A QUESTION FOR YOU
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably a parent (or someone who was once parented) who has felt the quiet tension of being seen through someone else’s lens. So here’s what I’d invite you to sit with:
Which of your children (or the child you once were) have you been trying to understand (and which have you been trying to redirect)? What might change if you spent one week simply observing, without trying to improve?
Parenting doesn’t get easier the longer you do it. But I do think it gets more accurate (if you’re willing to keep learning the language of the people you love most).
If this resonated with you,
I'd be delighted to hear from you. Whether you're a parent curious about your family's strengths profile, or an organisation exploring strengths-based development, drop me a note at yeangcherng.com or visit strengthstransform.com to find out more about our programmes.
The journey of understanding yourself (& the people you lead, love & live with) is one worth taking intentionally.
Tags:
#CliftonStrengths #StrengthsBasedParenting #FathersDay #FamilyStrengths #StrengthsTransform #Singapore #Coaching
