A random taxi journey gave me parenting advice I will never forget

May 19, 2026 - 17:42

I don't take taxi journeys very often, but you can get some of the best parenting advice when you least expect it. Last Tuesday, I was running late for a meeting and flagged down a cab driven by a man in his late sixties. He had a calm, unhurried way of driving that immediately put me at ease. We started talking about the rain, then jobs, then somehow landed on the subject of raising kids.

I mentioned that my five-year-old son had started refusing to eat dinner unless I sat next to him and read aloud from a comic book. I was exhausted and worried I was spoiling him. The driver laughed softly and said, "You are not spoiling him. You are filling his tank."

He explained that his own daughter, now a grown woman with children of her own, went through a phase where she needed him to sit on the floor outside her bedroom door every night before she could sleep. He did it for two years. His wife thought he was crazy. But he said that when she became a teenager and faced real trouble, she came to him first. She trusted him because he had shown up for the small, ridiculous things.

He told me that children do not remember the perfect meals or the tidy house. They remember the person who stopped what they were doing to be present. He said the comic book reading was not about the food. It was about connection. My son was not being difficult. He was asking for my attention in the only way a five-year-old knows how.

I paid the fare and walked into my meeting ten minutes late, but my mind was not on the agenda. It was on that simple, profound truth. Since that day, I have not once complained about reading comic books at the dinner table. I just sit down, open the page, and fill his tank.