I have six adult children, ages 38 to 62—old enough to know everything, and wise enough to often prove it.

Over the years, I’ve adopted a simple parenting philosophy: never give advice to adult children unless they ask.

Not because I lack opinions. Quite the opposite. I have advice on everything—business, relationships, health, socks, breakfast cereal. I am, in fact, a walking advice factory, at least in my own mind.

But I’ve learned something important: advice given to adults has a strange side effect. It makes them feel like children, and no 60-year-old attorney wants to feel like a 12-year-old who forgot his homework.

Let me introduce the cast.

One child is a doctor married to another doctor. When I say anything medical, they smile kindly—the way grown children do when they know their father means well.

Another is a highly respected professor at UCLA. Happily, he not only accepts my ideas, but he also often asks for them, which is one of the pleasures of having children who have grown into people you genuinely enjoy talking with.

One is a successful attorney. Offering legal advice to a lawyer is like bringing your own spices to a Michelin-starred restaurant—and then critiquing the chef.

One is a yoga teacher, deeply experienced in KIUT yoga. I once tried to impress her with breathing advice. At 86, it turns out I breathe like an amateur.

The youngest two are just as accomplished and just as capable of making their own decisions. One is a talented writer who does not need my editorial advice. The other is an insightful therapist who certainly does not need my help exploring anyone’s psyche.

Yet sometimes I slip. Because a parent never fully retires.

Occasionally, I will hear myself say, “You might want to…” and immediately stop before I say more.

Advice is rarely about the listener. 

It’s about the speaker. It says, “I know better. Let me save you from making a mistake.” But what I’ve learned slowly, sometimes reluctantly, is this:

We learn most deeply from our own experience.  Painful, expensive and sometimes hilarious experience.

So now when a child calls with a problem, I listen.

And then I do something very difficult for me:  I refrain from solving their problem. Just…understanding, and respect.

Here’s the irony: The less advice I give, the more they ask for it. And when they do, I try to offer it not as instruction, but as a story…a possibility…a “this worked for me.”

There’s a quiet shift that happens somewhere along the way.  You stop parenting children, and you start loving adults.  They are no longer branches growing from you.  They are fully formed trees, with their own roots, their own seasons, their own storms. 

And if you stand back—just far enough—you can see something remarkable.

Not what they need from you. But the independent men and women they have become.

The greatest gift I can give them is not my answers. 

It’s my trust.

And in that small act of restraint—occasionally awkward—there is something that feels a lot like love.

Alan

Susan and I’d been married for about two years—long enough for me to know where she kept the coffee filters, but not quite long enough for me to know when I should keep my business worries to myself.

One morning, over breakfast, I overshared my business woes.

“I’m short on cash,” I said, trying to sound calm and CEO-like, which is hard to do when you have no idea how you’re going to make payroll on Friday.

Susan didn’t blink. Though she was a licensed social worker, she didn’t offer helpful advice, a breathing technique, or a reminder to eat more oatmeal. She simply said, “I have $40,000 saved. You can have it.”

Forty thousand dollars.

At that time, in the late 70’s, that was not just money—it was a lifetime. It represented years of discipline, delayed gratification, and probably saying “no” to anything indulgent, like shoes that sparkled or fancy vacations. And she offered all of it to me, as casually as someone might offer you a second cup of coffee.

I was stunned. Deeply, genuinely moved. I thanked her—profusely, embarrassingly, repeatedly. And then, being the practical businessman I was (and still am), I added, “The problem is… I could go through that amount by 10 a.m. and still need more.”

Not my finest romantic moment.

Somewhere, a poet lost his wings.

Years later, I read a Wall Street Journal piece about the Ten Rules of Business. Rule number one: Don’t run out of cash. Rule number ten: Don’t run out of cash. The other eight rules, the article suggested, were more or less filler—like the parsley on a steak plate. Nice, but not the point.

But Susan taught me something the article didn’t mention.

There’s another kind of “cash.” The kind you don’t list on a balance sheet.

Trust and generosity. The quiet, breathtaking willingness of another human being to say, “What’s mine is yours. We’ll figure it out together.”

I did solve the cash problem another way, the business survived, even thrived. I’m still in the game today, long enough to have learned far more rules, many of them the hard way.

But that morning stayed with me.

Because while I was busy calculating how fast I could spend $40,000, Susan was demonstrating something far more valuable: how quickly one person can give everything they have to another without hesitation.

And here’s the part that touches me, even now.

Cash problems come and go. You tighten, you stretch, you survive.

But moments like that?

They’re priceless.

And if you’re not careful—if you’re too focused on the numbers, the deals, the next 10 a.m.—you can run out of those.

Long before you run out of cash.

Alan

We live in a particularly divisive time. Political polarization is at its worst since the Civil War. Only now, social scientists have identified a different kind of division that is not merely based on differing ideologies.  “Affective polarization,” is rooted in distrust, dislike, and contempt. and manifests as emotional hostility toward anyone perceived as being on the opposite side. Some even believe that disagreement is the same as treason.

With so much hostility across sociopolitical divides, will we ever be able to repair and rebuild trust?  Will we ever be able to come together and focus instead on all we have in common? Our shared need for human connection? What would it look like if we could cross the divide of our differences?

And that brings to my mind, a true story I remember reading years ago about a Christmas Day pause in hostilities between American and German soldiers during WW II. To refresh my memory, I prompted ChatGPT to tell me about it.

After politely explaining that it was WWI and not WW II, and that it was between British and German soldiers, Chat GPT offered the following story. I find it inspirational.

Of note: the phrase “When the Guns Fell Silent: Christmas, 1914” is commonly associated with accounts of the Christmas Truce published in British newspapers shortly after the event occurred (AI does a good job sourcing these references). Also, a common headline/byline for journalists reporting in that era was simply “Staff Correspondent.” As you can see below, ChatGPT follows the tradition of the time.

“When the Guns Fell Silent: Christmas, 1914

By Staff Correspondent

On Christmas Day, 1914, something extraordinary happened on the battlefields of Europe.

In the frozen trenches of World War I, where mud, fear, and artillery had ruled for months, the guns went quiet. Not by command. Not by treaty. But by choice.

As dawn broke across no‑man’s‑land, British soldiers heard something unexpected drifting from the German lines—singing. Christmas carols, sung softly, hesitantly, in a language the listeners did not speak but instantly understood. Soon, British voices answered back.

By midmorning, men who had been trying to kill one another the day before climbed out of their trenches. Rifles were left behind. Hands were raised not in surrender, but in greeting. They met in the open ground that had moments earlier been certain death.

They shook hands. They exchanged cigarettes, chocolate, buttons, and photographs of wives and children. Some prayed together. Others buried their dead. In at least one sector, they played an impromptu game of soccer on the frozen earth.

For a single day, the war forgot itself.

There were no speeches. No flags planted. No victory claimed. Just young men—farmers, clerks, teachers—remembering that before they were soldiers, they were human.

The truce was unofficial, brief, and discouraged by high command. By the following day, the killing resumed.

But that one Christmas remains.

It stands as proof that even in the darkest machinery of war, conscience can surface. That obedience has limits. That peace is not naïve—it is remembered.

More than a century later, the Christmas Truce endures not because it stopped the war, but because it revealed what the war could not destroy.

Humanity crossed no‑man’s‑land first.

And for one quiet day, it held.

Alan