Come On, Bud. Let’s Go.

My second-born son, Dietrich, is autistic and has severe ADHD, and I’ve always felt for him because those two parts of his brain can seem like they’re pulling him in opposite directions. The autistic side of him wants extreme routine and predictability (think consistency on steroids), while the ADHD side is constantly dopamine-seeking and looking for something new and fun to do. There are times when that combination is incredibly difficult for him, and for several years one of the places we saw it most clearly was simply trying to get him through the front door of school.

We didn’t put Dietrich into school until second grade; until after we had his diagnosis. Having the diagnosis helped us better understand him (whole other story and conversation to be had about this) and it also meant the school district could have the resources he needed available when he arrived. Even with that preparation, getting him there was brutal. My wife initially drove him, and every morning became a negotiation. Was today a break day? Did he really have to go? Why couldn’t he stay home? An easy morning might still take 20 minutes of arguing and fighting before he finally went inside and doing that five mornings a week was exhausting.

When my wife went to work full-time, our nannies we hired started taking him. We had two different nannies, and naturally they each developed their own ways of getting Dietrich into the building. Everyone was trying to do the right thing and making the best decision based on where he was that particular morning, but whether he was going to school or getting a break remained an open question. Without my wife or me personally dealing with the consequences of that morning’s decision, he eventually ended up absent around 15-20% of the time.

Then I left Knight Cabinetry, and on April 14, 2025, getting Dietrich into school suddenly became 100% my problem.

An immovable mountain met an unstoppable force.

Except being the unstoppable force didn’t mean I was going to overpower him. I wasn’t interested in yelling louder, getting angry, or turning every morning into a battle that I had to win. I just started giving him the same answer and, more importantly, the same version of me every day. Calm, quiet, persistent, encouraging and having the same answer everyday.

Come on, bud.

Let’s go.

You’ve got this.

And we’d go to school.

It was still hard. Consistency isn’t magic, and doing something the same way three times doesn’t suddenly change years of behavior. But over the remaining weeks and couple of months of that school year, something started to change. It didn’t become easy, but it became better. The arguments and timing got shorter. The negotiations became less intense. The question of whether we were going didn’t have as much power because my answer wasn’t changing.

That summer, I was home with the boys while I worked on building Hito Works, and I referred to myself as the DOD—Dad On Duty. Being around that much meant Dietrich kept getting the same version of me over and over. I wasn’t (and am not) perfect, and I’m certainly not claiming that I never got frustrated, but the underlying expectations became increasingly predictable.

When school started again in the fall, we talked about what was coming and that, on school days, we were going to school. When he asked for a break day, rather than making that morning’s attendance negotiable, we’d talk about it and plan a break day sometime in the future. He could have a break, but he didn’t have to fight me at 7:30 in the morning to get one.

Slowly, school stopped being a decision we made every morning and became simply what we did.  By last spring, getting Dietrich to school had become remarkably normal. This year, the kid who once required 20 minutes of arguing on a good day will hear me say, “It’s time to go, get your shoes on,” and answer, “Okay, Dad, I’m coming!”

I want to be very careful about taking credit for that transformation, because this isn’t all me. Not even close. Dietrich went from seven to ten during this period, and those are huge developmental years. He’s matured tremendously, his self-control has skyrocketed, and he deserves an enormous amount of the credit for learning how to manage something that is genuinely harder for him than it is for many other kids. I’m incredibly proud of him and the young man he’s becoming.

But I also learned something from him.

Consistency doesn’t always change something because you’ve discovered the perfect technique. Sometimes consistency works because you remove the uncertainty.

For a long time, every school morning contained a question: Do I really have to go today? Different people had different approaches, his own feelings changed from morning to morning, and occasionally enough resistance resulted in staying home. It was completely understandable how we got there, because everyone involved was trying to help him. But from Dietrich’s perspective, the outcome wasn’t predictable.

Eventually it became predictable.

Dad is going to get me up. Dad is going to stay calm. Dad isn’t going to yell. Dad is going to encourage me. Dad will listen to me. And we’re still going to school.

I spend a lot of time talking to business owners about consistency, and this experience has changed how I think about why it matters. In business, we tend to focus on the operational side of consistency: processes, SOPs, KPIs, job descriptions, meetings and accountability. Those things matter tremendously, but underneath all of them is something more human.

People want to know what to expect.

Your employees want to know whether the expectations you’re enforcing today will still be true next Tuesday. They want to know whether missing a target results in a productive conversation or it depends on what mood you’re in. Your customers want to know whether you’ll communicate with them and do what you said you would do. Consistency removes some of the mental energy people spend wondering what’s going to happen next.

And I’ve realized the same thing is true at home.

Being consistent doesn’t mean being rigid, and it certainly doesn’t mean finding one parenting technique and blindly applying it to every kid and every situation. Parenting requires changing constantly as our kids grow, giving them freedom, letting them fail, encouraging them, correcting them, and somehow figuring out which one they need from us at that particular moment.  And how to have different rules and standards for different kids based upon their capabilities and capacity.

But underneath all of that, I want there to be something that doesn’t change very much.

I want my boys to know what version of Dad they’re going to get.

Not a perfect version. Not a version that never gets frustrated, makes the wrong decision, or must apologize afterward. Just a consistent one. The one who is going to be there, who believes in them, who is going to keep encouraging them, and who sometimes keeps calmly pushing when something is hard.

Come on, bud. Let’s go. You’ve got this.

It took Dietrich a couple of years to make going to school look easy.

It took me about the same amount of time to realize how much he was teaching me about consistency.