Choosing to be fathers

The comment

The meaning of fatherhood in today's society

Gino Cecchettin's speech on Father's Day

by Gino Cecchettin

19 March 2026

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

3' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

When I think about what I have learnt in my experience as a parent, the first thing that comes to mind is this: children are not ours. We accompany them through life, but they do not belong to us. Perhaps this is where we need to start to reflect on the meaning of fatherhood today.

Actually, I prefer to talk about parenting, because bringing up children is not a matter of separate roles between father and mother, but of shared responsibilities. In a family, everyone contributes what they are: with their history, their mistakes, their frailties, and their experiences. It is from the coming together of these differences that the richness of a family bond is born.

In my life I have had the privilege of being a husband and father of two daughters and a son. Like many parents I have known the joy of simple things: family meals, discussions around the table, laughter in the kitchen. Moments that, while you are living them, seem ordinary, but that with time you realise are the real fabric of life.

Then life sometimes changes everything. When you lose a daughter, as happened to me with Giulia, you find yourself questioning everything: the meaning of being a father, the value of relationships, what really counts. The pain remains something intimate and impossible to fully explain. But it is within that pain that a truth becomes even clearer: the task of parents is not to hold their children back, but to help them become free.

Being parents means accepting that children will never be our continuation. They are not the place to realise the dreams we failed to fulfil. They are people who travel the world alongside us for a stretch of road, with a life that belongs to them alone.

That is why educating does not mean filling children with instructions or expectations, but helping them to become themselves. It means transmitting trust, responsibility, respect. Sometimes even through "no's" that may not be understood immediately and may make us appear severe or distant, but behind those limits there is almost always a gesture of love: the attempt to prepare children for the complexity of life and the ability to read it.

With time also comes the most difficult test: letting them go. When their lives begin to take independent directions, the detachment is more about us as parents than it is about them. For them, it is simply life really beginning. For us, it is the most authentic exercise of love: desiring their happiness even when it does not coincide with our expectations.

Today, parenting also brings with it a new awareness. In a society plagued by tensions and often distorted relational models, educating means teaching daughters and sons that relationships are not about possession or control. It means transmitting the value of mutual freedom, of respect, of the ability to recognise in the other person an autonomous person.

Perhaps this is the greatest task of parents in our time: to raise children who know how to be in the world without fear of being themselves and without the need to dominate others in order to feel strong.

If I had to say what I really want for my children, I would not talk about success, fame or wealth. I would speak of happiness. That which is found in authentic relationships and in the small everyday things that, one after the other, build the meaning of a life.

At the end of the day, this is what being a parent means: accompanying our children as long as we can, knowing that one day they will walk alone. And hoping that, when they do, they will bring with them at least one certainty: that their freedom and happiness have always been our priority.

Because being parents, after all, means just that: not teaching children to live as we do, but giving them the courage to live as they are.