If we asked you to name the one thing that matters most in parenting, what would you say?

Discipline? Faith? Good schools? Making sure they eat something green once in a while?

After 8 kids and 26 years of doing this — the diapers, the driver’s licenses, and everything in between — if we had to boil it all down to one thing, it would be this:

Stay connected.

That’s it. That’s the whole secret, and it isn’t really a secret at all.

Stay connected, even when it would be easier not to

Stay connected through the hard seasons and the easy ones. Through the eye rolls and the slammed doors. Through the years when they need you every single minute — when you can’t even shower without a little face at the door — and the years when they act like they don’t need you at all.

Especially then.

Because connection is where everything else flows from. A child who feels connected to you will listen differently. They’ll come to you differently. They’ll weather hard things differently. Rules matter, routines matter, all of it matters — but none of it lands the same way without connection underneath it.

We learned that the slow way. There were seasons where we focused so hard on correcting the behavior in front of us that we almost missed the kid behind it. What turned those seasons around wasn’t a better speech. It was slowing down, getting curious, and making it clear: I’m still here, and I’m still for you, even when this is messy.

That’s true for a toddler in a meltdown, and it’s just as true for a teenager. We wrote about that season in What Your Teenager Actually Needs From You — underneath all the attitude is usually a kid checking whether the connection still holds.

Connection doesn’t have to be big

Here’s the good news: staying connected rarely looks like a big family event or a perfect heart-to-heart.

It looks like noticing. It looks like the two minutes in the car when they suddenly tell you the real story. It looks like sitting on the edge of the bed at night a little longer than you planned. It looks like putting the phone down at dinner — something we talked about in Family Dinner Conversation Starters That Build Culture, where small questions, asked often, quietly change the feel of a home.

And sometimes it looks like going first after a hard moment. Apologizing when you lost your temper. Circling back after an argument instead of letting the silence do the talking. Kids don’t need us to be perfect at this. They need us to keep coming back.

That matters on the thankless days, too — the ones we described in What to Do When Parenting Feels Thankless. You may not see the fruit of connection today. You plant it anyway, because the seasons change, and the kids who stay connected in the small years are the ones who still call in the big years.

Try this today

Pick one kid — just one — and make one small, deliberate point of connection today that has nothing to do with chores, homework, grades, or correction.

Ask about the thing they care about. Sit with them while they do something ordinary. Send the text. Take the walk. Stay for the story that starts with, “Mom, Dad, guess what,” even if you were on your way to do something else.

No agenda. No lesson tucked inside it. Just: You matter to me, and I like being close to you.

Then do it again tomorrow. Connection isn’t built in a day. It’s built in a thousand small returns.

Let’s talk about it

Here’s your conversation starter for today — ask your spouse, or ask your kids directly at the table tonight:

“When do you feel closest to us as a family — and what are we doing in those moments?”

Listen more than you talk. Their answers will tell you exactly where your connection already lives, and how to build more of your family life around it.

After all these years and all these kids, we don’t have parenting figured out. But we know this much: stay connected. Through the hard seasons and the easy ones. Everything else flows from that.