Short Kings and Tall Dreams: The Day My 7 Year Old Son Taught Me A Life Lesson

My son, the little king with an endless imagination and a backpack full of questions, walked into the room one day and landed a punch I wasn’t ready for. He looked at me, eyes wide with the kind of curiosity that only a seven-year-old can pull off without seeming judgmental, and asked, “Dad, will I be short like you when I grow up?”

Boom. Right there, he hit me where it hurts. I felt my stomach tighten, my brain racing through years of my own insecurities. His mom and I are both short. We’re the people who know every trick in the book to reach the top shelf and have perfected the art of navigating crowded spaces like stealthy ninjas. I thought I’d be ready for this conversation. I should be ready for it. And yet, I wasn’t.

“Why do you ask, buddy?” I managed to get out, buying myself a few seconds to assemble a response, to weave a narrative that could dodge the inevitable disappointment. Here it was—the crossroads where I’d have to choose between instilling false hope of a 6’4” future or confronting the reality that genetics might not be in his favor. How do I tell my son to own his destiny when part of that destiny means never being the tallest in the room?

His gaze didn’t waver. He just blinked, not with concern but with simple curiosity. “Will I be short like you?” he repeated. Straight. No embellishments. No panic. Meanwhile, my mind was in overdrive, scrambling for an answer that didn’t suck. I didn’t want to lie to him, didn’t want to sell him a story about a mythical growth spurt that would magically vault him into the world of tall men and high shelves. But I didn’t want to crush his dreams, either.

So I took a deep breath. “Does being short bother you?” I asked, hoping I was steering this conversation in the right direction. This was a gamble—a Hail Mary of a question. I expected a grim nod, a sigh, maybe even a complaint about not being able to see over the heads of his classmates during assemblies. I was ready to arm myself with reassurances, to spin a web of consolation about how greatness isn’t measured in inches.

Instead, he shocked me. He floored me, actually.

“No,” he said, with this casual shrug that somehow weighed a thousand pounds. “I love my height. It makes me who I am.” And just like that, this seven-year-old kid shattered the walls of my own insecurities. He spoke with more self-assurance in that one sentence than I had ever managed to muster at his age—or hell, even at 14.

Here I was, a grown man, suddenly aware of how deeply my own perceptions of height had wormed their way into my psyche. Society’s relentless drumbeat: taller is better, taller is stronger, taller is more successful. You grow up thinking you have to fit into these pre-made molds, and the ones made for short people? They’re small, cramped, and usually found on the bottom shelf. So you either learn to adapt or spend a lifetime yearning for something you were never built to have.

And yet here’s my son, standing on his solid little legs, looking me dead in the eye and telling me he loves his height. Like it was nothing. No dramatic monologue, no self-help buzzwords, just a kid’s pure acceptance of himself as he is. I wanted to hug him, to tell him he’s perfect, but mostly, I wanted to ask him how he got there—how he came to a place of peace that I had struggled to reach for decades.

He’d made a profound statement, without knowing it, and it struck me how far ahead of the game he already was. At seven years old, he was looking at the world through a lens that I hadn’t even found until adulthood.

I had to admit, in that moment, that I was the one with the issue, not him. I had been projecting my own insecurities onto him, worried he might feel lesser or limited by his stature. The truth is, I had spent too many years believing that being short was a curse, a handicap in the contest of life. All those years of dodging height jokes, of stretching my spine just a bit straighter in the mirror, hoping I could somehow appear taller to the world. And here was my son, staring at me with a sense of peace I couldn’t quite wrap my head around.

“Why do you love your height?” I asked, still a little stunned, but hungry for the wisdom of this pint-sized sage standing before me.

“Because it’s mine,” he said simply. “If I was taller, I wouldn’t be me.” There it was again, the kind of clarity that made my adult mind spin. He wasn’t fighting against his nature. He wasn’t comparing himself to others. He was just being—accepting himself as he was, with no need for justification.

It hit me then that maybe we’ve all got it backward. We spend so much time trying to fill the shoes society says we should wear, that we forget to cherish the ones we were born in. My son wasn’t trapped in some illusion of what he should be. He was perfectly content being exactly who he was. And isn’t that what we’re all trying to achieve?

Sure, the world might still toss its stones, its criticisms, its ideals. It’ll try to sell you on the idea that you need to be taller, richer, smarter, more something. But here’s the thing: owning who you are means those stones don’t hit as hard. They bounce off, leaving you standing, resolute and unshaken.

My son taught me a lesson that day. He made me realize that the battle isn’t against height, or genetics, or societal standards. The real struggle is against the idea that you have to be anything other than what you are. My seven-year-old son grasped that concept before I did. And now, looking at him, standing there like the short king he already knows he is, I’m reminded that we don’t need to stretch ourselves taller. We just need to stand firmly in who we are.

So, no, I won’t sell him on false hope. I won’t tell him he’ll be 6’4” one day. Instead, I’ll teach him to love every inch of who he is. Because being a king isn’t about size; it’s about how you own your space, no matter how much of it you take up. And in that sense, my son is already taller than most.