Our greatest opportunity as parents and grandparents is not to teach values. It is to model them. This weekend, our family lived this. When my sons were younger, Saturdays were sacred. We built businesses, solved problems, got our hands dirty, and at the end of the day we would sit down to a delicious celebration meal. It created memories and funded our family adventures.

One of the opportunities, and challenges, of being human is that we come equipped with a rather temperamental biological machine. Every now and then it misfires. Most of us think about the obvious moments. The terrible embarrassment of wetting ourselves, getting sick, or having our body betray us in some public way. Those are not pleasant memories. They are the kind that make you want to crawl under a rock.

This week I had three deeply meaningful conversations with parents who are navigating strained relationships with their young adults. Each situation was different, but the ache was the same. In one, a new marriage introduced a rift in the relationship. In another, decisions on both sides created distance that slowly widened. And in the third, a daughter was doing what daughters must do — stepping into independence — but it was misunderstood, and connection suffered. Different stories, but the same quiet pain that sits underneath. I want to share three simple practices that can place balm on the wound, strengthen the bridge, and reopen the conduit of communication. These are not complicated ideas, but they are powerful when applied with sincerity.

Boundaries are how you love yourself, and they are also how you show others that you love them. In our new home we built what has become a pretty spectacular game room. It has a 1986 Grand Lizard pinball machine, a golf simulator studio, a pool table, a custom arcade cabinet loaded with thousands of the classic games many of us grew up with, a foosball table, and a sports viewing area. I built this room very intentionally. My hope was that it would become a place where my sons and their wives could gather with me, laugh, compete, and play like teenagers again. I wanted to create a space where connection could happen naturally through play and shared activity.

There is nothing on this earth more rewarding and more complex than a long term relationship. Not business. Not building companies. Not wealth. Not reputation. Binding yourself to another soul, bringing children into this world, and learning how to love without keeping score may be the highest refinement we experience here.