Richard Nixon was a smart man. He was a ruthless and skilled politician. He was also—if his diaries are any indication—a man who did care about the public good, who had real goals for using government to make people’s lives better.

Yet there was another side of Nixon—an angry side, a resentful side, a paranoid and harsh side. We know how his presidency ended. We know the terrible sins he was guilty of (which were far worse than breaking into his opponent’s offices—he sabotaged peace talks with Vietnam to increase his chances of winning the election, securing his own ambition at the cost of thousands of soldiers’ lives).

It was Henry Kissinger, himself formed by his own painful upbringing and the brutality of the world, who accurately read how Nixon was wired. As Kissinger once remarked, “Can you imagine what this man could have been had somebody loved him? Had somebody in his life cared for him? I don’t think anybody ever did, not his parents, not his peers. He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.”

How sad is that? While it’s too late for anyone to go back and fix Nixon—too late to go back and fix so many broken people who changed the course of history through their brokenness—it is not too late for us to love our kids. To love them completely. To care for them. To not fill them with a giant hole that they will spend their entire lives trying to fill.

It’s our chance to fill them with goodness instead, so that whoever they are and whatever they do, they know that they are enough and that they are loved.