I began questioning my identity as early as I can remember. I’d say around 1985 — I was eight years old.
The diagnosis wouldn’t come until I was twenty-seven. The questions came much earlier.
I didn’t know what a chromosomal variation was. I didn’t understand why life seemed harder for me than it did for everyone else. I just knew I was different.
By kindergarten, I spent most days in the hallway or the principal’s office. By second grade, I was being asked to leave school. Then another school. By 11th grade I had been asked to leave every school I ever attended.
While my five siblings seemed to navigate life with relative ease, I became the kid who couldn’t stay out of trouble, couldn’t seem to fit in, experienced extreme frustration and couldn’t understand why.
Every expulsion, every disciplinary meeting, every disappointed look from an adult added another brick to a story I was already beginning to tell myself:
Something is wrong with me. I’m a bad kid.
For decades, I believed that story. Long before our culture began talking about identity, I was fighting for mine.
By my late teens, the battle had become exhausting. Hopelessness settled in. Suicidal thoughts followed me for years — not always loudly, not always urgently, but persistently enough that the ideation became almost welcome. A quiet exit I kept in my back pocket.
Yet through all of that confusion and frustration outside of home, there was one thing I never questioned.
I belonged. I belonged where it counted most. At home with my family.
That distinction may have saved my life.
My parents gave my siblings and me plenty growing up, but none was greater to me than a deep sense of belonging.
We weren’t a perfect family. Not even close. But there was never any question that we belonged to one another.
I wasn’t loved because I performed well. I wasn’t accepted because I made life easy. I wasn’t valued because of my achievements. I belonged because I was a Langhofer. We knew who we were, what we were about, and what our purpose was — and that purpose was always together.
That belonging became an anchor when everything else felt unstable. It gave me something solid to stand on while I wrestled with questions about who I was, and who everyone outside my home said I was.
Years later, that lesson would become the most important thing I carried into parenthood.
In 2003, a Karyotype test revealed the source of my life’s frustration. I had been born with a chromosomal variation known as 47XXY. The biggest blow was learning that I was completely sterile and “would not be able to have my own children.” All I could think when that grownup told me those words were “Watch me!”
Between 2004 and 2008, we adopted three beautiful children at birth. Each adoption story is unique and sacred. Each involved courageous birth mothers making difficult decisions out of love.
Then in 2011, I became a single dad almost overnight. The circumstances were extremely painful for the kids and me. And unfortunately, it had only just begun.
I was overwhelmed. But there was something even harder.
My children carried pain that made mine look like a trip to Disney. They had losses I couldn’t undo, questions I couldn’t answer, and massive wounds I couldn’t heal.
Dads want to fix things. I couldn’t fix this.
But I could give them what my parents had given me. I could give them belonging.
I had always hoped to build that belonging in a family much like my own. I hadn’t planned to do it alone in the midst of incredibly challenging circumstances. I felt incredibly inadequate.
So I did the only thing that felt natural to me. I became intentional about building that kind of family.
I began building what eventually became known as our Langhofer Family Handbook. Years later, it would evolve into what is now the Langhofer Family Charter.
We identified who we wanted to be as a family. We wrote down our values. We created a vision for our future. Most importantly, we gathered every week for family meetings. We celebrated wins, discussed challenges, worked through conflicts, and reminded ourselves who we were.
Slowly, something beautiful happened. We stopped functioning like individuals sharing the same house.
We became a team. The culture of sadness and pain turned into a culture of teamwork with a shared vision. We made a family logo and had it printed on hats and t-shirts. We had a family motto: “We are a family. We are a team. We work together.” We said it often. When “mistakes” brought tears, we called them “memories.”
They knew they were Langhofers. They knew what we stood for. They knew they were seen, wanted, valued, and fully part of something bigger than themselves.
Life didn’t suddenly become easy. Far from it.
We experienced painful storms over the years. Situations that tested every one of us. But the belonging held. It didn’t eliminate grief. It didn’t erase pain. It didn’t answer every question.
It gave us something solid to stand on while we walked through those questions together.
Today, when I look at our family, I don’t see perfection. I see resilience. I see connection.
I see people who know who they are because they know where they belong.
And I can’t help but wonder how many children in our culture are desperately searching for identity when what they really need first is belonging.
The numbers suggest it’s not a few. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide has become one of the leading causes of death among young people in America. Rates of anxiety and depression have surged over the past decade, with a majority of teens now reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. We are watching an entire generation wrestle with questions no one is helping them clearly define: Who am I? What do I stand for? Where do I belong?
At the time, I thought my struggle was unique. Looking back, I can see it was just early.
Brené Brown captured the difference perfectly: “Fitting in is becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging is being who you are.” Too many children are exhausting themselves trying to fit in — when what they actually need is a place where they already belong.
Perhaps the greatest gift we can give our children is not confidence. Not achievement. Not success.
Perhaps the greatest gift we can give them is a deep and unwavering conviction that they belong in the one place they should belong the most.
But belonging doesn’t happen automatically — not even inside a family. Sharing a last name and a roof isn’t enough. Maya Angelou once wrote, “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” That is true belonging.
The way I did it was sort of by accident. I needed a roadmap more than anything back then. I needed something to serve as a daily reminder of where we were heading and how we were going to get there. I needed to be able to communicate a consistent message of hope and inspiration to my family. That’s what our Langhofer Family Handbook became.
Belonging is built — intentionally — by parents who are willing to do the work. It’s built when a family identifies shared values, a shared vision, and shared goals. When children see themselves reflected in a purpose bigger than any one person, something shifts. They stop wondering whether they matter. They know they do — because they know exactly where they fit.
Because belonging has a remarkable way of anchoring people through life’s hardest storms.
This Father’s Day, I’m not thinking about gifts or grilling or football. I’m thinking about the fathers who feel the weight of leading their families through an increasingly complex world. The ones who lie awake wondering if what they’re doing will be “enough.”
If that’s you — you don’t have to have it all figured out. You just have to be willing to start. Sit down with your family. Talk about who you want to be together. Write it down. Come back to it. Make belonging something you practice, not something you assume.
The world will hand your children a hundred different versions of who they should be. Give them something stronger to stand on.
I know. It anchored me.
And later, it anchored the family I was entrusted to lead.