By the time a man realizes that his father was right, he has a son who thinks he's wrong.

The line wryly captures a recurring generational cycle: youthful certainty tends to discount parental advice, while maturity brings retrospective recognition of a parent’s hard-won judgment. Yet that recognition often arrives only after one has become a parent oneself—at which point the pattern repeats, with one’s own child dismissing the same kind of counsel. The humor depends on timing and irony, but the implication is serious: experience changes what we can hear and value. It also suggests empathy across generations, inviting readers to see disagreement less as personal failure and more as a predictable stage in growing up.