Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids
Updated on September 25, 2024, at 5:12 p.m. ET
Sign up for Raising Resilient Children, Russell Shaw’s eight-week guide to parenting with more happiness and less worry.When my son was a toddler, he liked to run in our driveway until he fell. He would then turn to me to see if he was hurt. If my face betrayed worry or if I audibly gasped, he would wail. If I maintained equanimity, he would brush himself off and get back to running. Learning that I could so powerfully influence his mental state was a revelation. Here was this human being who was counting on me to make sense of the world—not just how to tie his shoes or recite the ABCs, but how to feel.
Years later, when he was in middle school, this lesson came back to me. One night while doing homework, my son told me about a classmate who had been unkind to him. My first instinct was to rush to fix it—email the parents, call the school, demand action. (Calling his teachers would have been complicated, given my role as the head of the school.) But instead of reacting, I paused. “That sounds hard. What did you do?”
“I decided not to hang out with him for a while,” my son replied. “I’m going to try playing soccer at lunch instead.”
“That’s a great solution,” I said, and he went back to his homework.
These otherwise ordinary parenting moments crystallized for me an important truth: Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all.
