Parents know better

Raising kids with authority

I silently judge other parents all the time.

Don’t all parents? It’s kind of our worst habit.

Not only for what they feed their kids or for using an iPad as a stand-in parent, but for something else.

Something more insidious.

And once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it.

Especially in yourself.

I Know Better

It’s the tone of the conversation I’m talking about.

I don’t mean tone as in volume or pitch. I mean the conviction behind it.

What might sound soft-spoken and warm can still have an undertone of “Let me tell you how this works.”

It sounds like the voice of authority. Which, granted, we usually are.

But that doesn’t mean we want our children to internalize the belief that someone else always knows better.

We’ll crush their curiosity, their confidence, and trust in their own ability to think for themselves.

Explaining Is Delicious

“Instead of being quite direct with our children, we say, ‘You are here on probation, and you must understand that. Maybe when you grow up a bit you will be acceptable, but until then you should be seen and not heard. You are a mess, and you have to be educated and schooled until you are human.’” — Alan Watts

Sadly, this way of talking to children, like they’re on probation, isn’t rare. And it’s not a mystery why.

We all grew up with it: adults know, children don’t.

Weirdly, it’s still how a lot of schools operate. You sit. Teachers talk. You leave when the bell rings.

So catching yourself doing this as a parent makes total sense.

Also, it’s delicious. Explaining something you know feels good.

It’s embarrassing how much I enjoy it. Ask me something I know a lot about (or think I do), and I practically start salivating for the chance to talk.

There’s pleasure in showing how something fits together. And that’s not wrong. It’s human.

But that impulse comes at a cost.

Without meaning to, we can end up replacing our children’s ideas with our own.

Parent Training

I’m lucky that I got trained as a coach, before I became a parent.

If I hadn’t, I’d probably still be doing the thing I now notice in others: talking at my daughter instead of with her.

Coaching showed me my communication patterns and helped me notice my impulse to fix, explain, and take over.

I learned how to ask instead of answer. How to stay with her thinking, instead of replacing it with mine. How to respond like a partner, not someone who knows better.

So when my daughter was born, I was ready.

Incorrect

When we play a new game together, I wait. I listen. I’m there with her.

If she builds a strange version or misuses a toy, I don’t correct her. If she asks for help, I give her just enough to keep going herself.

She invents. She changes the rules. She moves on.

That’s what learning and thinking for yourself actually looks like.

Honestly, I still feel the urge to jump in. But I catch myself most of the time, because I’ve been trained for it.

Because I don’t want to teach her that the answer always comes from someone else or that she needs some kind of permission to explore.

Do that often enough, and she’ll just wait to be told.

Protect Her

That’s what I’m afraid of.

Not that she’ll get something wrong. But that she’ll stop coming up with her own ideas in the first place. That she’ll start waiting for the “right” answer before she even thinks for herself.

I want to protect her confidence in thinking freely.

The world will teach her how things work soon enough.

Maybe what she needs from me isn’t answers at all. Just a parent who believes she can find her own.