The right answer teaches the wrong lesson
The fastest way to finish your kid’s thoughts
I am irrationally sensitive to how adults talk to children.
I was biking through the city with some parents and children on a sunny summer afternoon. We were heading home after taking the kids swimming—which, at their age, mostly means holding them while they play in the water.
One of the children suddenly called out: “Look, there’s grass on that roof!”
There was. One of those living roofs you sometimes see, the grass dry and yellow from the summer.
“I think it’s fake grass,” she added.
“No, it’s real. Look,” one of the adults said.
It was. But don’t say that, I thought. Ask her why she thinks it’s fake!
Nobody else seemed bothered.
I was seething.
Congratulations, you’re right
Why correct her?
Do you think she was asking you to tell her?
No. She was noticing, wondering, and trying to make sense of it.
Of course the grass was real. But that did not matter one bit in that moment.
What mattered wasn’t being right or wrong. It was that she was still thinking it through for herself.
Instead of helping her follow her own thought, the correction stopped and replaced it.
Our job as parents is not just to supply the information our children don’t yet know. It is to protect their willingness to keep looking, wondering, and thinking for themselves.
Isn’t that exactly what you want? For your kid to look closely. To form ideas. To trust their own mind enough to say them out loud. To be wrong without immediately being put right.
Correct one small fact often enough, and you risk crushing the much bigger thing underneath it: the child who was thinking for herself.
What happens if you just wait?
Don’t say anything
It only takes a few seconds.
That is all your kid needs to keep following their own thoughts. And all you have to do is not immediately replace them with yours.
For a while now, my daughter has been finding reasons to come into the room while my wife puts our son down for a nap.
But not when I do it.
It had happened often enough for me to notice, but I hadn’t asked her about it.
So the next time it happened, I asked her why.
“It takes longer when Mom does it,” she said.
I waited.
“Or it feels longer.”
I waited again.
“I miss Mom when she does it.”
Ouch.
I’ve long since accepted my place in this family, but still.
She found it
Until I asked, I don’t think she had really thought about why she kept coming into the room.
Within a few seconds, she realized that she wanted more time with Mom.
Now she asks for it.
A book together. A cuddle. A little more time before Mom takes her brother to the bedroom.
I’m glad I didn’t finish the thought for her.