Trusting Child Development Professionals
As parents, we seek the best for our children. What can sometimes be a challenge is recognizing that the best thing for our children is letting them navigate their own path, and sometimes letting them fail.
Life’s best lessons aren’t always learned through getting your way, or creating situations where your children get their way. For example, when parents confront coaches about playing time (or referees about perceived bad calls…or camp directors about experiences related to camp) for their kids, they send dueling bad messages: that the child deserves the time (or call) and that the child can’t communicate with the coach (or referee or camp director) for him or herself.
What can be hard for some parents (including me) is to let your child go through adversity and experience failure. Despite those types of experiences often offering the best lessons, we often prevent kids from learning those lessons by intervening on their behalf.
Instead, we need to recognize just how smart and resilient our children are. Instead of “rescuing” them unnecessarily, we need to encourage and support them while they figure stuff out by themselves. Perhaps easy to say (or write), but definitely leading to stronger, more lasting life lessons.
Let’s try words like these the next time we’re tempted to intervene with a coach or child development professional: “You’re my child’s coach (or camp director). I trust you.’”