Your child needs to learn to handle disappointment. Get dressed. Stop hitting. Leave the playground without a full-body protest.
Yes. These are things worth learning.
But your child doesn’t have to learn the lesson on your timeline. They have to learn it on theirs.
Inconvenient? Completely nerve-wracking? Absolutely. Especially when your timeline involves getting to work to do a presentation for your boss’s boss.
We can offer support, create opportunities to practice, and hold boundaries. What we can’t do is turn our urgency into their readiness.
“I’ve told you a hundred times” may be accurate. Unfortunately, the number of times we’ve explained something doesn’t tell us whether a child can do it yet.
Skills have seasons
Sometimes children seem to change overnight. They start using words to ask for help, tolerate a change in plans, or suddenly manage something that felt impossible a month ago.
Then comes a stretch where seemingly nothing happens.
Same struggle. Same reminders. Different sweatshirt forgotten on the same playground.
Skills have seasons: periods of rapid growth followed by periods of stability, practice, and plateauing. During a quieter stretch, your child may be making a skill more reliable. Or their energy may be going somewhere else.
Then there are the days when a skill apparently disappears.
“But you did this yesterday!” They did. Yesterday’s capacity was available yesterday.
Sleep, illness, stress, sensory demands, and changes in routine can affect what’s available today. Sometimes what looks like losing a skill is difficulty accessing it under a heavier load.
There is a reason for the change, even when we haven’t figured it out. That gives us something to investigate rather than someone to blame. A clear or persistent loss of established skills also deserves a conversation with your child’s clinician. Remember that behavior changes (especially significant ones) don’t happen for no reason.
Hope without a deadline
This is where I find it useful to distinguish between specific hope and general hope.
Specific hope sounds like: “By October, they’ll be going into school without crying.”
General hope sounds like: “We can keep finding ways to help them feel safer and participate in learning.”
The first gives us a particular outcome and a deadline. The second gives us a direction.
This distinction echoes Viktor Frankl’s writing about finding meaning and maintaining hope amid suffering, without requiring circumstances to improve on command. I’m using “specific” and “general” as practical parenting language here, rather than as his formal terminology.
A related idea appears in the Stockdale Paradox, described by Jim Collins through his conversations with former prisoner of war Admiral James Stockdale: maintain faith in the future while facing the difficult facts of the present. Stockdale warned against repeatedly pinning hope on rescue by a particular holiday.
Obviously, these accounts come from circumstances profoundly different from parenting, and yet the emotional content of each of them is similar and resonant, no? For the parenting application, we can consider the (artificial) deadlines of school years, birthdays, grandma’s next visit, and yes - annual holidays as the markers that might trip us up into the “Specific Hope” category. If you’ve been using benchmarks to keep time and measure your endurance, you might be feeling exhausted and hopeless right about now. And that’s ok. Feel the exhaustion, do what you can to move through the day; rinse and repeat.
But rinse and repeat while moving yourself away from the Specific Hope into more General Hope. Thoughts like, “My child can keep learning.” “And right now, they need help doing this.” “I’m willing to believe that we can all survive this together” can go a long way to restoring your relationship with your child and your relationship with your own sense of self.
Two things to try
First, catch one deadline you’ve attached to a skill.
“They need to manage this before kindergarten / high school / 12th grade / college.”
Ask yourself: What can I actually influence? Perhaps you can arrange support, make the task smaller, or practice when everyone is rested. Maybe your child needs an extended break from whatever program they’re in. Put your energy there.
Second, notice the conditions around success.
Instead of only tracking whether your child did the Thing, notice what helped. More time? Fewer people? A snack? Someone staying nearby?
That information is more useful than another tally of failures. Your child still needs opportunities to learn. You still get to have expectations. But you can hold an expectation without demanding that development meet your preferred delivery date.
I work with families all the time who are wondering “when will this change and how can I help my child?”. If you’d like help figuring out what to practice, what to accommodate, and where to ease the pressure, schedule a 1:1 parent coaching session with me.
xo G