I Fully Agree with Letting Kids Struggle—But It’s Harder Than It Sounds
The milk jug was nearly full, and my four-year-old had both hands wrapped around it, trying to lift it off the counter. Her face was already turning pink. The cereal bowls were lined up. The last thing I wanted was a puddle of milk across the floor at 7:15 in the morning, right before we needed to get shoes on and out the door.
I reached out to take the jug from her. Then I stopped.
It wasn’t because I had a sudden rush of patience. It was because I remembered the exact moment, three weeks earlier, when her preschool teacher said something that I fully agreed with. We were standing in the classroom doorway during pickup, and my daughter was struggling to zip her own jacket. I leaned down to do it, and the teacher gently put a hand on my arm.
“Let her try a little longer,” she said. “It’s okay if she gets frustrated. That’s part of it.”
I nodded and said, “I fully agree with this.” And I meant it. I really did. It sounded wise and true, and I felt like a good, modern parent for saying it.
But standing in the kitchen with that milk jug, I realized that saying a thing and believing a thing are very different when you have to wait through the thing.
I let go of the jug. My daughter grunted. A little milk sloshed over the side and ran down the plastic bottle onto her fingers. She looked at me, and I could see she was deciding whether to cry or keep going. I didn’t say anything. I just stood there, maybe a little too rigidly.
She adjusted her grip and tried again. This time she managed to lift the jug a few inches off the counter, but it was shaking. I watched myself not help. It was honestly one of the hardest things I’ve done as a parent, and I’m not exaggerating. Every instinct in my body was screaming to just fix it. But she kept at it. She set the jug down, shook out her hands, and took a breath—exactly like I do when I’m about to lift something heavy. Then she lifted it high enough to pour milk into the bowl. She spilled a little on the table. But she poured.
She looked up with this completely unbothered face, like she’d just done something obvious. “I did it,” she said, matter-of-factly.
And I thought, okay. Okay, I see it now.
The strange thing is that I didn’t become a believer in the moment of success. I became a believer in the moment before, when I could see her deciding not to give up. That little pause, that reset, that second attempt—it only happened because I didn’t swoop in. If I had taken the jug, she would have learned that, when things get hard, someone else will come along and handle it. Instead, she learned that she can handle it. That’s not a lesson I could teach her with words. I had to get out of the way.
After that morning, I started paying attention to all the places where I was doing things for my kids that they could do for themselves. Not because I was trying to be a better parent, but because I genuinely wanted to know how often I was cutting off that moment before the deciding. It was a lot. Shoes. Buttons. Juice boxes. The way I would automatically pick up toys they dropped instead of asking them to do it. I was like a little helicopter that never actually landed, just hovered over every task and quietly removed the difficulty.
So I made some small changes, mostly out of curiosity.
We bought a small plastic pitcher that fits in my daughter’s hands. Now she pours her own water and milk at dinner. It spills sometimes, and we have a towel nearby. It’s not a big deal.
With my older son, who is seven, the struggle shows up in homework. He’s got a math worksheet, and I catch myself hovering, waiting to answer his question before he even finishes asking it. He’ll say, “I don’t know what to do here,” and I’ll open my mouth to explain the whole problem. But now I try to say, “Hmm. What do you think we should do first?” or “Can you tell me what you see on the page?” The trick is not to give him the answer, but to give him the chance to talk himself through it. He often knows more than he thinks he does—he just needs the space to realize it.
Sometimes we still sit together, and he gets frustrated. He puts his head in his hands and says, “This is too hard.” In the past, I would have jumped in and tried to fix it. Now I wait a little longer. I might say, “I’ll stay here with you. Take a breath and try one more step.” Not because I’m some patient saint, but because I’ve learned that the frustration actually passes. It’s like a wave. If I don’t rush in, it recedes and he’s able to look at the problem again. If I rush in, he learns that frustration means someone else will rescue him.
I have to be careful, though, not to swing too far the other way and turn everything into a lesson. There are days when my daughter can’t find her shoes and we’re already late, and I just hand them to her. There are times when my son is genuinely stuck on a problem that is above his level, and I do explain it. It’s not about being a purist. It’s about noticing which moments are meant for struggling and which moments are just about getting through the day.
The park taught me something else. My kids love climbing up the slide or standing on the log that runs around the sandpit. I used to hover and shout “be careful” every few seconds. Now I try to sit on the bench and let them figure out their own balance. It’s terrifying. I have to physically hold myself back sometimes. But I remember what a teacher once told me at school drop-off: our job isn’t to remove all risk from their lives; our job is to be present while they figure out what they can and can’t do. I fully agree with that, too. But it doesn’t make my stomach feel any better.
I’m not going to tell you that every struggle ends in success, because that would be a lie. My daughter tried to open a yogurt cup the other day and ended up squeezing it so hard it popped open and splattered yogurt across her shirt. She cried, and I helped her clean up. There was no proud moment. There was just yogurt. But she tried. And next time, she’ll have a better sense of how hard to squeeze.
The thing I’m still figuring out is the line between letting them struggle and leaving them stranded. There’s no clear marker. Sometimes I stand there for what feels like an eternity, watching them wrestle with a sock, and I worry that I’m being mean. But then they get it on, and they look at me like “why were you even here?” And I realize that most of what I was doing before was just easing my own discomfort, not their difficulty.
I don’t think “fully agreeing” with something means you’re instantly good at it. It just means you’re pointed in the right direction. I still hear myself almost grab the milk jug. I still catch myself about to say “let me do it.” But more and more, I stop. And when I do, I notice that my kids are stronger than I give them credit for. They don’t always get it right. Neither do I. But we’re both getting more practice at trying again. That feels like enough for now.
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