My son was six years old, sitting at the kitchen table with a pencil in his fist and a worksheet in front of him. The sheet was for a first-grade math problem, the kind where you have to count the dots and circle the right answer. He had already erased one number so hard the paper had worn through, and now his chin was starting to quiver.
I was trying to make dinner. I remember the steam from the pot, the smell of garlic, and the sound of him pushing his chair back from the table. “I can’t do it,” he said. Not whining, just flat. Defeated.
Standing there with a spatula, I had two immediate thoughts. The first was: This is not a big deal. It’s just six dots. Circle the six. The second, less generous thought was: Are we really doing this? Do I just need to make him suck it up?
In that moment, “suck it up” felt like the right parenting move. The world is full of things you’d rather not do. Learning to tolerate frustration is part of growing up. If I gave him a break every time he felt like giving up, he’d never build any kind of stamina. I genuinely believed that.
So I took a breath and said, “You can do this. Take a break and try again.”
He took a break. He took a very long break. He wandered into the living room, sat on the floor with a toy truck, and did not return. Twenty minutes later, the worksheet was still on the table, the pencil still there, and I had a choice: drag him back and force the issue, or shut down the homework routine entirely.
That’s when I started to wonder who the “sucking it up” was really for.
I’ll be honest—my own childhood was full of “sucking it up.” That was the culture of my school and my family. You finish your work, you sit still, you don’t make a fuss. And that approach did teach me to push through some things. But it also taught me to ignore my own signals. By the time I was an adult, I couldn’t tell the difference between “this is unpleasant” and “this is genuinely not working.” I’d just power through, white-knuckling everything from bad jobs to versions of myself that needed changing.
I didn’t want that for my son. But I also didn’t want him to quit every time something felt hard. That felt like a different kind of failure.
So instead of forcing him to finish the worksheet that night, I sat down next to him the next day, when the pressure was off. We did the same kind of problem, but I used a handful of dried beans instead of the worksheet. I asked him to just count out six beans. He did it without even blinking. Then we drew six dots on paper. Fine. Then we tried the worksheet, and he looked at me like I had pulled the rug out from under him.
It wasn’t the counting that was hard. It was the sheet itself. The format, the black-and-white rows of circles, the expectation embedded in the paper. For him, the page felt like an order. It shut him down.
That was the moment I realized the issue wasn’t grit. It was context.
There’s a strange myth in parenting and education that difficulty is uniform—that if something is hard, the answer is more effort, more endurance, more “sucking it up.” But difficulty has texture. Some tasks are hard because the skill isn’t there. Some tasks are hard because the child is tired, or hungry, or feeling trapped. Some tasks are hard because they’re actually badly designed for that kid, or that moment, or that mood.
If you only ever respond with “suck it up,” you lose the ability to tell the difference.
I’m not saying we should never ask kids to push through. We absolutely should. But pushing through doesn’t mean ignoring what’s happening. It means saying, “Let’s try this in a different way,” or “Let’s break it into a smaller piece,” or “Let me sit with you and do the first one together.” Those are not cop-outs. Those are the actual strategies that keep a child from giving up for good.
Here’s what I started doing after that bean-counting night.
First, I made the decision that homework would never happen over a hot stove again. I sat with him, but I kept my hands in my lap. I stopped hovering over his shoulder, because I could see that standing behind him made him nervous. I moved to the side of the table, close enough to help, far enough to not breathe down his neck.
Second, I tried to catch the moment when he was about to tip over. I could see it now—the pencil grip changing, the leg starting to swing, a low sigh that sounded like air leaving a tire. When I noticed that, I would say, “That one looks frustrating. Do you want to do the next one out loud?” Sometimes he said yes, and saying the problem out loud made it easy. Sometimes he said no, and I let him sit a little longer.
Third, I stopped calling it “a break” and started calling it “a reset.” A break sounds like running away. A reset is just shifting the position of your mind. We’d do three jumping jacks. We’d close our eyes and pretend to blow out a candle. It took thirty seconds. It was ridiculous. It worked.
I also started asking more specific questions. Instead of “Was that too hard?” I tried “What part was hard?” And he’d say something like “I didn’t get what I was supposed to do with the top row.” That gave me something real to work with. We solved a comprehension problem, not a character problem.
Still, I didn’t abandon the “suck it up” idea entirely. There were days when he just had to push through—when he was tired but the work had to be done, when the right answer was to take a breath and keep going. Those days exist. That’s life. But I stopped making them the default. I stopped treating every moment of frustration as if it were a teachable moment about persistence.
Now he’s eight. He still doesn’t love worksheets. But he’s learned to say, “My brain is getting fuzzy, can I do one more then stop?” That’s not avoidance. That’s him paying attention to his own limits and naming them. That feels more important than completing a page of math problems.
And me? I’m still figuring out the line between support and surrender. Some evenings it’s clear. Other evenings he’s just stalling because he wants to watch TV, and making him do the math is the correct call. The hard part is telling those two apart in real time, when you’re tired and dinner is burning.
I don’t have a system for that. I’ve just learned that “sucking it up” is not a strategy—it’s a shutdown. It tells a child their feelings are obstacles to be ignored, not information to be understood. That’s a dangerous lesson, because the older they get, the more they’ll need to understand their own reactions.
Sometimes you do just need to power through. But sometimes you need to change the table, or the pencil, or your own tone. And I think the job of a parent is to know which one is happening. That’s not soft parenting. That’s actually the harder work.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » My son was six years old, sitting at the kitchen table with a pencil in his fist and a worksheet in front of him