What I Wish My Parents Did When I Was Little: Practical Parenting Lessons From An Adult Kid
Last week I knelt on my sister’s living room rug helping my 7-year-old niece sort tiny bricks for a space station Lego set. After 10 minutes of hunting for a specific 1×2 dark grey piece, she huffed, slammed the instruction manual shut, and threw a loose brick across the coffee table. It clattered into a half-empty mug of iced tea, and my sister tensed up from the couch, ready to jump in and say something. Before she could, I said, “That piece hiding is really frustrating, huh? You’ve been looking for it forever.” My niece nodded, eyes wet, and said “I just want this to work.” Five minutes later we found the brick together.
That moment hit me harder than I expected. I was that 7-year-old once, slamming my books shut when things didn’t go right, and I don’t remember anyone ever stopping to say that it was okay to feel that frustrated. My parents were good people, they worked long hours, they fed me, put clothes on my back, and showed up to every parent-teacher conference. But there are small things I wish they’d done, things that don’t make it into most parenting checklists, that stuck with me into adulthood.
I remember when I was 10, I spent two weeks building a papier-mâché volcano for the school science fair. I painted it red and orange, picked out baking soda that was the right grain, practiced the eruption three times in our kitchen sink. The day of the fair, my nozzle got clogged, and it just oozed a little vinegar out the side instead of exploding all over the tray like I planned. I got a B, and I cried all the way to the car. My dad looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “It’s just a B. It’s not the end of the world. Stop crying.” He was right, technically. It wasn’t the end of the world. But to me, in that moment, it was everything I’d cared about for two weeks. I stopped bringing my messy, half-failed projects home after that. I just hid them in my desk at school and threw them away before I got on the bus.
I don’t blame my dad for that. He grew up being told not to make a big deal out of small hurts, so that’s what he knew how to do. But that’s the first thing I wish my parents had done: name the bad feeling before they fixed the problem. It doesn’t take any extra time, and it doesn’t reward bad behavior. When I was a teenager babysitting, I started practicing this with the kids I watched: when they fell off their bike, I didn’t say “you’re fine, get up” first, I said “that scraped knee hurts so bad, huh?” It sounds too simple to work, but it does. When kids feel like their feelings are seen, they calm down twice as fast as when you tell them their feelings are too big.
The second thing I wish they’d done was care about the things I cared about that didn’t get graded. I drew constantly as a kid. Every notebook I had was covered in marginal drawings of cats and castles and characters from my favorite books. I’d bring my sketchbook to dinner and show my parents what I’d drawn, and they’d glance at it and say “That’s nice, did you finish your math homework?” It wasn’t that they hated art. They just wanted me to get good grades so I could go to college and have a stable job. But it took me until my 30s to start drawing again for fun, because I’d internalized that anything that didn’t get me ahead was a waste of time. The concrete takeaway here is simple: every single day, ask your kid one question that isn’t about grades, rules, or behavior. It can be as simple as “What’s the silliest thing that happened at recess today?” or “Can you show me your favorite thing you made this week?” It doesn’t have to be a 20-minute conversation. It just lets them know that they’re more than their test scores.
Third, I wish they’d let me mess up small problems instead of jumping in to fix them for me. When I was 8, I got in a huge fight with my best friend, Lila, over who got to lead our four-square game at recess. I came home crying, saying Lila was being mean and I never wanted to play with her again. Before I could even finish telling the story, my mom picked up the phone and called Lila’s mom. By the end of the call, our moms had arranged for us to apologize to each other and go get ice cream together that weekend. I never got to tell Lila how mad I was, or work out that we could take turns leading, or even just have a day of being mad without someone forcing us to be okay again. For years after that, any time I had a fight with a friend or a disagreement with a boss, I just assumed I couldn’t handle it on my own. I’d wait for someone else to fix it for me, which made everything harder. The fix here is easy: when your kid comes to you with a problem that doesn’t involve anyone getting hurt, ask them “What’s one thing you could try to make this better?” before you step in. If they can’t think of anything, give them two options to pick from, don’t just do it for them. Small conflicts are how kids learn to solve problems, and if you take that away when they’re little, they don’t get to practice when it matters more later.
I’m not writing this because I hate my parents, or because I think any parent can get everything right. My parents did the best they could with what they had, same as all of us. I still catch myself jumping in to fix my niece’s problems before she’s even asked for help, or brushing off a bad grade like it’s no big deal when it’s a big deal to her. It’s hard to unlearn the things your parents taught you by example, even when you see why they did it. Last month, I found my old sketchbook from 5th grade in a box at my parents’ house. It’s full of those messy cat drawings, half the pages folded over, a lot of them scribbled out when I thought they weren’t good enough. I brought it home, and I keep it on my coffee table. It’s a reminder: the small things don’t feel small when you’re a kid. And that’s all any of us can try to remember, right?
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