August 2023

Resilience: the song reminds the child, “All the things you treasure most will be the hardest won / I will watch you struggle long before the answers come.”  During my time as an English teacher, basketball coach, dorm parent, Head of School, and now father to my own children, there is nothing more affirming than a child who perseveres through frustration, achieves success, and exclaims, “I did it.”  The experience of earned self esteem through those moments becomes a kind of flywheel, where small triumphs lead to confidence and the completion of even greater challenges.  The most effective teachers I have known understand they cannot engineer those “I did it” breakthroughs.  The most calm and confident children are not honed in workshops, they are grown in gardens.  In other words, as teachers and parents we tend to the conditions that will favorably influence their thriving.  Cognitive skills, athletic abilities, musical talents, and social dexterity all emerge through moments of frustration and even failure.  In the short term parents and teachers could make many challenges go away through direct intervention.  Yet, by interrupting the struggle we may unintentionally limit how far a child may go.  The educational art lies not in standing idly by, or directly intervening, but in coaching & encouraging.  

Encouragement: the song affirms for the child, “But I won't make it harder, I'll be there to cheer you on, /  I'll shine the light that guides you down the road you're walking on.”  I find the promise not to make the challenge harder to be somewhat curious.  It causes me to reflect on experiences with teachers and coaches in my past whose behavior intensified a task’s difficulty.  For me a task became harder when the adults in my life micromanaged and criticized small details.  It may be worth asking, what behaviors make a challenging task even harder for you?  Most importantly, the song reminds us of our capacity to illuminate the child’s path.  While carrying our children down the road may be more efficient, doing so denies them the opportunity to develop agility.  Relatedly, I have found value in this advice: be the CEO, not the manager, of your child’s life.  In other words, coach, guide, and encourage, but resist the temptation to hotwire solutions through direct intervention.  This requires a good deal of trust. 

Trust: the song promises the child, “Before the mountains call to you, before you leave this home, /  I want to teach your heart to trust, as I will teach my own.”  This one is hard.  My guess is that everyone reading this has been disappointed in a relationship.  We know that trust requires a choice to make something important to us vulnerable to the actions of someone else.  No wonder the relationship between school and home requires so much care. During our cultural moment when trust in each other and in our institutions is strained, what can we teach our children?  Williams’ decision to emphasize “I will teach my own” heart reminds me of an African proverb that says, “Beware of the naked man who offers you a shirt.”  I suppose we can model trust by first trusting ourselves and encouraging our children to do the same.