Don't Wait Until They're Ready

You’d be really surprised at what kids are capable of when you take a leap of faith

It was four years ago, and we’d just moved to MA. My youngest (nine) asked if she could go into the pizza place alone to pay for our order and bring the pizza out to the car.

It was 6 pm on a Friday in the middle of winter. The place was packed, and we’d already waited forty minutes for our call-in order to be ready.

I wanted to say no.

I almost said no. Not because I thought she couldn’t do it. Just because she’s a tiny little thing, and while she’s nailed her loud, commanding, voice-in-a-crowded-room thing, I felt like I was feeding her to the wolves.

The line was out the door with high school football players shoving each other and shouting, impatient parents wrangling hungry toddlers, and it just didn’t feel like a good idea.

She came out five minutes later carrying a box almost as big as she was, a pocket full of change, grinning like she’d just done something enormous.

She had.

Independence doesn’t start with the big stuff. It doesn’t start with riding a bike to school alone or staying home by themselves for the first time. It starts with the moments we barely notice, when we’re most likely to skip right past because it’s faster to just do it ourselves.

We tend to wait until kids prove they’re ready before we hand them something to do on their own. But readiness rarely comes first. It comes from fumbling through something slightly too big and discovering, on the other side of it, that they could.

I’m a big believer in letting kids do things before they’re fully ready. Not in a throw them in the deep end way. In a let’s find the smallest possible version of this and start there way.

Because every time we hand a child a low-stakes moment and step back, we are telling them something. I trust you to figure it out.

They feel that. And they rise to it, more often than you’d expect.

For Paid Subscribers: Let’s break this down (by age and stage) so you can start today.

What’s in this post:

• The breakdown by age with examples

• What to do when it doesn’t work

Opportunities are happening all day, at every age and stage. Here’s how to find them.