Imagine you’re attending a meditation workshop and the facilitator invites you to lean into stillness. After a few seconds, they start giving cues on how to be still, one after another, followed by reading a passage from a book about meditation, and then it ends. You didn’t really get to experience stillness, but you learned a lot about why it’s important. Now imagine being facilitated by a person who gives a short context in the beginning, shares short cues at 10-minute intervals, and ends after 30 minutes. In the first scenario, stillness was interrupted by talking about how to be still; in the second, you were provided the environment to be in stillness and possibly experienced stillness.
Similarly, we ought to teach our children by providing environments where they can have certain experiences and relate to them with integrity, trust, love, and whatever other qualities we want to foster in them.
Teaching concepts like confidence or processing emotions is very limited, or even counterintuitive if the child doesn’t have a reference from their own experiences. If your child is consistently trusted in their daily choices, they’ll believe in themselves. If you let your child express their emotions, they will know what processing emotions means—because they have experienced it.
If you want a self-confident child, trust in your child’s abilities and give plenty of opportunities for them to be trusted.
Here’s some examples of what I’ve been doing to support my daughter’s confidence, autonomy, individuality, and freedom:
- Simple daily things I do that are maybe the most important is that I wait a few seconds longer than most parents to intervene, interrupt, speak, direct, or support. During this time, I’m looking to see what minimal intervention or support I can give for her to accomplish her mission by herself.
- I trust in her development and the natural intelligence of her body. She will reach developmental milestones in her own time. I will not rush her to talk, walk, or master skills like eating with a spoon. When it’s necessary and relevant for her, she’ll make the effort to learn and do it.
- I offer several options for food and let her decide what she wants to eat and how much. I trust that she’ll eat when she needs food and that she’ll pick food that matches what she needs. The only thing I control is what food is provided for her.
-I’m available to listen to her feelings when she needs to process her emotions. I trust that she’ll express herself when she feels safe, and I don’t force or suppress her expression. - I mostly let her direct our play and follow her lead. I avoid suggesting what to play with and instead see where her attention goes. When I ask her if she wants to play with something, it’s mostly in the context of offering her an alternative to something unsafe, like
Do you want to play with this smooth metal spoon instead of that very sharp metal knife?
-We have a yes-space where she can follow her own directed play without interruptions for safety concerns.
Every time we show a child how something works, we take away their opportunity to discover it by themselves. This is why child-led play and learning, or unschooling, is an amazing alternative to traditional schooling. They don’t need to rediscover the wheel, but providing an environment with the necessary pieces at their developmental level to make similar discoveries is fun and empowering.
Adults are slightly different, but I think the concept of providing environments is still relevant. For adults, environments can be a thought experiment or imaginative, like the example at the beginning of this post. As dreams show us, our imagination is an environment that provides learning opportunities.
Parenting our children is more about creating a supportive environment where they can naturally develop these qualities or learn them through the experience of being in a relationship with us, rather than trying to teach them directly. This post doesn’t really end here—I invite you to first run an experiment where you create an environment for an experience to happen and share what you learn.