Doing Nothing for Your Child Is Actually Doing Something

October 19, 2023

Parents love and adore their children and would do anything for them, but sometimes doing nothing for your child is actually doing something. Of course, kids need their parents to be involved in their lives and to provide support, and if their child falls, mom and dad need to be there to catch junior before he hits the floor. But then again, sometimes parents need to let their child hit the floor.

When it comes to kids and their schooling, teachers and school principals would certainly choose to have mom and dad overparent versus underparent, as it’s better for parents to be too involved in their child’s life than to be detached and uninterested. However, there is a happy balance for which parents should strive. Educators don’t expect their students’ parents to simply shrug their shoulders when their kids run into situations that might require a helping hand. However, a parent’s job when it comes to their child’s education is to guide, to offer advice, and to promote confidence that their kid can accomplish something on their own or perhaps fail yet know they can get through the discomfort or distress.

When I was a middle school teacher prior to my principal career, I treasured the value of being able to encourage children from a distance, letting them experience some exasperation, some frustration, and even some hurt, knowing that they would grow from this incident and be a smarter, stronger, and more resilient person as they grew up. Now I wasn’t a sadist. I didn’t feel joy when I caught one of my students cheating on a test. But I did feel optimism that by suffering embarrassment and sadness now for being caught cheating, this child would more likely grow up with a more developed moral compass and more determination to do the right thing and work harder instead of trying to take the easy way out. 

When I served as the school principal, if one of our sixth grade students cheated on a test and was sent to my office by the teacher, I was helping this student more by giving him or her a zero on the test and detention, than by only giving him or her a stern look of disappointment.  Better to suffer the negative consequences and sad feelings now as a sixth grader, so five years later when the student moves on to being a high school junior, he or she will have learned the consequences of cheating and thus, not suffer a more devastating consequence, such as cheating on the college admissions test and thus not getting into college. 

More often than not, a child learns best from a school discipline incident if the consequences are accepted by the parents. Even if the family discussion leads to determining the principal or teacher wasn’t fair, the lesson learned is similar to being pulled over by a state trooper for speeding and trying to complain by saying, “But everyone else was speeding, too.” You might be right, but you’ve still earned the ticket and as unfairly as it feels, you must suffer the consequence.

Of course, if the trooper (or his speed-gun) was wrong and you are adamant you were driving the speed limit, you have the right and expectation to challenge this at traffic court. But you would do that the following week at court; you would not confront the trooper during the time of the infraction, lest you want to get another citation for interfering with an officer. And similar to not arguing with a teacher in front of your child, if your child is in the car when you get pulled over you don’t want him or her to see you confront a trooper. Your child needs to be taught – and shown by example – that it is proper and much safer to comply with the officer’s directives at the moment. Similarly, don’t confront the teacher in front of your child if you want to argue against a school punishment, but ask for a private meeting only between teacher and mom/dad, lest your child will be given unspoken permission to not respect the teacher in the future. (Note: you may need to invite your child into the conversation at a follow-up meeting if the teacher doesn’t believe your story in your initial adults-only meeting.)

Another pointer is in regards to how to handle poor marks on report cards. In the event your child brings home his or her report card and it shows a low mark or two, don’t pilot your helicopter or drive your bulldozer over to school to confront the teacher to ask why the teacher gave your child these marks. After all, the correct wording is your child “earned” these marks; the teacher didn’t “give” your child these marks.

If your child is warranting low marks, don’t try to fix this by erasing wrong math answers on the homework paper and writing in the correct ones while your child is playing a video game in the next room.  Don’t put the finishing touches on the science project yourself while your kid is asleep. These examples may sound extreme, but they are true stories of school parents’ actions that happened perennially in my school. I have had helicopter and bulldozer parents do their children’s work for them because the parent didn’t want the embarrassment (for them or their child) of seeing a poor mark or didn’t want their child to so-call suffer by being forced to persevere through the hard work of completing assignments, especially when it brought about tears and temper tantrums.

Over-parenting might immediately assist the child in getting a better grade, but what happens when that child is 30 years old, and he fails to complete a project for his boss at work? Without mommy or daddy there to finish the project for him the night before it’s due, the 30-year-old will suffer the consequence. Unfortunately, the consequences when an adult are always more serious than when a child. So, whereas the 10-year-old who didn’t finish the project would be told by the teacher to stay in from recess, the 30-year-old with the unfinished project might be fired by his boss.

That is why you should want your child to suffer his or her little-kid-problems when the consequences aren’t as life-shattering – and you should want your child to learn from them at this young age – so he or she will be less likely to have big-adult-problems in the future.

Well-intentioned parents believe that supporting their children no matter what is the right thing to do. This type of enabling-parenting will only cause harm by enabling the youngster all the way into adulthood, resulting in the child either never developing fully and maturely, or developing a sense of entitlement, or both.

Being a loving parent, you will want to make your children’s lives easier and less stressful, but resist rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty too often. You want your kids to not have all their needs met by mom and dad because they will miss out on essential life skills.