When I was pregnant, one of my friends gave me a woven basket artfully filled with parenting books.  Nice.  But secretly, I was insulted.  I had been dreaming about being a mom since I was 6, babysitting since I was 11.  I had just finished my PhD in Psychology, for God’s sake!  What was my friend trying to tell me?  I found a use for the basket, but put the parenting books aside.

My son was not a particularly easy baby.  Nor (in retrospect) was he a difficult one.  He didn’t nurse well, but he was alert and social, with a belly laugh I wish I had thought to tape.  He smelled like a loaf of dense, warm bread as we paced the halls with him in our arms, our nightly going-to-bed ritual (What a mistake!  We were soon locked into 40 minutes of walking, walking, walking to coax him to sleep).  He had a dimple in each cheek and one on his chin.  A cute little face that turned magenta when he cried.  He was a regular kid (if there is such a thing), amazing and wonderful in his own way.  I was astounded by how (1) fiercely protective and (2) utterly incompetent I felt around him.  I devoured those books from my friend.

Fast-forward 18 years.

I am a Clinical Psychologist in private practice and the author of a self-help series, the What to Do Guides for Kids.  I spend my days teaching children the skills they need to better manage their feelings, and teaching parents to support their children as they learn these skills.

Isn’t that what we want as parents, anyway?  Not a primer on how to stop to X, Y, or Z behavior, but guidance about how to teach our children to solve X, Y, or Z problem on their own, to manage these things more effectively.

You have, perhaps, heard the proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

A lifetime.  That’s what we need to do: teach our children to fish.  To develop a set of skills.  Skills like flexibility, self-calming, optimism, stick-to-itiveness.  Skills they can use when faced with teasing, anxiety, uncertainty, and failure.  To navigate the tricky waters of childhood, and overcome problems that might otherwise derail them.

If you are a parent, a teacher, a coach, a therapist, any adult trying in some way to guide a young person, and if the notion of teaching kids coping and problem-solving skills is of interest to you, check back in.  I’ll be writing again soon.