In the moment, it’s terrifying. You’re holding your preemie in the hospital. You’re wondering if your daughter is ever going to walk. You’re baffled—why isn’t your son speaking? Why isn’t he reading yet? Your teenager that just can’t get it together. Why can’t she figure out what she wants to do with her life?
The anxiety. The fear. The impatience. The doubt.
But then you meet an adult who is dyslexic. You hear some incredibly successful person explain how they struggled, how they treaded water for years before they finally got their life together. You meet your friend’s perfectly healthy and high-functioning 9-year-old who was born even earlier than your baby. Then it hits you—oh yeah, with time, these things tend to even out. Eventually—with help and hard work, of course—they learn how not just to read, but to love reading. They find their lane. They overcome their developmental issues…and the significance of them, it recedes into the distance.
In The Daily Dad book (leather edition here), we tell the story of Dr. Edith Eger, whose son was born with athetoid cerebral palsy. When she expressed to the doctor her fears and worries about the kind of life her son could have now, he replied, “Your son will be whatever you make of him. John’s going to do everything everyone else does, but it’s going to take him longer to get there. You can push him too hard, and that will backfire, but it will also be a mistake not to push him hard enough. You need to push him to the level of his potential.”
With your kids, it is the same. It will take how long it takes. Might that be much longer than ‘average’? Sure, but you don’t have the average kid. You have your kid. They have their own timetable, their own schedule, their own journey. Your job is to be there for that journey. To get them the help they need. To provide the patience and the confidence and the resources they need to complete it. Your job is to be there for it, however long it takes.
P.S. As we say in the Daily Dad book (leatherbound edition here), it’s our job as parents to help our children become who they are—not who we want or wish them to be. In fact, a whole section of the book is dedicated to lessons in nurturing and powerful examples like Dr. Eger’s about parents helping their children discover who they really are.
You can also check out Ryan’s interview with the peerless Dr. Edith Eger—Holocaust survivor and the author of one of his favorite books, The Choice—about the power of forgiveness and finding strength in suffering over on the Daily Stoic Podcast. Watch or listen here!
