She was a precocious girl. She was always getting excited about one thing or another. She was a lot to handle.

We can imagine it was a conversation easy to roll one’s eyes at when her 11-year-old came home and said, “Mom! Mom! I found out what I’m going to do with my life. I want to be the No. 1 tennis player in the world.”

Billy Jean had not been playing tennis long. Tennis champions were usually European. Usually rich. Women were not really even supposed to be athletes. These were all things her mother could have said to her kid, some version of the things that mothers and fathers have been saying to discourage their sons and daughters from pipe dreams for all time.

Instead, as Billy Jean King recounted years later, “My mother looked at me and said the absolutely best, most revolutionary thing she could have said to a girl like me in 1954: ‘Okay, dear.’”

In other words, okay, dear, let’s do it, let’s give it a try. It’s the same message Joan Didion’s mother once gave her daughter: ​Okay, dear, here’s a notebook.​ And it’s the same message Jim Valvano’s father gave when his teenage son said one day he’d win a college basketball national championship: ​Okay, dear, my bags are packed.​

There’s a whole chapter about this in The Daily Dad (the month of August). We have to figure out how to be a fan. We have to figure out how not to stifle. We have to figure out how to let them have their excitement. We have to help them become what they want to become, who they were meant to become.

Because you never know. You just never know.

P.S. As mentioned, ​the Daily Dad book​ is full of practical strategies and tips this month on becoming a better fan as a parent, such as choosing the right form of motivation, balancing patience with discipline, and creating more positive rules for ourselves to engage and play with our kids. ​Grab a copy​ to learn how you can be more supportive—and more open about that support—as a parent today!