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We spend a lot of energy teaching kids to keep trying. Don't give up. Mistakes are how you learn. You can't do it yet — but you will. It's good advice, and most parents believe it.

Here's the part nobody tells you: that advice applies to you too, and it's a lot harder to take when it's aimed at yourself.

When parenting starts to feel fixed instead of flexible

If you've ever caught yourself thinking any of these, you already know what I mean:

"My child never listens."
"Nothing I try works."
"This is just how my child is."
"I must be doing something wrong."

Those thoughts feel true in the moment. But notice what they have in common — every one of them is a dead end. There's nowhere to go from "this is just how my child is" except to feel stuck. That's fixed thinking, and it's not a character flaw. It's just what exhaustion sounds like after the fortieth time you've asked your kid to put their shoes on.

A growth mindset doesn't mean pretending everything's fine or slapping a positive spin on a hard day. It means asking a slightly different question. Instead of "why won't my child listen?" — which has no useful answer — try "what have I tried, and what haven't I tried yet?" That question actually goes somewhere.

What this looks like in real moments

Say your child melts down every single morning about getting dressed. Fixed thinking says: "He's just difficult in the mornings, that's who he is." Growth thinking says: "Mornings aren't working right now. What's actually happening — is it a sensory thing with certain fabrics? Is it that we're rushing? Is it that he wants control over something, anything, before we leave the house?"

Same kid, same meltdown. Completely different door to walk through.

A few ways to practice this yourself

You don't need a personality overhaul. Small shifts, repeated, are what actually change a household.

1. Swap "always/never" for "right now." "She never shares" becomes "sharing is hard for her right now." It sounds small. It changes what you expect to happen next, which changes how you respond when it does.
2. Separate the behavior from the identity. "He's lazy" and "he's avoiding this specific task" lead to two completely different conversations with your kid.
3. Ask what the behavior is trying to tell you. Most difficult behavior is communication with bad timing. It's rarely just defiance for its own sake.
4. Give yourself the same grace you're trying to teach. If you expect your child to bounce back from mistakes, you have to be willing to bounce back from your own parenting missteps too.
5. Track what's working, not just what isn't. It's easy to remember every hard morning and forget the three good ones. Growth mindset needs evidence, and you have to go looking for it.

Where this goes deeper

This is really the whole idea behind my book, Growth Mindsets for Parents and Children. It's not a book you hand to your child and walk away from — it's built so parents and kids can work through these shifts together, with real strategies for both of you, not just tips aimed at fixing the child while the parent stays the same.

Because that's the truth most parenting advice skips: kids learn growth mindset by watching it, not by being lectured about it. If you want your child to believe they can grow, they need to see you believe it about yourself first — especially on the hard days.

If any of this sounds like where you are right now, you're not doing it wrong. You're just due for a different question.

Want more practical tools for building confidence and communication in your family? Learn more about ICAN1 LLC's books and resources.

Ask most kids "what's wrong?" and you'll get a shrug, a "nothing," or a door closing — sometimes literally. It's not that they don't feel anything. It's that a lot of kids simply don't have the words yet for what's going on inside them, especially when it's big.

So the feeling comes out sideways instead. It shows up as slammed doors, sudden tears over something small, a kid who argues about everything today when yesterday they argued about nothing. Shutting down. Snapping. Withdrawing to their room the second they walk in from school. None of that is random. It's usually emotion looking for an exit it doesn't have words for yet.

What's actually happening underneath

When a child can't name what they're feeling, the feeling doesn't go away — it just leaks out somewhere else. A kid who's anxious about a test might come home and pick a fight over screen time. A kid who felt embarrassed at recess might refuse to talk at dinner. The behavior you're reacting to is rarely the real story. It's the overflow.

This is where a lot of parents get stuck, and understandably — because in the moment, you're not usually thinking about the feeling underneath. You're just trying to get through the argument in front of you.

Helping a child name what's going on

You don't need fancy language for this. A few simple, low-pressure questions tend to open more doors than "what's wrong":

• "What happened right before you started feeling that way?"
• "Where do you feel it in your body — is your stomach tight, is your chest tight?"
• "What do you need right now — space, a hug, or to talk it through?"

Notice these questions don't demand an instant, articulate answer. They give a child something specific to point to instead of asking them to explain their whole inner world on command, which is hard for adults too, honestly.

An important boundary here

Helping a child name and express a feeling is not the same as excusing what they do with it. Feeling angry is always okay. Throwing something because you're angry is not. Feeling embarrassed is always okay. Being rude to your sibling because you're embarrassed is not.

You can hold both at once: "It makes sense that you're frustrated. It's still not okay to talk to me that way. Let's figure out another way to show me you're frustrated." That sentence teaches emotional honesty and accountability in the same breath — and kids need both.

A few strategies to try this week

1. Build a feelings check-in into your routine, even just once a day. "On a scale of calm to stormy, where are you right now?" takes ten seconds and builds the habit of noticing.
2. Name it before you fix it. Resist jumping straight to solutions. "That sounds really frustrating" lands better than "well, next time just—" almost every time.
3. Model naming your own feelings out loud, in age-appropriate ways. "I'm feeling really overwhelmed right now, I need a minute" teaches more than any lecture about emotions could.
4. Give the behavior a job to do. If your child slams doors when upset, that's not great, but it tells you they need a physical outlet. Help them find one that doesn't break anything.
5. Follow up later, not just in the moment. Sometimes the real conversation happens at bedtime, in the car, somewhere with no eye contact required.

A resource built for this

This is exactly what I built Everyday Feelings to help with — a 45-day workbook for kids ages 7 to 12 that gives them daily, low-pressure practice naming what they feel, reflecting on it, and building real coping tools, one small page at a time instead of one overwhelming conversation.

Helping your child manage their emotions doesn't mean you have to have all the right words in the moment. It means giving them practice, a little at a time, so eventually they'll have the words themselves.

For more tools on supporting your child's emotional growth and family communication, explore ICAN1 LLC's resources.

When a child is mid-meltdown, mid-argument, or mid-refusal, most parents' first instinct is the same: make it stop. Right now. That instinct isn't wrong — you do need the yelling to stop, the hitting to stop, the disrespect to stop. But "make it stop" and "understand what's happening" are two different goals, and chasing only the first one tends to leave the second one behind entirely.

What control-focused parenting misses

Control asks: how do I get my child to stop doing this?
Connection asks: what is my child trying to tell me by doing this?

Those questions can lead to the same boundary — the behavior still isn't okay — but they lead to very different conversations, and very different relationships over time.

Let me be clear about what connection is not, because this is where the idea gets misunderstood the most:

• It does not mean giving your child whatever they're asking for.
• It does not mean removing consequences.
• It does not mean tolerating disrespect.
• It does not mean loosening the rules of your household.
• It does not mean your child runs things.

Connection is not the absence of structure. It's what makes structure actually work, instead of just producing a louder fight next time.

What it looks like instead

A control-only response to a child yelling "I hate you, you never let me do anything!" might be an instant consequence and nothing else. A connection-based response still holds the boundary — that language isn't okay — but also gets curious about what's underneath it: Is this really about the one thing you said no to, or has today been building all along?

That curiosity isn't weakness. It's information. And information is what lets you actually solve the pattern instead of just managing today's version of it.

Moving from reacting to responding

The gap between reacting and responding is usually about three seconds — but those three seconds change everything.

1. Notice your own state before you respond. If you're flooded with frustration, your first words are going to come from that frustration, not from your parenting values. A breath, a pause, even a "give me a second" to your child, buys you those three seconds.
2. State the boundary plainly, without a lecture attached. "We don't speak to each other that way" is enough. Address the underlying feeling once things are calmer.
3. Get curious after the storm, not during it. Once things are calm, ask what was really going on. Kids will often tell you things in the aftermath that they couldn't access in the moment.
4. Follow through, every time. Connection doesn't mean consequences disappear — it means the consequence comes from a place of teaching, not punishment for its own sake.
5. Repair the relationship after conflict. A short "I still love you, we're okay" after a hard moment isn't coddling. It's what makes a child feel safe enough to be honest with you next time.

Where this fits into the bigger picture

This shift, from control to connection, is really the foundation of everything I do through ICAN1 LLC — Instilling Confidence and Nurturing Skills. It's not about being a softer parent. It's about being a more effective one: someone who can hold a boundary and understand their child at the same time, instead of having to choose.

If you're in the middle of a hard season with your child right now, and control isn't getting you the results you hoped for, that's not proof you're failing. It's usually just proof it's time to ask a different question.

To learn more about ICAN1 LLC's parent coaching, books, and family resources, visit our Programs & Visits page.

Walk into almost any elementary school and you'll find a growth mindset poster somewhere — a colorful reminder that mistakes help us grow, that "yet" is a powerful word, that effort matters more than talent. The posters are everywhere. The actual culture behind them is a lot rarer.

Here's the gap I see most often, whether I'm sitting with a teacher, a counselor, or an administrator: growth mindset gets taught as a lesson instead of lived as a culture. A student hears it in a classroom lesson on Tuesday, then gets handed back a test with a red "F" and no path forward on Thursday. The message and the practice don't match, and kids notice the mismatch faster than adults think they do.

Where the disconnect usually happens

Growth mindset breaks down in a school in a few predictable places:

• Grading practices that reward the right answer on the first try and penalize revision.
• Language from adults that praises being "smart" instead of praising the process a student used.
• Discipline systems that treat struggling behavior as a character problem instead of a skill gap.
• Staff culture where adults themselves aren't modeling growth — where mistakes among teachers or staff are treated as failures instead of information.

That last one matters more than people expect. Kids absorb culture from watching adults, not just from what adults teach. A school full of growth mindset posters, run by a staff culture that punishes mistakes, is teaching the opposite lesson of what's on the wall.

What a real growth mindset culture looks like

It's less about vocabulary and more about systems. A school with an actual growth mindset culture tends to have:

1. Revision built into the process, not treated as extra credit. Students get real opportunities to redo work and improve a grade, not just a one-shot score.
2. Feedback that's specific to effort and strategy, not just outcome. "You tried three different approaches before this one worked" teaches more than "great job."
3. Consistent language across classrooms. When a student hears the same growth-oriented phrases from their teacher, their counselor, and the front office, it becomes real instead of decorative.
4. Staff modeling it openly. A teacher saying "that lesson didn't land the way I planned, let's try it differently tomorrow" teaches growth mindset better than any poster could.
5. Family communication that reinforces it at home. When parents hear the same language the school is using, the message doesn't stop at the classroom door.

Where families fit into this

This is exactly why I wrote Growth Mindsets for Parents and Children as a book for the home side of this equation, not just the school side. A school can build the strongest growth mindset culture in the district, and it will still hit a ceiling if the language stops the moment a child walks in the front door at home. Schools and families need to be saying the same thing, in the same way, for it to actually stick.

If you're an educator or administrator working on this at the building level, I'd genuinely love to talk about how a coordinated home-and-school approach could strengthen what you're already building. And if you're a parent reading this and wondering how to reinforce what your child's school is trying to do, that's exactly what the book is for.

Explore ICAN1 LLC's books and resources, or reach out about bringing this conversation to your school through Programs & Visits.

A child melts down over a broken pencil. A teenager suddenly refuses to walk into a classroom they were fine with yesterday. A student who's usually quiet snaps at a classmate over something small. Every teacher has a version of this story, and every parent has gotten a version of the phone call about it.

The instinct on both sides is often the same: figure out how to make the behavior stop. But behavior at school is rarely just about school, and behavior at home is rarely just about home. Kids don't have separate emotional systems for each building they walk into — whatever they're carrying comes with them.

Why this is hard for both sides

Teachers see a piece of the picture: what happens in the classroom, the trigger moment, the immediate behavior. Parents see a different piece: what happens at home, the sleep, the sibling conflict, the stress nobody talked about at breakfast. Neither side has the whole story on their own, which is exactly why the usual approach — a phone call home only when something goes wrong — tends to feel adversarial instead of collaborative.

When a parent hears "your child had a hard day" only in the context of a discipline referral, it's easy to feel blamed instead of included. When a teacher only hears from a parent when they're upset about a grade or a consequence, it's easy to feel like the relationship is purely defensive. Both sides end up protecting their side of the story instead of building a shared one.

A different way to approach it

A few shifts make a real difference, whichever side of this you're on:

1. Share the pattern, not just the incident. "This has happened three times this week around lunchtime" gives a parent something to work with. A single isolated incident report often doesn't.
2. Ask what's different, not just what's wrong. "Has anything changed at home recently?" opens a door that "your child was disrespectful today" closes.
3. Loop parents in before it becomes a pattern, not after. A quick early note ("noticed she seemed off today, just wanted to flag it") builds trust that a formal referral three weeks later can't.
4. Use the same language at school and at home. If a teacher is using a calm-down strategy in the classroom, a parent using the same language at home reinforces it instead of introducing something new and confusing.
5. Treat the parent as the expert on their child, and the teacher as the expert on the classroom. Both pieces of information matter; neither side has the full picture alone.

A resource for both sides of this conversation

Everyday Feelings, my 45-day workbook for kids ages 7 to 12, was built with exactly this gap in mind — it gives children a consistent, shared language for naming and managing emotions that works whether they're using it in a classroom, a counselor's office, or at the kitchen table. When the language is the same everywhere, the support is too.

Whether you're a teacher trying to better understand what's showing up in your classroom, or a parent trying to build a stronger bridge with your child's school, the goal is the same: get everyone speaking the same language about what a child needs.

Learn more about ICAN1 LLC's books and resources, or reach out through our Contact page to talk about bringing this approach to your school or family.