The colorful keys clanked slowly as I pressed them with one finger on my daughter's toy piano. I'm trying to play "Clapping Land," an old Danish folk song from a book on the Dalcroze Method. It's an approach for teaching music theory to preschoolers through body movement. With her preschool closed due to the pandemic, I've been scrambling to fill the gap with homeschooling. The trouble is, I don't know how to read sheet music. I had to look up YouTube videos on what a time signatures are is, Google what a quarter note vs. a half note looks like, and look up how the location of the notes corresponded to the keys on the piano.

After fumbling through a music lesson in front of my child, I realized I wasn't teaching music as much as resilience in the face of "not knowing." It's that sense of being ok in that space between facing a new problem and finding a solution. Think back to your schooling. Were you judged on your ability to remember someone else's version of the right answer rather than on your own insight and ability to form interesting questions? If so, being in a space of doubt and "not knowing" can be anxiety-inducing. Most of traditional schooling is set up that way, even though as adults, the problems we face in our careers and as parents have a whole lot of grey area. How can we best prepare our children for our adult reality?

If you're like me, every time your child makes a "mistake," you might hold your breath and fight the urge (at times unsuccessfully) to blurt out the right answer or show them the right way to do something. I feel a sense of anxiety in the face of mistakes, whether they are my own or my child's. Rushing in to fix their mistakes is a way to relieve that anxiety for myself. The problem is, it sets up a dichotomy where the world is populated with these bigger, more powerful beings (adults) who have all the right answer, and children who are reliant on these adults to feed them the right answer.

Real, intrinsic, self-initiated learning, however, requires patience with "not knowing." It means sitting with and feeling comfortable with that state. When I impatiently correct my child (and, again, this happens more often than I'd like), I communicate that I'm very uncomfortable with her not knowing the right answer. I'm pushing my anxiety from my own schooling days onto her newly forming relationship with the learning process.

I would very much like to turn that tide around. After sitting with this question for a while, here are some things we as parents could focus on to promote patience with learning hard things. I use the second person pronoun "you" in these suggestions, but they are reminders to myself as much as to an audience for whom these might be helpful:

Pause Before Fixing

Infant expert Magda Gerber promotes the idea of waiting and observing before rushing in to fix things for a crying infant. This help a parent respond in a less impulsive and more attuned way. If you're able to in the moment, pausing long enough to really observe the issue can help avoid rushing in with the answer and take over a problem your child might have some input into.

If you know the "right" answer, waiting can be a good strategy to shift gears and pose a question instead of an answer.

"Hmm, what are you working on here? The shoe is stuck. Well, let's see how that happened."

A lot more learning can take place with descriptive, guided questions than with serving up the right answer too soon.

This won't be perfect.

If you're rushing out the door, shoes need to come on, and zippers need to fly up, it might be difficult to pause. It's an intention to hold, rather than a strict rule to adhere to.

Narrating Problem Solving

This one is something that comes up a lot if you read through parenting advice on peer conflict or frustration in general. This involves acting like a non-biased, calm narrator that describes the problem solving process for you or the child.

If you think the child is able to figure out a problem, describing the issue back to the child and inviting problem solving with something like: "Ah, it looks like the lid on the box is stuck. I wonder what might help. Any ideas?" Or just offer descriptive solutions: "It looks like the lid on the box is stuck. Maybe holding it down with one hand while pulling over here with another might help. I'll hold the box steady. Want to give it a try?"

If you listen to Janet Lansbury's excellent parenting podcast, then this advice might sound familiar. She often talks about taking the smallest possible action to help a child move along the problems-solving continuum. The important part is doing so with warmth and kindness. This means offering a suggestion at first. If that doesn't help, offer a bit of help and then kindly invite the child to do the next step. If there's resistance, offer to do a bit more and invite again. It's iterative and kind, not pushy and aggressive.

Model Problem-Solving

Finally, we can model how we problem solve in our day-to-day life as well. Rather than silently figuring out a confusing recipe or work problem, it can help verbalize your thought process.

An example of narrating your own problems might be: "Hmm, I can't get this door to open; how frustrating. Maybe I need to try a different key. It's still stuck... I wonder if pushing it a bit more might help. Is it the lock that's stuck or the door jam?"

Final Thoughts

Letting go of our own anxieties around learning and being "smart enough" to know the right answer at the right time can have benefits for ourselves and our children. I'm starting to understand that if I don't have a good relationship to my own mistakes and patience for the dark spaces of "not knowing" inherent in the learning processes, it's more tempting for me to hijack my child's intrinsic love of learning.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash