Patience now = confidence later. Yes it’s slower, but independence starts with letting them try.

In this video, you are watching me sit on the hallway floor while my toddler attempts to put on a single velcro sneaker. It takes an agonizing amount of time. It is physically painful to watch a child figure out right from left when you are already ten minutes late for preschool. The honest truth is that letting them struggle is the actual work of parenting in these early years. You sit on your hands and you bite your tongue.

If you look closely at the bottom corner of the frame, you can see my knuckles turning white. I am gripping the edge of the entryway bench to physically stop myself from reaching over to do it for him. That is the hardest part of teaching basic life skills. Sometimes you just want to leave the house.

The algorithm totally buried this post. It barely scraped a few hundred views. It is just a quiet moment of waiting instead of a loud trend. But the mothers who did find it left highly engaged comments. They understood the exact flavor of torture involved in watching a tiny hand miss a strap twice in a row. They know that this slow practice is the only way we eventually get to drink our coffee in peace while our kids get themselves ready.