“Our tendency,” she says, “is to want to rescue him and tell him how to do it.”
Well, of course—I have three decades more experience than he does.
“Instead…. Become not-so-competent,” McVittie says.
Huh?
Wendy Mogel, a Los Angeles-based clinical psychologist and author, most recently, of The Blessing of a B Minus, agrees. “If you give a lot of advice, this means you are telling your child, ‘You do not have enough competency to handle this on your own.’”
In other words, I guess I am supposed to let him start to navigate his own path, mistakes and all.
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“Solving the problem for them,” Mogel says, “is short-circuiting one of the absolutely essential tasks of middle school: learning social navigation when the hormones are swarming around your body, the social groups form and reform daily and the mode of social communication is crude and primitive.”
