Parents sometimes hear all of this and worry they're doing too much. Usually, I don't think that's the most useful question either. Your child may genuinely need you to sit nearby while they begin homework. Your teenager may still need help breaking a large project into pieces. Your college student may call because they have three things due, haven't started any of them, and genuinely don't know where to begin. Helping isn't the problem. What matters is what happens inside the help. Are you

Last week, a mom described what happened after soccer practice. Her 11-year-old son climbed into the car, slammed the door, and burst into tears because she'd parked in a different spot than usual. Like, WHAT?!! "I just stared at him," she told me. "It made absolutely no sense." Except it did. Because once again, it wasn't really about the parking spot. He'd spent the last two hours holding it together. He'd been trying to keep up with the drills, worried he'd made a mistake during scrimmage,...

A few summers ago, my daughter came home from college. I remember waking up around one in the morning and realizing she wasn't home yet. I looked at the clock, then at my phone. I found myself caught in that familiar internal debate many parents face. Do I text her? Do I leave it alone? Am I worrying unnecessarily, or is it reasonable to want to know where my child is in the middle of the night? What struck me was that I genuinely wasn't sure what the expectation was anymore. She wasn't a...