My son threw a tantrum the other day. Nine years old, worked up about something, words tumbling out faster than they made sense. And I did what I do — what I’ve built an entire career doing. I listened for the actual problem underneath the noise, diagnosed it fast, and offered him the wisdom of my experience.
It felt great, for about ninety seconds. I was present. I was showing him I cared enough to actually engage, not just nod along. From where I was sitting, solving it was the loving thing to do.
It wasn’t what he needed. He wasn’t bringing me a problem. He was bringing me himself — and I was too busy pattern-matching his tantrum to a category I recognized to notice that his tone, his body language, everything except his actual words, was telling me something different.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: I know better. This is, more or less, what I get paid to think about. And I still did it, because knowing a pattern intellectually and resisting it in the middle of a nine-year-old’s meltdown are two entirely different muscles. Underneath the reflex was something simpler and less flattering than “I forgot my own principles” — I was anxious. Not knowing exactly what was going on with him was uncomfortable, and reaching for a familiar answer made that discomfort go away fast. So instead of asking myself “what does he actually mean when he says this,” I defaulted to “oh, this — I’ve seen this before.”
There’s a quieter force running underneath that, too, one I don’t love admitting: some part of being a father wants to be the one with all the answers. Not having one, in that moment, felt like a small failure of the job. So even knowing I didn’t have a precise, useful answer, I reached for one anyway — because offering nothing felt worse than offering the wrong thing. What he actually needed wasn’t a diagnosis. It was a sounding board. Someone to listen without rushing to fix, judge, or resolve.
If I’d seen one thing clearly in that moment, it wouldn’t have been a better answer. It would have been permission to slow down — to be responsive instead of reactive, and let what was actually in front of me register before I decided I already understood it. Presence, not performance. My son didn’t need my expertise that day. He needed me to notice I didn’t have any.