Teaching Without Words

The earliest years of my life were spent on a four-acre tract of rural farmland, on the edge of Memphis, TN. To my four siblings and I, it was our Kingdom…and we had the grandest time conquering it. Right in the center of the property was a giant mud puddle we creatively titled “The Pond.” We fished in it, swam in it, paddled the boat around on it, and looked at it as the grand ballroom of our muddy little Kingdom. It was awesome!
When I was around six years old, my dad convinced my siblings and I that we were actually tadpoles. He assured us that if he were to tie our hands and feet together, we could jump into the pond and swim out by jumping off the bottom and wiggling through the muddy water. The knowledge of our insurmountable capabilities gave us the courage to hop down the diving board, jump in and start wiggling. It worked like a charm! Under the watchful eyes of mom and dad, we wiggled through the water (like tadpoles) and rolled onto the bank covered in filthy mud but squealing with laughter, certain we were the best swimmers ever born!
Now, to the casual observer, this exercise would—at best—look useless and at worst—dangerously foolhardy. True, we could easily slip out of the old socks that we had used to tie our hands together…and we were only in a few feet of water that my dad could instantly pull us out of if we had trouble…But still! We were little kids with our hands and feet tied together in muddy water, full of bacteria. And really, what was the point?
At six years old, you can have plenty of fun in a clean pool with floaties on your arms under the watchful eyes of a professional lifeguard. Why would a parent allow even this minimal risk when their kids could have just as much fun in a sterile and safe environment?
As it turns out, there's a good reason for raising children imperiled by a muddy pool.
It is now forty years later, and my siblings and I are all confident to a fault.
Our lives are completely different, but we all share the unshakable certainty that we are the masters of our own fate. This characteristic is not a happy coincidence or even genetics. Rather, it is a result of my parents very intentionally crafting a framework in our lives through which we view the world. This framework comes from the stories of our youth that tell us that regardless of the difficulties we face, we can—through care and effort—-overcome.
This character trait is not limited to my family: anyone can train their children to be overcomers.
It wasn’t until my wife and I had our first child that I began to consider my upbringing.
Before that point, I was who I was and why I was that way, did not really matter to me.
That all changed when I met my daughter for the first time. Suddenly, I didn't just want to be a dad, I wanted to be the best dad. I wanted to give my little girl every advantage that I ever had and more. As I looked back at my own childhood, I could see that the seemingly random, sometimes difficult experiences weren't random at all. I realized that on that summer day in “The Pond”, the lesson that I learned was not how to swim with my hands and feet tied together, it was that I learned how to trust my ability to overcome hardship. I learned to trust myself, not because my mom told me to, but because she stood there and watched me jump off the diving board. Her trust in my ability to overcome was evident; witnessing that trust, reflected in her expression and demonstrated through her actions, instilled in me the belief that I could succeed. Not just in swimming like a tadpole, but at any obstacle that life threw at me.
As a young father, I realized that my parents didn't just end up with 5 capable, confident, adult children, they trained us to be this way. It took intentionality and a lot of nail biting to navigate the uncertain edge between the sterile safety of a helicopter parent and the turbulent training ground needed to produce strong, self-possessed men and women.
When I looked at my little girl for the first time, I knew I wanted to keep her safe. While that is well and good…it is also my job as a parent to ensure that she will thrive as an adult.
The world we live in is full of problems, and the necessary tools to solve those problems are ingrained in us when we are children. If I, as a parent, were to remove every obstacle in my children’s path, I would be crippling their ability to problem solve for themselves.
The infrastructure of emotional stability, confidence, persistence and moral integrity all find their beginnings in the heart and mind of a newborn and they continue to develop as the child’s world expands. If you want to raise individuals who have faith in themselves, each other, God, and in their ability to overcome obstacles, you have to foster an environment filled with obstacles that are worth challenging and require growth to overcome. This is the value of sports and play, but that alone is not enough.
On our weekly podcast, my mom recently said that “to a young mother, everything looks dangerous.” I was somewhat amused, considering our own upbringing…but her words got me thinking about how differently we perceive the world at different stages of our lives.
Through this article, I would like to encourage you young mothers to consider the danger that your children will face…not just as children, but what they will face as adults. Allowing your children the latitude to overcome difficult circumstances can sometimes feel at odds with the primary directive of protecting our children from harm. Consider though that the protection itself can harm them by making the world seem too big and scary for them to overcome without someone else controlling them. You need to remember that ultimately, you are raising adults, not children. As a new grandfather myself, I find it shocking how quickly my children went from being babies to having babies of their own. The amount of time that you have to prepare them to meet the challenges of the world is dreadfully short. The outcome we desire is not to have large children by the time they're eighteen, but adults ready to conquer the world and make it their own.
To successfully navigate this delicate balance, you will need stability in your own life.
That is just one more reason that a balanced marriage is so important for the emotional and psychological strength of the children. I think a father is naturally equipped to place challenges in front of the children in a way that the empathetic mother would find counterintuitive. You will usually find the father to be the one tossing babies into the air, teaching them to ride a bicycle, or cheering loudly when they get hit by a baseball, so they get to walk to first base and win the game. However, if the father's reckless playfulness gains oversized prominence in the home, it can feel chaotic and insecure to the children. If it is the momma's cautious empathy that controls the household, the house will feel stifling and the children imbalanced in the application of their own pursuits. And yet, if the father gets reprimanded every time he initiates roughhousing with the kids, he will begin backing out of the home culture and leave it up to the mother. The children will end up missing the frenzied fun of rushing through the difficult parts of life full of joy, while simultaneously not learning to overcome adversity. The platform that gives them the confidence to roughhouse with Dad is to know that Mama will be there afterwards to nurture them. A balanced, well-ordered home creates balanced, confident children.
Some of this story I hadn't thought about in a long time, and when I was writing this article, I was ruminating with my mom about the good times in our youth. She recounted her side of the story as she stood watching us jump off the diving board. Her perspective was so different than mine, I found it hilarious. When us kids looked at her, we saw absolute confidence in our ability to overcome. From her perspective, she was about to skin my dad alive for talking us into doing something so crazy! I had no idea.
I asked her to write down her side just to give some perspective about what moms are going through. Here it is!

As a young wife and mother, I had my share of fear for my children. Very often, I thought my young and
over the top husband was half crazy when
it came to rough housing or encouraging the boys (and girls, too) to do scary tricks on bikes, etc. They were MY sweet children. Thankfully, he listened to my caution…a little. My mama, who we called Nanny, was a central part of our lives, so she had her say as well. She was an old time Southern Belle and her accent made mine sound like high English. She would call out, "Now Mack." Mack, being interpreted, means Mike, and the word NOW meant "think first."
Nanny and I both had enough wisdom to know a few key things. The first was that the kids liked daddy's games and tricks better than inhouse board games or the big birthday parties she loved to throw. They waited at the door for him to come home and rough house, knocking over furniture and whatever else in the process. The romp usually ended in crying when one of the wrestlers got his nose smashed or some other body part got in a twist, but the next day, they would be standing at the door, squealing when he drove up the lane. Figure that!
As they got a little older, the afternoon wrestling matches were left behind for more adventurous things. This took my stress level up a notch. Mack waited until Nanny was visiting to have the kids do his pond trick. Nanny and I both knew that whatever stunt the kids were doing (like jumping off into the pond, hands tied) we had to show equal amounts of enthusiasm and confidence at their endeavor and surely show an amazing amount of thrill when they swam out. So many moms fail in this regard. An expression of dread or fear when your child is about to experience a challenge is not wise. A brief show of fear from mom at this time can stunt a child's future confidence. A show of relief that they are safe is hard to hide but it is not a good idea either, unless it is accompanied with a show of amazement at their abilities. The object is to let the children know that they are the best. Here's the thing: ALL good mamas that are reading this and certainly ALL good daddies need to know that when Mike excitedly told me what trick he had planned, I much more excitedly told HIM that he was to tie their hands so loose, that the ties would come off by themselves. I didn't lay down the law often so, when I did, he listened. As our Nanny would say, "He knows who butters his bread, so he better listen."
Mike gave the kids a stern talking to concerning never doing any stunts without him. They never did, so he must have made his point well.
The moral of the story is this: Moms have an important part to play in raising children, just as important as dad's roll. Daddies rarely get in the way of Mom's job because he loves that she cooks, cleans, nourishes, teaches, heals, and a million other things. Moms, on the other hand, can have trouble seeing dad's role as vital. Playing ball, going fishing, fixing cars and all the other things dads like to do with the kids seems to be non-essential and sometimes can seem reckless. But it takes two to make the babies and it takes two to give balance. Although, parents raising children alone can seek wisdom and provide for this balance.
One thing I didn't mention is this: Some kids are different in that they prefer quiet, steady, safe places without a lot of being thrown in the air, etc. It is a rare child, but those children's style needs to be respected. Dads need to keep this in mind.