Menlo Church

It works like like a seesaw. If one person overfunctions and does too much, the other person inevitably underfunctions and does too little. And here is the law of family physics. If you work harder on your child's life than they do, you are faking their current competence and stealing their future capacity. Every time you rescue them from a forgotten lunch, every time you email that teacher to fix a grade, it's unsustainable. Every time you manage their schedules so they don't feel the pain of their mistake, you're jumping on the high side of the seesaw. And what happens when you do that? They have no choice but to sink to the bottom of helplessness. You are doing it because you love them, but you're also doing it because you're anxious and you wanna solve for that. But you are training them to be passive.