I've had to console grown men and women who were crying in frustration, and I want to tell you about one of them.
Miguel was twenty-six years old with a college degree and good grades his whole life. He'd just failed his third self-assessment project — couldn't get it to work per the requirements — and he was breaking down.
"I don't understand," he said, voice cracking. "I've never failed at anything. Why can't I do this?"
I knew the answer. I've seen it hundreds of times over eleven years running a software development bootcamp. The problem wasn't that Miguel couldn't learn to code. The problem was that he'd never learned to think.
Your child is heading down the same path right now, and I want to tell you about it before it's too late.
Oh, and Miguel? About a year after he graduated, he made a LinkedIn post explaining that he'd finally realized what I had been doing for six months, and all the pieces clicked for him. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
What I Actually Do (And What Your Child Needs)
For eleven years, I led a team of software development coaches in a bootcamp. Whenever I hired instructors, I always told them the same thing:
"Your job is not to teach people how to code. Your job is to coach people through the process of learning how to become an analytical and algorithmic thinker."
If someone learns to think analytically and algorithmically, coding follows naturally. Without those thinking skills, they fail the moment they hit a problem we didn't explicitly teach them how to solve.
This is what Miguel didn't understand for six months. This is what schools stopped prioritizing twenty-three years ago. And this is what your child needs far more than good grades.
I'm not just an educator — I'm also a parent of two teenagers. I've spent their entire childhood deliberately building the thinking skills that school won't teach. It worked, and it can work for you too.
The Crisis I See Every Day
My students arrive with impressive credentials. They were the "smart kid." Teachers loved them. Honor roll, AP classes, never below a B.
Then they encounter something genuinely difficult, and they completely fall apart.
Not because the material is impossibly hard — because their identity shatters. They've spent eighteen years learning that success means "getting it done" and that smart people "get it" immediately. Now they're discovering that what they had wasn't intelligence; it was just an easy curriculum.
The behaviors I see are heartbreakingly predictable. Twenty-four-year-olds begging me to just tell them the answer. Complete shutdowns when frustration sets in. Declarations like "I'm just not a technical person" after a single failed attempt. And plagiarism — which is exactly what they learned to do when the goal was always "right answer by Friday, don't care how."
Teachers, you see this too. The gifted student who melts down when challenged. The honor student who'd rather cheat than risk being wrong. The kid asking "Will this be on the test?" about everything.
Here's what we actually had to teach people to do: how to break problems into pieces (they couldn't), how to learn efficiently (they didn't know how), how to handle ambiguity without panicking (they'd never done it), and how to learn from mistakes (they saw mistakes as failure). All of this should be automatic by age sixteen, but we were teaching it from the ground up at twenty-five.
And some didn't make it through. Not because they weren't smart — because they couldn't let go of their ego and adopt a growth mindset. Their minds had been shaped by a lifetime of the wrong incentives.
These are your kids in ten years.
How We Got Here: The Testing Era
If your child is in school right now, their education has been shaped by a 2001 law called No Child Left Behind.
In the simplest terms, here's how it worked: schools get money based on test scores, teachers get evaluated on test scores, and principals keep their jobs based on test scores. The result is that everyone optimizes for test scores.
The problem is that test scores and thinking skills are not the same thing — in many ways, they're mutually exclusive. Teaching kids to think takes time, exploration, and mistakes. Tests reward speed, pattern-matching, and one "correct" answer.
The Incentive Trap
Your child's school operates like a hedge fund manager of mediocrity, optimizing for students hovering around "proficient."
If your kid is already proficient, then mission accomplished — nobody's paying attention to them anymore. If your kid is advanced and bored and needs further development, forget about it. The system has no incentive to provide resources or time for them. And if your kid is below proficiency? That's where every resource goes.
"But Didn't They Fix This in 2015?"
Sort of. Not really.
The Every Student Succeeds Act replaced NCLB in 2015, giving states more control over how to manage education. But notice what didn't change: the annual testing requirements, the funding tied to performance, and the teaching-to-the-test culture that had been deeply embedded for over a decade.
You can't reverse thirteen years of institutional momentum with a new law. The first NCLB kids were already adults by 2015. They're the ones who ended up in my bootcamp.
The law changed. The culture didn't.
What Got Cut
Everything that develops thinking was gradually pushed aside: gifted programs (those students are already proficient, so there's no funding incentive), art, music, and recess (not quantifiable on a standardized test), science experiments (too messy — facts are easier to test), essay writing (multiple choice is faster to grade), class discussions (you can't attach a defensible number to discussion quality), student questions (off-script and wastes test-prep time), and deep exploration of any kind (coverage matters more than understanding).
Your child is being trained to be really good at something that doesn't matter.
Why Every Child Is Being Failed
Gifted Kids: Quietly Neglected
Imagine your child is naturally fast at running — so fast that the gym teacher never makes them practice and just tells them to sit on the bench while slower kids train.
Then there's an actual race. Your kid discovers that being fast and knowing how to race are very different things. They've never learned pacing, strategy, or fatigue management. They lose, they're devastated, and they conclude they're not actually good at running.
That's what's happening academically. Your gifted child never learns to struggle, never develops persistence, never picks up study strategies. Their entire identity gets built on effortless success. Then they hit college or the working world and fall apart.
This could have been my daughters. I saw it coming and intervened.
Struggling Kids: Trained, Not Educated
Kids who are behind get intense focus on test-taking strategies — bubbling techniques, keyword recognition, process of elimination. These help with tests, but they are not thinking skills. When these students leave school and face real problems that aren't multiple choice, they're lost.
Average Kids: Hitting Benchmarks, Not Learning
The average student gets the most resources and the most test prep. And what they're actually learning is that right answers matter more than understanding why, that speed matters more than depth, and that compliance matters more than curiosity.
They'll probably graduate. They'll probably go to college. And then they'll be in my bootcamp at twenty-five, unable to solve problems nobody handed them a formula for.
The Five Missing Skills
1. Metacognition: The Dashboard
This is your child's ability to monitor their own understanding — the internal voice that says, "Wait, I don't actually get this."
When it's present, a student can say, "I thought I understood, but now I'm not sure." When it's missing, they can't even identify what they're confused about and are blindsided by bad grades.
Quick check: Ask your child, "How do you know you're right?" If they can't explain their reasoning, that's a red flag.
2. Productive Struggle: Embracing Difficulty
This is the ability to stay engaged with hard problems without panicking or giving up.
When it's present, a child tries multiple approaches and says things like, "This is frustrating, but I can figure it out." When it's missing, they immediately say "I can't," shut down emotionally, or demand that you solve it for them.
Quick check: Give them a slightly-too-hard puzzle and watch what happens. Do they engage or give up?
My daughters still have emotional reactions to difficulty — they're teenagers. But they work through it.
3. Problem Decomposition: One Bite at a Time
This is the skill of breaking complex problems into manageable chunks.
Ask someone to "eat an elephant" and they freeze. Ask them to "take one bite" and they can do it. Our schools are handing kids elephants and timing them.
When it's present, a child can say, "First I need to do this, then I can do that." When it's missing, they say, "This is too much," and can't even identify where to start.
Quick check: Give them a multi-step task and see if they can sequence the steps on their own.
4. Assumption Validation: Debugging Your Thinking
This is the habit of testing whether your reasoning is actually correct before moving on.
When it's present, a child says, "Let me check if this works," and tests edge cases. When it's missing, they assume their first answer is correct and never check their work.
Quick check: After homework, ask, "How did you verify that your answers are right?"
5. Growth Mindset: Intelligence Is Developable
This is the belief that abilities develop through effort rather than being fixed traits you're born with.
When it's present, a child thinks, "I keep getting these problems wrong, so I need to review the material again." When it's missing, they think, "I'm just not a math person." That fixed mindset — trying once, not getting it, and concluding you're not good at it — is like going to the gym once and deciding you're "not a fitness person."
Quick check: Listen to how your child talks about challenges.
The bottom line: Without these five skills, your child can memorize facts and pass tests but can't actually think. With them, they can learn anything.
The good news is that all of these can be taught at home, but you have to start early — ideally as soon as your child starts school. If you don't catch these before your child is thirteen, it's going to be a much bumpier ride.
Why Waiting Makes It Harder
Your child's brain is at its most flexible during childhood and adolescence. The prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for executive function, planning, and problem-solving — develops between roughly ages ten and twenty-five.
This is the window. Miss it, and you're trying to build these skills after the easy period has closed. Teaching adults the thinking skills they should have started learning at ten is like teaching someone to use a computer when they're seventy. It's possible, but so much harder than it needed to be.
In the bootcamp, I watched this play out constantly. Adults needed about three months just to believe that thinking is a learnable skill. Some plateaued after six months despite intensive coaching. We were trying to build in six months what should have developed over fifteen years.
And then there's the identity problem. By adulthood, a person's identity is built around their academic experience. If you start early, analytical thinking is just how your child learns. If you start late, it becomes identity warfare — they have to unlearn who they believe they are before they can grow.
What Actually Works: Five Strategies for Tonight
Strategy 1: Socratic Questioning
Instead of giving answers, ask questions that guide your child toward answers.
Here's what it looks like in practice. Your kid says, "I don't get this math problem." Instead of explaining it, you ask: "What is the problem asking for?" Then, "What information do you have?" Then, "What's your first step?" And finally, "How can you check if that's right?"
Each question moves them one step closer to solving it themselves — and more importantly, teaches them how to approach the next problem you won't be there for.
Strategy 2: Process Praise Over Outcome Praise
When your child succeeds, praise the effort, not the trait. Instead of "You're so smart! A+ on your test!" try something like, "You worked hard for three days to understand dividing decimals — look at how that paid off." Instead of "You're a natural at science," try, "I'm proud that you didn't give up when you were struggling with organic chemistry."
I get it — you're proud when your child succeeds, and it took me years of practice to make sure I always praised my daughters for their effort rather than their ability. Telling your child she's smart feels good and may make her feel good momentarily, but over time it builds an identity that crumbles the moment something is actually hard.
Strategy 3: Model Thinking Out Loud
Thinking is usually invisible. Make it visible by narrating your problem-solving so your child can hear what thinking actually sounds like.
Here's a real example from my house. Our internet kept dropping one evening while both daughters were home. Instead of quietly troubleshooting, I talked through it out loud:
"Okay, internet's out. Let me figure this out. Is it just my device, or is everything down? Let me check my phone. Phone's out too. So it's either the router or the service. Let me restart the router first — that's the easiest thing to test..."
My older daughter chimed in: "Or call them?"
"Good thinking," I said. "What info would I need before calling?"
"Account number?"
What happened in that moment was that she heard me break down a problem, test hypotheses in a logical order, and involve her in the process. She learned something about how to approach ambiguous problems — and I never sat her down for a "lesson." I just made thinking visible during normal life.
Strategy 4: Normalize Struggle and Mistakes
Make it clear that difficulty is normal and that mistakes are information, not failure.
When your child is struggling, you might say, "This is hard, isn't it? Hard things are where real learning happens." Or, "Mistakes are how we debug our thinking." When they're frustrated, try, "Frustration means you're at your learning edge — that's exactly where you want to be."
Here's a real example — and one where teenagers really test you. My younger daughter was learning algebra one evening and started crying: "I'm so stupid! I can't do this!"
I didn't say, "Don't say that, you're not stupid!" That doesn't help. I didn't say, "This is easy once you get it." That makes her feel worse.
What I said was, "Yeah, algebra is genuinely hard. Your brain is doing something new — dealing with unknowns. That's uncomfortable. But uncomfortable is where learning happens. Let's take a break, then break this down together."
I let her cry for a minute. The emotion was information — she was at her learning edge. That's actually a good thing, even though it doesn't feel like one in the moment.
Strategy 5: Let Them Fail (The Hardest One)
This is the strategy that separates parents who build thinking skills from parents who just talk about building them.
A few years ago, my daughter had a big project due that was worth thirty percent of her total grade. She left it to the last minute — the night before, if I recall.
"I need help! I can't finish this!" she said.
Every instinct in my body screamed: Rescue her. Stay up all night. Prevent the failure.
Instead, I said, "That's tough. What do you think you should do?"
"I don't know! Can you help me?"
"I can answer questions and point you in the right direction, but I can't do it for you. What are your options?"
She was crying and angry. "I don't have options! I'm going to fail!"
She made a plan and executed it poorly because she was exhausted. She failed that project, and I did not rescue her.
Three weeks later, a new project was assigned. She started immediately, planned it out, and finished two days early.
"I noticed you started this one right away," I said.
"Yeah," she said. "I didn't want to do that panic thing again. That sucked."
What she learned from that experience was worth more than any grade: consequences are real, she can survive failure, she can learn from her mistakes, she can plan ahead, and Mom won't rescue her — so she needs to rescue herself. In a word, she learned agency.
A year later, she manages her time well, plans ahead, and asks for help strategically rather than desperately.
The short-term rescue would have felt better for both of us. The long-term lesson was immeasurably better.
Real Transformations: What Changes
Here's what my graduates tell me, and the pattern is remarkably consistent:
"I came to learn to code. But what I actually learned was how to think. Now I approach my entire life differently."
They tell me they feel more in control — of their careers, their decisions, their lives. They tell me they can actually solve problems now, and not just coding problems but life problems. They tell me they don't panic anymore when things get hard because they have strategies. And more than a few have told me they feel like a different person — calmer, more confident, more capable.
One student put it perfectly: "I thought you were teaching me JavaScript. You were actually teaching me how to be an effective learner."
Sarah: From Panic to Agency
Sarah was twenty-three with a college degree and plenty of intelligence. Her first genuinely hard coding problem led to a full panic attack. During her first month, she cried twice a week and almost quit. I wouldn't let her.
Six months later, she was talking my ear off about how she no longer made decisions emotionally. She could think through difficult situations and feel confident she was making smart choices.
Her whole life was different from that point on.
From One Parent to Another: The Hard Truth
I won't pretend this is easy, because it isn't.
It's slower. Letting your child think takes far longer than just telling them the answer. It's frustrating, because you know the answer — you can see what they need to do — and you have to sit there and watch them struggle. They get mad at you. "Just TELL me!" is something I hear weekly, sometimes through tears, sometimes through yelling.
You'll doubt yourself constantly. Am I being too hard? Should I just help? And teenagers are especially challenging — emotional intensity plus cognitive development is a lot to navigate.
Other parents will judge you for it, too. I've gotten comments like, "You let her turn in that project? You could have helped more." Yes. I could have. I chose not to.
But It Works
Are my daughters perfect? No. Do they still have meltdowns? Yes — they're teenagers. Do they make bad decisions? Absolutely.
But they have tools. And I watch them reach for those tools more and more as they grow.
If it works for me — juggling a demanding job, parenting chaos, and two very different kids — it can work for you. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be intentional.
Start where you are. Your kids will thank you. Maybe not this year. Maybe not until they're twenty-five.
But they will.
Miguel's Epiphany
Remember Miguel from the beginning? The one who was frustrated with me for six months straight?
About a year after graduation, I saw his LinkedIn post. His company was training him to mentor junior developers, and he'd taken an introductory coaching class. Here's what he wrote:
Something clicked today. I recently started taking a few courses in professional coaching, and I realize that this is what my instructor was doing for six months.
He never gave me the answers. He just asked me questions and made me come up with the answers myself. I thought he was being difficult. Or didn't want to help. Or liked watching us struggle.
Turns out he was coaching me on how to think.
I sat at my desk and smiled.
Quick Start: Five Things for Tonight
If this all feels like a lot, just start here. Tonight, do one of each:
- Ask one Socratic question instead of giving one answer.
- Praise one process instead of one outcome.
- Think out loud once so your child can hear what reasoning sounds like.
- Normalize one struggle instead of rushing to fix it.
- Let them work through one problem on their own.
That's it. Start small, be consistent, and trust the process. Your child's future self will thank you.