One of our most important impulses as parents is to protect our kids.

We often do that by trying to understand what’s going on for them:

“What’s wrong?”

“Was someone mean to you?”

“Was there anything you didn’t like?”

These questions are important. If we know what’s bothering them, we might be able to help prevent it from happening again.

But it’s often the next question that matters most. We can ask about problems, or we can ask about progress.

“How did you decide to handle that?”

“What was something you learned about this?”

“What might be a better way to get what you want next time?”

Listening to what happened is a great place to start. The next question is how we emphasize our kids’ capabilities.

The Experience Belongs to Them

One important part of the camp experience is that parents aren’t there.

When a child climbs to the top of the rock wall, they did that.

When a child learns to resolve a disagreement with a cabinmate, they did that.

But when they come home, we have an important role in how they frame those experiences.

Imagine a camper tells their parents they didn’t get along particularly well with one of their cabinmates.

One parent might ask, “Did that make your time at camp difficult?”

Another might ask, “How did you handle that? Did you figure out a way to get along?”

In both cases, the experience belongs to the camper. But the story they tell about it starts to change.

The Other 5%

When we wrote about friction, I suggested that a great summer camp experience should be roughly 70% pure fun, 25% building skills, and 5% friction.

Perhaps a similar philosophy applies to the questions we ask our kids.

We should absolutely ask about the fun, the friendships, and the things they learned. That’s most of the experience, and it deserves most of our attention.

But the other 5% matters, too.

When something didn’t go perfectly, we should listen to what happened and then help our kids recognize how they responded, what they learned, or what they might try next time.

These conversations help them build a growing collection of evidence that says, “I know how to have fun and make friends. I know how to try new things. And I know how to handle something if it doesn’t go my way.”

One more question

Asking about progress doesn’t mean pretending that everything was wonderful or dismissing a genuine issue.

We should absolutely listen when something goes wrong.

But there’s a difference between acknowledging that something was difficult and teaching a child to see themselves primarily through that lens.

Our goal isn’t to make childhood harder. It’s to help kids become stronger by recognizing what they’re already capable of handling.

At camp, we get to provide the experiences.

Parents get to help frame them.

And when the friction comes up, we can listen, and then ask one more question:

“And how did you handle it?”

Because sometimes the most important part of the story isn’t what went wrong.

It’s what they discovered they could do about it.

Erec Sir