A parent reached out this week with something I've been mulling on since: "I'm having a hard time striking the right balance between following my child's lead, and making sure they're also doing hard things and putting in effort."
I think I know where this question comes from. It's when you look up and realise your child has spent another day just playing. Maybe they did the bare minimum of something you suggested, but otherwise they just moved from one thing to another, following whatever caught their interest. And there's that voice in your head asking: Is this enough? Are they ever going to learn to tackle things that are genuinely challenging?
I sat with this for a while, because it touches on something fundamental to this way of living. That constant tension between trusting our children's path and wanting to make sure they're growing, developing, and challenging themselves.
Here's where I land: the question isn't really about whether children should face challenges. They absolutely should. The real question is: whose challenges are they facing?
I watched my son on a mountain bike trail recently. He was working on this particularly tricky section - the kind where everything has to flow just right or you lose all momentum (or just crash). I watched him try it again and again. He was tired, frustrated, even picked up a few scrapes from a fall. But he kept going back.
Why?
No one was telling him to keep trying. No one was explaining the value of persistence or the importance of hard work. He was choosing the challenge, embracing the difficulty, pushing through the frustration - not because anyone was making him, but because mastering that trail meant something to him.
Ok, but you might be thinking: "That's great for a kid who's found something challenging they love. But my child just... plays. They resist anything that looks like formal learning. They'll spend hours in their imaginary worlds or building with LEGO, but the moment I suggest something different they shut down."
And this is where it gets interesting. Because that resistance? That shutting down? It's usually not about avoiding hard things. It's about protecting their natural drive to learn and grow - a drive that's actually working perfectly when they're deeply engaged in play.
Now, let me be clear about something: when I talk about play, I'm talking about active, engaged play - not passive consumption of content or endless hours of quick-reward style games. A child needs space to be bored, to figure out what interests them, to be introduced to different things over and over, to engage deeply. If they're constantly in consumption mode, they will miss out on opportunities to develop an appetite for taking on challenges for sure.
Creating this kind of environment - one focused on possibilities rather than distractions - is how natural challenge-seeking begins to happen. Whether it's a child working through increasingly complex storylines in their imaginative play, or my son on those mountain bike trails, the pattern is the same. That moment of him tackling a difficult section again and again? It didn't just happen. It wasn't random. It came after months of exposure to our local trails. Of watching other riders. Of spending loads of time on easy trails without any really clear outward signs of 'progress'. Of stitching together, in his own mind, small successes on those easier sections. Of having the time and space to progress at his own pace.
What I've seen over the years, from watching both the quiet moments of play and these more obvious physical challenges, is that something powerful happens when children feel truly safe to engage with difficulty on their own terms. Encouraging is great, and modelling from you is important (very important), but it's feeling safe to try, safe to fail, and safe to back away that keeps them coming back again. The more we can protect this safety, the more naturally they will lean into challenge.
So instead of pushing harder when we're worried about their progress, what if we saw those hours of deep play differently? What if we recognised that a child meticulously adjusting their LEGO creation for the tenth time is the same process as my son returning to that tricky trail section again and again? They're both choosing challenge. Both pushing themselves. Both discovering what it feels like to work at something until it feels right.
Watching my son that day, and it's quite clear the persistence he was building wasn't just about mountain biking. It wasn't even really about the skill or the achievement. It was about discovering something within himself - that he could face something difficult, something frustrating, something that didn't work the first time (or the tenth time) - and keep going. Not because someone else said it was important, but because he decided it was worth it.
Every day, in their own way, our children are building this same understanding through play. They're creating their own challenges, pushing their own boundaries, developing their own relationship with effort and persistence. Not because we made them, but because that's what humans naturally do when given the space to explore what matters to them.
And, rest assured, this capacity for challenge-seeking doesn't stay in the realm of play forever. It grows and evolves naturally, finding new expressions as their world expands and their interests mature. Because what they're really learning isn't just how to play - they're learning how to engage deeply with challenge itself. They're discovering what it feels like to care so much about something that the hard parts become worth it.
So maybe the question isn't "How do I make sure my child is doing hard things?"
Maybe it's "How do I learn to recognise the challenges they're already choosing?"
Talk soon,
Issy.