Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen describes a quiet trap that loving, encouraging parents fall into without realizing it. You tell your child, with total sincerity, “You can do this” — about a task he actually cannot yet do at that level. What happens next isn’t what you’d hope.
If the child tries and fails, Kelemen explains, one of two things happens internally, almost always below conscious awareness. Either the child concludes, “I was capable and I still failed, so I must be a horrible, defective person” — or the child concludes something quieter and more corrosive: “I really can’t do this, and my parent told me I could, which means my parent doesn’t actually know who I am.”
That second conclusion is the dangerous one. It doesn’t announce itself. A three-year-old doesn’t articulate “my parents don’t understand my abilities.” But Kelemen notes that this message gets internalized at a deep, subconscious level early on — and it resurfaces years later in a very specific, very painful way: at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, the teenager stops coming to talk to you about what’s really going on in their life, because somewhere inside, they’ve already concluded you won’t get it. The root of that silence, Kelemen argues, often traces back to years of well-meant but inaccurate encouragement.
This doesn’t mean encouragement is bad. It means encouragement has to be honest. Praise that reflects the child’s actual, current ability builds trust: my parent sees me accurately. Praise that inflates ability, even with the best intentions, quietly teaches the opposite.
A practical shift: instead of “you can definitely do this,” try “let’s see how far you get” or “I believe you can handle trying, even if it’s hard.” These phrases encourage effort without promising an outcome the child may not be ready for. If your child does struggle, you can say, “That was genuinely hard — it makes sense you found it tough,” rather than treating the difficulty as a mystery given how “capable” they supposedly were.
Accuracy, not inflation, is what tells a child: my parent actually knows me. And that message, repeated honestly for years, is what keeps the door open at fifteen.
For more of this kind of honest, practical parenting wisdom, join the inner circle at lawrencekelemen.com.
This blog was co-written with Artificial Intelligence.