A Summer of Scaffolding

Every spring, parents enter a very specific kind of panic.

Summer camp registration.

Suddenly you are refreshing websites at 8:59 a.m. like Taylor Swift tickets are about to drop, except instead of concert seats you are fighting another mother for the last Tuesday-through-Thursday ceramics camp within driving distance of your house.

I’ve done the summer-of-fun thing. The camps, the trips, the long stretches where the only real goal is to let everybody breathe after the school year.

But this year, I kept thinking about what was waiting for my girls on the other side of summer.

One was heading into her first year of middle school. The other was heading into her last.

And I realized I didn’t want to fill every open square on the calendar.

I wanted to build scaffolding.

Scaffolding is temporary by design. It exists long enough to support something while it becomes strong enough to stand on its own.

That is what I wanted this summer to be.

For my incoming sixth grader, middle school means more than a new campus. It means changing teachers, changing classrooms, more independence, more responsibility, and a very real increase in the executive-function skills required to keep all the little pieces moving.

So rather than waiting until fall to see where she struggled, we started practicing some of those muscles early.

A little tutoring. Some academic support. Systems for remembering things. Opportunities to manage responsibilities without me swooping in and doing the managing for her.

The goal is not to create a child who never struggles.

Quite the opposite.

My job is to create situations where my children can struggle and then experience themselves becoming capable, as often as possible.

That distinction matters to me.

I don’t want to build a life around removing every obstacle from their path. I want to give them enough support that when they meet the obstacle, they have a few tools and enough confidence to think, Okay. I can probably figure this out.

For my older daughter, the scaffolding looks different.

She is heading toward high school, and she is beginning to understand that getting better at something she loves requires more than simply loving it.

She loves volleyball.

So this summer has included more athletic development, different kinds of training, and the realization that the things you care about sometimes ask something from you in return.

Time. Repetition. Discomfort. Effort.

Basically all the really fun things teenagers dream of for summer.

And somewhere between the tutoring, practices, camps, and normal family chaos, we climb a giant hill of sand together every week.

The sandhill has become one of my favorite teachers.

It looks terrible from the bottom.

Your legs start burning almost immediately. Someone inevitably wonders why we are doing this to ourselves. Progress feels offensively slow because every step forward comes with half a step sliding backward.

We keep going.

Then we get to the top.

And suddenly the giant, miserable, impossible-looking hill is underneath us.

I love that my girls get to feel that lesson instead of only hearing me say it.

Hard things are different once you have evidence that you can do them.

That is what I think confidence actually is.

Not looking into the mirror and repeating that you are capable.

Watching yourself do hard things repeatedly until your brain has collected enough proof to believe you.

The funny thing is, I think parenting asks us to do the same thing.

Every season brings a version of your child you have never parented before.

Just when you become marginally competent at parenting a fifth grader, she has the audacity to become a sixth grader.

You don’t get to keep the version you finally figured out.

You grow with them.

That has been especially tender for me after years of homeschooling. I have had the enormous privilege of watching so much of their learning happen right beside me. Chickens and bunnies became biology. Baking became math. Art happened anywhere we could make a mess.

There were beautiful days.

There were also days where expectations were not met, nothing went according to plan, and I felt like I was failing everybody involved.

Usually those were the days that taught me the most.

This fall, both of my girls will be in school.

I am excited for what is coming, and there is still a part of me grieving what is ending.

Both things can be true.

Maybe that is part of scaffolding too.

We build the support. We stand nearby. We help where help is actually needed.

And then, eventually, we have to trust that what we helped build can stand without us holding every piece.

That might be one of the hardest parts of motherhood.

It might also be the whole point.

Capability is one of the greatest gifts we can give another human being.

This summer, I’m trying to remember that giving my girls what they need does not always mean making things easier.

Sometimes it means helping them get strong enough for what comes next.