A school once wanted to hold back a student I'd been working with for months. By spring, that child was reading at grade-level expectations. So when the school told the family they planned to retain him, I asked one simple question: what are you basing that decision on?

Your child can know how to read and still never become a reader. Those are two different things. Reading isn't only about decoding words, passing an assessment, or getting through a homework assignment. What we really want are children who are curious, who can choose their own books, who can get lost in a story, and who know that reading can actually be enjoyable.

Most parents walk into a teacher conference with one question: How is my child doing? It's a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. It's also a very broad one. A teacher can tell you your child is doing fine, and you can walk out feeling good while still having no idea what fine actually means.

I've known this girl since she was three years old. This summer, her family reached out about our internship program, and for the first time in sixteen years, it wasn't her mom doing the talking. It was her.

There's a student at our center I'll call Caleb. He has a way of sliding into the room and sliding right back out again without anyone really noticing. In all the time I've known him, he has never once told me the work was hard. Not one time.

Then one afternoon I actually sat down and watched him work, and what I saw changed the way I think about every child who resists.

Your child can read every word on the page correctly and still not understand what they just read. Research puts that at somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of students. That's not rare. That's a real number of families listening right now.

Today I want to tell you what happened next, and how you can start seeing what I see in your own child, tonight. I've spent fifteen years and over five thousand assessments learning where kids actually are — not where their grade level says they should be, not where the report card says they are. I want to give you that same eye in about fifteen minutes.

My daughter wasn't even two years old. We were at my son's third birthday party, at a gymnastics place — kids everywhere, foam pits, ladders, equipment. She was off on her own, and my father was watching her. I looked over, and she had climbed up a ladder and was walking across the foam pit by herself, like it was nothing. Not even two years old.

This past summer, I had the most humbling parenting moment I've had in years, and my own kids weren't even involved. I was at a family reunion, reconnecting with my goddaughter and her young children — kids I hadn't seen in a long time, who live out of state. I showed up in full auntie mode: smiling, excited, ready for a good time. What I didn't show up with was any structure, any routine, any rules at all.

I almost didn't record this one. I sat down three times and closed the laptop, thought about it again. I've spent this whole season teaching parents how to raise scholars, and this summer, my daughter taught me what I still had to learn.

I've watched this same moment play out hundreds of times in fifteen years. A student sits down with long division — multiple steps, estimation, everything has to land in exactly the right place, in exactly the right order.

If you have a child in school right now, think about what their teacher actually sees when your child walks through that door each morning. Now let me tell you what my guest today sees — because what she told me at the end of our conversation, I have not been able to stop thinking about.

There's a question every parent carries in silence. They don't always say it out loud, but it lives in the back of every homework session, every parent-teacher conference, every moment they watch their child struggle with something other kids seem to have already figured out: is my child behind?

Today we're talking about grit — what it actually is, how it's built, and what parents do with the best of intentions that quietly kills it. I don't think it looks the way most people think it looks.

This is a conversation I'd been waiting to have since the day I met my guest. Dr. Nicole Monteiro is a licensed psychologist with twenty years of experience, a professor, a speaker, an author — and most importantly for this episode, a mom of two girls. We talked about something every parent needs to hear before the school year gets into full swing: our own stress, and what it's actually doing to our children, even when we think we're holding everything together.

Your child walks through the door. You can see it on their face before they say a word. Something happened today. Something is heavy. Something shifted. So you ask, how was school? Fine. What did you do today? Nothing. And you're standing there, watching your child carry something you can't see and can't reach, without knowing how to get to them without pushing them further away.

You're sitting at the table with your child. They're stuck on a problem. They've been staring at it for four minutes. You can see exactly what they're missing. You know the answer. Every instinct in your body says, just help them. So you do — you explain it, walk them through it, they write down the answer, close the book. And tomorrow night, same problem, same blank stare.

Some of the best conversations I have on this show aren't with experts. They're with parents who've simply lived it — who are a few years further down the road than you are right now, willing to look back honestly at what worked and what didn't. That's exactly what this episode is.

You've already said it three times. Do your homework. Do your homework. Do your homework. And now you're standing in the doorway wondering, am I the problem? Is this just who they are? Is there a version of this where I don't feel like a broken record every single night?

It's 4 p.m. Your child just walked through the door. You say, go get started on your homework. They say, okay. Twenty minutes later, you check in. They're on the couch, snack in hand, shoes still on, backpack exactly where they dropped it by the door. Not a single sheet in sight. And the negotiation begins. Sound familiar?