"I can't stand watching"

This one is more honest than the others and I'd like to spend some time on it, because I think it's closer to the centre of the habit than time or mess.

Watching a child do a thing badly is uncomfortable. The strap goes through the wrong loop and you can see it going through the wrong loop, and your hand is halfway there before you've thought. The wrong book goes in the bag. The pen hovers over the form and the tongue comes out. There's a feeling that comes up, somewhere between impatience and pain, and the takeover ends it. It's worth being clear that the takeover ends your feeling. The child, quite often, was fine.

Jelena Obradović, Michael Sulik and Anne Shaffer watched a hundred and two parents and their children, around the start of school, working on a set of structured tasks together, and measured second by second how much the parent was directing the child against following the child's lead. They then looked at the children's self-regulation and their executive functions, the researchers' term for the skills of holding a plan in mind and stopping yourself, on separate tasks. The finding was that parents who stepped in more during the moments when the child was actively working on the task had children who did less well on those measures. Stepping in when the child was passive or stuck didn't show the same pattern. It's a single study and it can't say what causes what. But it draws the line in an interesting place. The stepping in that seemed to cost something was the stepping in that happened while the child was already doing it.

That's the hand. It doesn't go out when the child is stuck and asking. It goes out when the child is in the middle of doing it wrong, because that's the moment that's hard to watch. And that's also the moment, if the study's right, when the child is doing the most learning, because a child in the middle of doing it wrong is a child working something out.

So the discomfort is a signal, and it's worth reading correctly. It isn't telling you the child needs you. It's telling you that you're watching someone learn, which looks like failing, and that you'd rather not. That's human. It's also, I'd argue, the thing to sit through, and chapter 20 is about how. For now, the next time the hand starts to move, ask whose problem it's solving. If the child hasn't asked, it's yours.