We Don't Quit In This Family. Except When We Do.

Here's a sentence that's true in my house: we don't let our kids quit.

Here's another sentence that's also true, from the same week: I told my 17-year-old I supported her decision to walk away from volleyball.

Those two things sound like a contradiction. They're not. It took watching all three of my kids hit a wall in the same seven days to figure out why.

The volleyball decision

My daughter didn't quit volleyball because it got hard. She put in the hours. She lifted the weights. She showed up for every extra training and optional program the team ran, the kind of stuff you do when you're trying to earn a spot, not just hold one.

And when it came down to it, she knew she wasn't going to get the opportunity to actually play.

That's not a kid getting bored and bailing. That's a 17-year-old doing the math on her own effort and hitting a ceiling she didn't build and couldn't move. So she made a call. She's putting her hours into her job now, saving for college, because that's the actual next step in front of her. Volleyball isn't part of that path.

I didn't tell her I was proud of her for quitting. I told her I supported her decision. There's a difference, and that distinction matters, because what she did wasn't quit. It was read the situation clearly, after giving it a shot, and redirect. That takes more guts than staying somewhere out of loyalty to hours already spent.

The bike

Same week, opposite end of the house. My six-year-old has been on a scooter for probably 4 or 5 months. He was never getting on a bike again unless we put his training wheels back on. Adamant, arms-crossed, done-with-this, never-again. We refused.

We have a family trip coming up and I want him to enjoy riding with us. We have neighbor kids now that want him to come along for a ride. So, out of pure need to be tortured I guess, I decided we were doing the damn thing. Not asking. Deciding. He's going to learn to ride this bike. Annnnd of course, the overachiever I am, decided the first day of school was as good as any. (Hind sight... not my smartest move.)

It did not go well at first. He's my emotional one. There were fits. There was stomping. There was a moment he swung at me. We stopped everything right there, because frustration is allowed in this house and it will always be allowed, but hitting is not, ever, and that line doesn't move for anybody, no matter how hard the day is.

So, I took a beat and I turned around and started helping his four-year-old sister with her bike. She's not a give-up-and-die kind of kid, never has been. She was having a blast, pedaling, wobbling, laughing about it. I don't think it was a coincidence that watching her have fun with the exact thing he'd declared impossible lit a fire under him. A jealous, competitive, six-going-on-sixteen kind of fire.

He got back out there. He fell. Full tumble, although a wee-bit dramatized, he hit the ground and declared, "I'm never doing this again". The whole production starting all over again.

First words out of my mouth: we don't stop on a fall. We don't end the day there. It's okay if you don't master it today. It is not okay to quit on the fall as the last thing that happened.

It took him a minute. A real minute, sitting in the grass, deciding. Then he got back up.

And he did it. Rode that bike without training wheels, and then couldn't stop showing everyone, his dad, his sister, anyone who'd stand still long enough to watch. Now I can't get him off the thing.

So what's the difference?

So you're probably thinking... which is it? Do we quit or don't we?

Here's what I actually believe, watching both of these play out in the same week: quitting on a fall, in the middle of the fear, because it's hard and frustrating and your ego got bruised... that's not information. That's just fear talking, and fear does not get to make the final call. You push through that. You get back on. You don't let a bad ten minutes decide the whole story.

But walking away after you've genuinely given something your effort, with clear eyes about where it does and doesn't lead... that's not quitting, even though it looks the same from the outside. That's discernment. That's a kid who did the work and is now smart enough to point her energy somewhere it'll actually pay off.

The difference isn't the walking away. It's the why, and the when. Are you stopping because you're scared and it's hard, mid-fall, before you've really tried? Or are you stopping because you tried, for real, and you can see clearly this isn't the road?

One of those we push through. The other we support.

I've got a daughter who hitting a ceiling she didn't build and had the sense to redirect. A son who almost let one bad fall write the whole story, and didn't. And a four-year-old who just doesn't quit, period, who I'm sure will teach me something about all of this too, eventually.

I'm not out here raising quitters. I'm raising kids who are learning to tell the difference between 'this is scary' and 'this isn't right for me.' A lot of adults I know can't do that... So honestly, I'll take the win.