Last week, I had the opportunity to give a workshop on Coaching Insights for Parenting Across Neurodiversity. As I prepared for it and talked with other parents, I found myself reflecting on my own parenting journey too.

For many years, when I saw a problem, my natural response was to try to fix it. Homework wasn’t getting done? Find a better strategy. Something wasn’t working socially? Offer advice. Worried about the future? Plan more, guide more, and try to prevent problems before they happened.

It all came from care. But I gradually realized that trying harder to fix things didn’t always make things better. Sometimes the more I pushed toward an outcome, the more pressure entered the relationship.

Learning coaching skills helped me look at these moments differently. Instead of immediately asking, “How do I fix this?”, I started asking other questions: What might my child be experiencing? What am I bringing into this interaction? What does my child need from me right now?

That small shift opened up a much bigger change for me.

I began paying more attention to effort instead of only results, understanding before advice, and emotional safety before correction. When I worried about the future, I practiced bringing myself back to the present: What can I support right now? What helps build confidence, resilience, and the ability to handle challenges over time?

One idea from the workshop has stayed with me: sustainable change doesn’t mean challenges disappear. Challenges come back. What worked yesterday may not work today. Children change, situations change, and we change too. What we can develop is a healthier way to meet those challenges together.

Maybe parenting is less about having the right answer every time and more about developing our capacity to respond thoughtfully.

And perhaps one of the most important shifts is this: it is less about changing our children, and more about how we grow as we support them.