Stop Correcting Your Children. Sometimes, Ask Them to Teach You

Parents spend much of their time telling children what to do, correcting their mistakes and showing them how things should be done. It is part of parenting. But there is another, surprisingly simple, way to build a child’s confidence: stop being the expert for five minutes and let the child become one.

Once a week, ask: “Can you teach me how to do that? I don’t know how.”

It sounds insignificant. It is not.

Consider a simple example. One summer, Sara Arora’s nine-year-old daughter returned home after watching a magic show. Excited to demonstrate what she had seen, she attempted her own trick. Soon, she was holding up a towel and making a spoon appear to float behind it.

Arora could tell that the spoon had been attached with tape. She could have immediately exposed the trick. Instead, she asked a much more useful question:

“How did you do that?”

Her daughter’s face lit up. She began explaining where the idea had come from, how she had experimented, where she had gone wrong and how she had modified the technique.

The real magic was not the floating spoon. It was the moment a nine-year-old realised that she knew something the adults did not.

That distinction matters.

Children are accustomed to being on the receiving end of instruction. They are told how to behave, what to learn, what they have got wrong and how they can improve. Even well-intentioned parenting can inadvertently create a hierarchy in which adults are the permanent experts and children are permanent learners.

Occasionally reversing that relationship can be powerful.

When a parent says, “I don’t understand this. Can you explain it to me?”, the child is no longer merely consuming information. They must organise their thoughts, decide what the other person knows, identify what needs explaining and communicate it clearly. In doing so, they practise skills that extend well beyond the immediate activity: confidence, communication, perspective-taking, patience and problem-solving.

There is also an important psychological dimension. A child who struggles at school may repeatedly receive the message that they are behind, need correcting or must try harder. Giving that same child an opportunity to be knowledgeable can provide a different experience: competence without comparison.

This should not, however, become another parenting programme.

There is no need for a weekly lesson plan or a carefully designed ‘five-minute activity’. The point is precisely its informality.

If a child is drawing, ask them to show you how they created it. If they are building something, let them explain the process. If they are playing a game, ask them to teach you the rules or strategy.

If they are editing a video, making a craft, learning a dance or listening to music, resist the temptation to supervise and simply ask them to demonstrate.

Even something as ordinary as unfamiliar slang can become an opportunity: “What does that mean? You’ll have to explain it to me.”

The objective is not to flatter children artificially. Nor is it to pretend that adults do not know things. It is to create occasional spaces in which children experience themselves as capable contributors rather than subjects of constant assessment.

That small shift can also strengthen the parent-child relationship. Children do not only need guidance from adults; they need evidence that their thoughts, skills and discoveries are worth listening to.

The larger lesson is therefore less about five minutes than about who gets to hold authority inside a family.

Good parenting requires boundaries, correction and responsibility. But it also requires knowing when to step back.

So the next time your child is absorbed in something, pause before correcting them.

Ask instead:

“Teach me. How does this work?”

You may learn something.

More importantly, your child may learn something about themselves: that they know, that they can explain, and that what they know is worth hearing

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