8 / 3 / 2023

Dear Friends,

This week I was thinking about one major lesson I learned this summer. It’s about the value of time in and of itself and, not-so-ironically, it took a few months to really sink in.

In the worlds of tech and entrepreneurship you often hear the advice of “Fail Fast”. It means errors and miscalculations are bound to happen, sure, but try to make the mistakes quickly so that you can move upwards and onwards even faster.

In my experience, it doesn’t always work like that - especially with kids. Sometimes our girls make the exact same mistakes over and over. Sometimes they gravitate towards the mean girls . . . again. Sometimes they get betrayed (or do the betraying 😬) . . . twice.  Sometimes it can take weeks, months, even years to learn the most valuable lessons.

But you know what? That’s okay too. There’s really no timeline for how or when these things happen and there are often no shortcuts to the insight gained from the experience. As for our role as parents, there are times when it’s our job to impart the wisdoms, but there are other times where the best thing we can do is simply sit with them while they work through things themselves.

There was a fantastic article in the NY Times last month, written by a psychiatrist studying the effect that Taylor and her tour have had on so many teenage girls and young women this summer. In addition to the (so well deserved) praise for ‘the poet laureate of this generation’, one of the best lines in the article says Taylor “is not going to solve whatever problem you’re having, but she is going to sit with you in it until the passage of time does its work.” What a great reminder as to what these kids so often really need.