One Take: What My Son Will Taught Me About Letting Go

I kept pushing him to do it over. Then I realized the problem wasn’t him at all — it was me.

My son Will gave his final speech for his public speaking class last night. He did it in one take. And I have to be honest with you — I’m not entirely sure what surprised me more: the fact that we actually got it done in one take, or the fact that I let him.

I should probably back up.

Will is taking public speaking online. As a high school class. And I’ll tell you, the traditional English professor in me — the guy who spent years in front of classrooms at the Citadel and the University of South Carolina — still can’t quite wrap his head around that. Public speaking. Online. But that, as they say, is beside the point.

The real issue is what happened leading up to that final speech. Because going into this class, it turned into — and forgive me, because the pun is absolutely intended — a battle of Wills. Between me and Will.

Given the opportunity, I would have done that speech ten times. Twenty times. Until every pause was deliberate, every word was exactly right, every moment of eye contact was earned. That’s how I’m wired. That’s always been how I’m wired. So I pushed him. And I pushed him again. And finally, somewhere in the middle of all that pushing, I had to stop and ask myself: what exactly am I trying to accomplish here?

The answer, when I was honest enough to face it, was uncomfortable: I was trying to turn Will into me.

The problem wasn’t him. It was me.

For Will, a B on a speech in a class he doesn’t particularly love is okay. It’s fine. It’s enough. For me — someone who spent his entire academic career in relentless pursuit of the highest grade in every single class — that was never okay. Not even close. And so I kept imposing my standard on him. My definition of effort. My definition of what good enough looks like.

But here’s what I’ve come to realize, and what I want every parent reading this to hear: your child is not you. They don’t have to approach school the way you did. They don’t have to care about the things you cared about, in the way you cared about them, with the same intensity you brought to them. And forcing them to perform to your standard — your version of what a good student looks like — isn’t preparing them. It’s suffocating them.

I see it constantly in my work as an independent educational consultant. I’ll sit down with a family — a student and their parents — and I’ll ask the student a question. And the parent answers. Not occasionally. Increasingly, almost every time. The student just sits there, present in body but absent in every way that matters, waiting for the meeting to end so they can go back to their life. Their actual life — the one that isn’t being managed, monitored, and narrated for them.

When monitoring becomes control

We live in the age of PowerSchool. Parents can now see every grade, every missing assignment, every quiz result — in real time. And I understand the impulse. You love your kid. You want them to succeed. So you check. And you check again. And before long, you’re no longer monitoring their education — you’re managing it, hour by hour, score by score, anxiety by anxiety. And in the process, you’re teaching them that someone else is always going to catch the things they miss.

Because here’s what happens when these kids get to campus: nobody is watching. Nobody is logging in to check their grades. Nobody is answering for them in meetings. And for the first time in their lives, they have to figure out who they are as students — without a safety net made of parental anxiety.

Sometimes one take is enough

Here’s the part I wasn’t expecting to admit when I started writing this: in some ways, I envy Will.

I spent my entire academic career letting everything get to me. Every grade. Every class. Every evaluation. Nothing was ever quite good enough, and I carried that weight everywhere. It wasn’t always healthy. Looking back, I’m not sure it made me a better student — I think it just made me a more anxious one.

Will takes things with a grain of salt. He doesn’t treat every assignment like the fate of the world hangs on it. The very thing that used to drive me crazy about him — that easy-going approach to things that don’t matter deeply to him — is actually something I’ve come to quietly admire. Because at the end of the day, I think he might be more fulfilled in his academic journey than I ever was in mine. And isn’t that the point?

He’s going to find his own passions. He’s going to find the things that light him up and pour himself into those. He doesn’t need me to make every class feel like a matter of life and death to do that. He needs space to figure it out himself.

Four things worth remembering right now

Will did his speech in one take. It wasn’t perfect — but it was his. And watching him finish it, I realized that my job was never to make him do it the way I would have done it. My job was to give him enough confidence in himself to do it his way.

That’s the job, parents. Not to smooth every path. Not to speak every answer. Not to monitor every grade. But to raise a person who knows who they are, trusts themselves enough to show up, and finds their own voice — even in an online public speaking class.

Especially then.

Carpe diem.