I stopped trying to teach my child and started learning in front of them

I used to think I was doing the right thing by constantly offering activities, explaining things, turning moments into learning opportunities. Every car ride was a chance to point something out. Every walk was a chance to name a plant or count something or ask a question I already knew the answer to. I thought that's what good parents did.

But for my child, every "did you know" was a demand to listen, every teachable moment felt like a trap, and I couldn't understand why they'd shut down or pull away when I was trying to share something interesting, something I thought would delight them.

It took me a long time to realise that the issue wasn't the content. It was the direction of it. I was always directing their curiosity, and for a PDA child that registers as pressure no matter how gently it's wrapped.

So I stopped directing their curiosity and started feeding my own.

Reading my own books where they can see

I started reading again. Not parenting books. Books I actually wanted to read. On the couch, at the kitchen table, in the garden. Audiobooks with headphones on. Books read aloud on my smart device as I drifted off to sleep. I didn't point it out or make a thing of it. I just let it be part of the landscape.

What happened over time was something I could never have engineered. My kids started noticing. They'd ask what I was reading or pick up something I'd left on the coffee table or start listening to an audiobook because they'd overheard a bit of mine. None of that happened when I was handing them books and suggesting they'd love this one. It happened when I stopped making reading about them and just let it be about me.

Trying new things badly

I picked up a ukulele and was terrible at it. I tried drawing and it looked ridiculous. I started a garden bed and made a mess and nothing grew. My kids watched. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes they helped.

And here's the thing I didn't expect: seeing me be bad at something made trying feel safer for them. Because if mum could pick up an instrument and sound awful and still keep going, then maybe being bad at something wasn't the end of the world. I'd been so focused on building their confidence through encouragement and praise that I'd missed the most obvious thing, which is that children learn more from watching us navigate failure than they do from hearing us tell them it's okay to fail.

Curiosity out loud

This one became almost second nature once I started paying attention. Instead of directing questions at my children I started just wondering out loud. "How in the heck did they even build that?!" "But what's gonna happen when..?" "I can't for the life of me figure out how this works."

Not directed at them. Just me, being curious about the world. Wondering out loud turned out to be an invitation that doesn't ask for anything. There's no demand in it. There's no expectation of a response. It's just a person being interested in something, and if my child wants to engage with that they can, and if they don't, nothing's been lost.

Asking questions I don't know the answer to

This was a big shift for me because I realised how many of the questions I'd been asking my children were questions I already knew the answer to. And they could feel that. They could feel when I was quizzing them versus when I was curious, and the difference changed everything.

"Why on earth do cats do that?" "What could that be made of?" When I'm actually curious, they can feel it. When I'm testing, they can feel that too. PDA children in particular are incredibly attuned to that distinction. A question that's really a test reads as a demand, and their nervous system responds accordingly. A question that's real, that I'm genuinely sitting with, reads as shared wonder and shared wonder doesn't ask anything of anyone.

Letting them see me struggle

I stopped pretending to have it all figured out. I let them see me try and fail, get frustrated, and try again. And that taught them more than any lesson ever did.

Struggle isn't something to hide. It's how learning actually looks. And for a long time I'd been modelling the opposite without realising it. I'd been modelling perfection, or the appearance of it, and that was setting an impossible standard for my children. When I let the mask slip and just let them see a person who is learning and messing up and working through it, something shifted in our family. They started being gentler with themselves when they struggled, because they'd seen me be gentle with myself when I struggled.

Not turning their interest into a lesson

This one I have to keep catching myself on because the habit is deep. When my kids showed me something cool, I stopped saying "did you know...?" and started just sharing the moment. Their excitement didn't need my curriculum layered on top.

Sometimes the best response to wonder is just more wonder, appreciation for life and awe. Not a fact. Not a connection to something educational. Just "wow, that's amazing." Because the moment I add a lesson, I've taken their experience and made it mine. I've redirected their curiosity into my agenda, and even when the agenda is learning, it still registers as control.

Modelling, not directing

This is what it all comes back to for me. Wonder, not worksheets. My children don't need me to constantly teach them. They need to see me still engaged with learning in joy. They need to see a person who reads because she wants to, who tries things because they're interesting, who asks questions because the world is fascinating and confusing and worth being curious about.

And when I stopped trying to make learning happen for them and just let it happen in front of them, they started coming to it on their own terms and in their own time. Which is the only way it was ever going to work for them anyway.