One of the things I appreciate most about Beaver is how often we talk about students having agency in their own learning. Students here ask questions, advocate for themselves, take intellectual risks, and increasingly take ownership of their experiences. We want our school to be student-centered and student-led, which reflects a larger belief that young people learn by doing… and that part of growing up is gradually learning to steer your own life.
Of course, that all sounds wonderful, until you are the adult watching them steer.
As parents, we can spend an extraordinary amount of energy wondering whether we’re doing this right. Are we pushing too much? Not enough? Should I email? Should I wait? Should I remind them? Should I call that other parent? Am I being supportive, or am I preventing my child from learning how to support themselves?
The stakes can feel incredibly high because the love underneath all of those questions is so enormous.
I grew up in a pretty rule-bound household. My parents didn’t spend a lot of time (or, let’s be honest, ANY time) worrying about whether I had enough agency. What I ate, what classes I took, where I went in my free time, and who I was allowed to spend time with were generally not matters of negotiation.
When I became a parent, I was determined to do things differently. And, as sometimes happens when we are trying not to repeat our own childhoods, I sent the pendulum pretty far in the other direction. I wanted my kids to have choices. I thought I was being supportive, and maybe I was, but there were probably also times when what my children needed wasn’t another choice. When I was cooking three different meals at once, maybe what they needed was… something else.
Christine Carter writes about this very tension in her article, “How Independent Should Your Teenager Be?” She argues that as children enter adolescence, parents have to begin giving up some of their role as “managers.” That doesn’t mean becoming overly permissive or disengaged. In fact, Carter argues for something much harder: setting meaningful boundaries, then giving teenagers room to make decisions within them. Sometimes that means watching them make a choice that, frankly, isn’t the exact one we would make. And wow, is that hard.
I’ve been thinking about a phrase I first encountered many years ago in my education courses at Boston College: the “warm demander.” The term comes from the work of psychologist and researcher Judith Kleinfeld and describes teachers who combine two things that can sometimes seem contradictory: genuine warmth and high expectations.
The best teachers I’ve known do exactly that. They know their students beyond the particular academic discipline they teach. They build relationships with them. They laugh with them. They understand something about who they are and what matters to them. And because that relationship exists, they can also say: I know you can push yourself further on this. I’m not going to do it for you, but I’m also not going to let you give up.
Maybe there is something in that word discipline for those of us who are parents, too.
As our children get older, discipline becomes less about directing every decision and more about helping them develop the ability to direct themselves. Our job gradually shifts from manager to coach. We establish guardrails. We ask questions. Sometimes we say no because some things still aren’t negotiable. But other times, perhaps more often as they get older, we say: What do you think you should do? Or How are you going to handle this? Or even the particularly difficult one: This is your decision.
And then we have to live with the answer. Gulp.
Schools have an important role in this transition, too. If we tell students that Beaver is student-centered and student-led, then we have to give them authentic opportunities to practice that responsibility. A student who is struggling in a class needs opportunities to talk with the teacher. A student who makes a mistake with a friend needs to participate in reconciling it. A student who takes on too much needs to begin recognizing their own limits.
This is an important distinction, I think: when the school asks a student to advocate for themselves, repair a mistake, or navigate a consequence, that isn’t the school withholding support. It is support. We are helping students practice adulthood, in a developmentally appropriate way, while there is still a substantial safety net underneath them.
That doesn’t mean the adults disappear. Quite the opposite. We have to stay close, ask questions, and provide structure and boundaries. We step in when safety, well-being, or circumstances require it. And sometimes we allow a young person to experience a manageable disappointment or consequence because we know there is learning there, too.
This may be one of the hardest parts of parenting and educating teenagers: knowing when our love requires us to step in, and when that same love asks us to step back.
Maybe being a“warm demander” offers us a useful way to think about it. The warmth is non-negotiable. Our children should know that they are loved, known, and supported regardless of the disappointing grade, the missed deadline, or the poor decision. But the demanding part matters, too. Loving young people means believing they are capable (sometimes more capable than they believe themselves to be!) and gradually asking them to carry more responsibility for their own lives.
That is what we are trying to do at Beaver. Our goal isn’t to remove adults from students’ lives in the name of agency. It is to surround young people with adults who know them well enough to coach them, challenge them, set guardrails when necessary, and increasingly trust them with the wheel. Parents and educators won’t always know exactly when to hold on and when to let go. We’re going to get some of those decisions wrong. I know I have.
But perhaps our children don’t need us to get every decision right. They need caring adults who are willing to keep adjusting alongside them, sometimes leading, sometimes coaching, sometimes stepping back… but always staying close.