The Missing Sense

Why safety has cost our children their ability to read the room.

When I first started Karate as a kid, I fell in love with the training. I built myself up in the safety of the dojo, although looking back, that safety is debatable lol. I remember the day I could finally do 40 pushups in a row. I felt strong. I felt like I had achieved something rare.

Then I went to school recess.

I mentioned my 40 pushups to the other boys because I expected some respect. I didn’t get it. It turns out that on that school yard, 40 pushups wasn’t a record. It was standard.

I wasn’t special. I was just average.

That realization was painful, but it was also one of the most important lessons of my life. Although at the time I didn’t realize it was, but it forced me to wake up.

Back then, the social environment was different. There was nowhere to hide. If you were slow, or weak, or socially awkward, you couldn’t just block the other kids or switch servers. You had to stand there and deal with it.

Honestly, if you had told the younger version of me about cyberbullying, where the worst thing that happens is mean words on a screen, I would have said “Hell yeah!”

I would have traded the risk of getting decked in the face for a mean comment any day. I would have loved the option to just turn the screen off and walk away.

But I didn’t have that option.

Because I couldn’t hide behind a screen, and because I couldn’t always win a fight physically, I had to develop a different kind of strength.

I developed a radar.

I learned to read a room instantly. I learned to watch eyes and body language to see if trouble was coming. I learned how to use my words to diffuse a situation before it turned physical. I learned that you cannot simply opt out of a bad vibe. You have to navigate it.

Today, I look around and I see a generation that is safer than I ever was. And that is a good thing. We should be glad our kids aren’t fighting at recess.

But in cleaning up the world for them, we have accidentally turned off their radar.

Because they can always retreat to a screen, they never get that harsh reality check I got on the playground. They walk into rooms with their headphones on and their eyes down. They are completely blind to the energy around them.

They don’t know how to read bad vibes until it’s too late. They don’t know how to use humor to lower the tension. They assume the world will adjust to them because it always has.

I am a father myself, so I have the exact same fears you do. I look at my child and my instinct is to protect. I want to sweep every obstacle out of the way because I love them.

But I also recognize that I have to have the discipline to stop myself.

It is hard to do. It takes actual restraint to watch your child struggle and not step in to fix it. But we don’t do them any favors when we make the world soft.

We have to guide them through that feeling. When they realize they aren’t the best, our job isn’t to say “No, you are perfect.” Our job is to tell them that it is okay not to be the best.

We need to teach them to see themselves on a journey of growth instead of just feeling inadequate. There is a huge difference between “I am not enough” and “I am not done building myself yet.”

My goal in the dojo isn’t to take us back to the rough days of the past. I don’t want kids to be afraid.

But I do want them to be aware.

We need to re-introduce a little bit of friction into their lives. We need to put them in situations where they aren’t the best in the room. We need to let them feel the weight of a standard they haven’t met yet.

Because when a child realizes they aren’t the center of the universe, they finally stop looking at themselves and start looking at the world. And that is when they truly start to see.