managing change

"I don't want to go to ski class!" Sophia, my four-year-old daughter, was crying. I knelt down on the snow so we could be at eye level and asked her why.

"I just don't want to go," she whimpered.

I didn't want her to skip class. She was already skiing well — turning and stopping on her own — so I knew she could do it. Plus she'd asked for lessons and we'd committed with the instructor. I wanted to teach her that she needed to follow through on her commitments. Finally, I had seen this before: she'd cried while learning to ride a bicycle, but when she finally learned, she was tremendously proud of herself.

I tried to comfort her, reason with her, convince her that, in fact, she liked class and at the end of it she would smile and tell me she had fun.