Removing the Training Wheels (It’s Hard Being a Girl)

The look of exhilaration on her face as she confidently pedaled in the distance is the stuff we become parents for. As I watched her eagerly push forward, her hair flying behind her, Dad running alongside, the depth of my emotional response surprised me. After a month of rough starts, frustration, giving up, and tears, my girl was doing it! She’d conquered that bike despite her fears and realized the freedom of soaring on a bike is perhaps only matched by swinging towards the sky, pushing your feet into the clouds.

This is perhaps the moment I should concede a bit to those ladies who love to stop me in the grocery store and tell me to enjoy my screaming baby and disobedient toddler because it only gets harder as they get older. In one way they are right. Parenting a smaller child is physically, mentally,emotionally exhausting in one way. Parenting an older child – especially a girl – is exhausting in a different way. What they forget to tell you, however, is what an amazing privilege it is to parent someone as they grow and come into their own.

It’s a whole new ball game when your kid can aptly express what they’re feeling and thinking – and they aren’t afraid to tell you in exact detail. Plus, the push and pull of autonomy is emotionally draining. They’re learning to be independent, but still need you in so many ways. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of parenting a growing girl, for me, is knowing when to step in, when to step back, when to push, and how much.

I knew it before, but it’s really hitting home right now. Being a girl is hard.

The struggle to fit in, to stand out, to be an individual, to find a group of friends. You’re not sure if you want to be a little girl or grow up. School becomes more demanding and friendships increasingly complicated. You just want to play, but there’s homework and responsibilities. The world is suddenly bigger and you’ve got all of these complex emotions, adult expectations, and you sometimes look at the baby with envy.

Then there’s your mom. You desperately want her to get you, but she just doesn’t understand.

If she only knew.

I know there’s no “right” way to be a mom, but every day I worry that I’m finding all the wrong ways. My heart aches, I love this girl so much. She needs responsibilities, boundaries, expectations, but she just wants to have fun. She needs encouragement, love, family time, but loving someone doesn’t mean they always get their way or get to hear what they want.

More than every lately, I’ve found myself having a Help moment with my daughter. You are smart, kind, funny, creative, and anyone would be lucky to have you as a friend. I love you, Dad loves you, your brothers love you. You are wonderful!


Just do your own thing and people will want to join you. Make up a game, create your own fun, don’t worry so much about what other kids are doing.


You can do this! Be courageous. Keep trying. I believe in you. I know you can!


But then there’s

You’re too old to be throwing a fit over this. You need to stop crying. Now.


How old are you? Why don’t you (pick this up, do that). Why do you always…


You need to try doing it yourself first. I can’t do everything for you.


And I believe she hears my voice in her head, echoing each morning’s words and what we say as she goes to bed at night. I hear them too, reviewing them, happy for some, wishing others back.

What I want her to know most of all is this: Our worth is not defined by others. It’s not valued by how many friends we have. It’s not determined by test scores or how fast we reach life’s milestones. You have a divine worth, you are a daughter of God, loved more than you can imagine. I realize that I didn’t fully understand this at 6, 16, or even entirely at 26.


I want her to know this: 

Excerpted from Forget Me Not by Elder Dieter F Uchdorft


When I look back at this time in our lives and remember the ups and downs, trials and successes, as my sweet daughter and I ventured into the unknown, I hope I remember the lesson of the bicycle.

I meant well when I suggested we take off her training wheels. I thought they were holding her back, that she would want to leave them in the past. Perhaps we pushed her too soon. Too many changes at once, too high of expectations on both of our parts.

Whatever the error, her excitement quickly gave way to trepidation, fear, procrastination, and raging frustration. We tried encouraging, being gentle, firm, and using tough love. She looked at her friends riding with envy, her little brother trailing behind on his tricycle. She blamed us and entreated us to put the training wheels back on. I lost my patience. We tried again. We knelt and prayed for help (she wanted to be able to ride “today”, but I told her God’s help doesn’t always work that way). She gave up. I became discouraged and angry.

Then we decided to push it again yesterday after another frustrated fit about something else. This girl needed a success. We all needed to conquer that bike. After a some successful attempts on the sidewalk with Dad, I suggested we go to a nearby cul de sac so she could try on the road. Her neighborhood friends came along to cheer her on and ride alongside her.

Thanks to her father’s patience – and I hope some of my encouragement as well – she finally experienced the incredible success of riding a bike! She mastered that bike and, after several times riding with Tim running alongside her, she rode confidently on her own. Ella loved riding so much, she didn’t want to stop.

Riding home, she ran into the difficulty of riding straight on the sidewalk, a new challenge to conquer another day. I admired her as she kept trying despite the difficulties, something I hadn’t seen her do in awhile. I shook my head a bit as she determined she didn’t need to ride on the sidewalk, which is all we have near our town home and where the neighborhood kids ride.

That’s childhood and parenthood, though, isn’t it? We’re never completely finished, totally there. We’ll face new challenges together tomorrow. And, when she remembers the story of riding her bike, she’ll simply recall  the thrill of riding by herself for the first time, perhaps with a glimpse of her dad running alongside, cheering her on. For me, though, it will always be a lesson in timing, patience, knowing when and how hard to push, and making sure she knows I’m always here, loving her, no matter what.