The Author of Your Own Story

A child once learned how to become an adult without realizing it.

It happened while building forts that would not stand, riding bicycles a little too far from home, settling arguments with friends, getting lost, getting found, and discovering that mistakes were survivable. Nobody called it development. Nobody called it resilience. Nobody called it agency. It was simply called childhood.

Growing up in Dickinson, there was not much supervision on a Tuesday afternoon in July. You left the house after breakfast, maybe came back for lunch if you felt like it, and showed up again when the streetlights buzzed on. Nobody tracked where you went. Nobody scheduled what you did. The neighborhood was the curriculum, and the lessons were not gentle. You figured out right quick which kids kept their word and which ones did not. You learned that a homemade ramp looks a whole lot more reasonable before you actually hit it. You discovered that a creek that looked crossable was not always crossable, and that being wrong about that had consequences that arrived immediately and without sympathy.

Nobody called any of that development either. But that is exactly what it was.

When people compare childhood today to childhood in the 1960s and 1970s, the conversation almost always begins with outdoor play. Children used to spend more time outside. They climbed trees, wandered creeks, explored fields, and disappeared into entire afternoons that belonged only to them. Today, children spend more time indoors, more time on screens, and more time in structured activities. That observation is not new.

What tends to get overlooked is that the greatest difference may not be where children spend their time. It may be who controls it.

Agency is the experience of having meaningful influence over your own life. It is the understanding that your choices matter, your actions carry consequences, and your decisions can shape outcomes. In plain terms, it is the feeling of knowing, "I can do this."

The challenge is that agency cannot be taught through a lecture. It cannot be downloaded through an app, delivered through a worksheet, or absorbed through a motivational speech. Agency must be experienced. It develops when a child decides to build a fort and the roof keeps collapsing. It develops when a group of kids has to settle an argument without an adult stepping in to referee. It develops when a child gets turned around on a bicycle ride and has to figure out how to get back home. It develops when boredom arrives and there is nobody immediately available to solve the problem. In those moments, the child becomes responsible for writing the next chapter of the day.

Most of those experiences would never make it into a family photo album. They are not dramatic. They are not milestones. But they are quietly shaping something important beneath the surface. Every scraped knee, wrong turn, failed plan, and solved problem deposits something into an account most people never see.

Capability.

Each deposit may seem small in the moment. Over time they accumulate. Those deposits eventually become confidence.

Confidence tends to grow when children repeatedly discover they are capable. Before confidence comes competence. Before competence comes opportunity. Before opportunity comes freedom. That sequence cannot be shortcut, and it cannot be handed to a child from the outside. It has to be built from the inside out, one ordinary moment at a time.

The children of the 1960s and 1970s were not simply playing outside more. In many ways, they were practicing adulthood long before they reached it. Not adulthood in the sense of paying bills or filing taxes, but adulthood in the sense of decision-making, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and figuring out what to do when things go sideways and nobody is coming to fix it. They were learning how to function in a world that did not rearrange itself around their preferences.

That does not mean childhood was somehow perfect back then. Far from it. Children today benefit from greater awareness of mental health, improved medical care, better understanding of learning differences, and protection from dangers that previous generations faced with little support. Those are real gains, and they matter.

This is not a nostalgia piece. It is a developmental one.

Because somewhere along the way, many children gained calendars full of opportunities but lost some ownership of their experience. They became passengers in days that were carefully designed for them. Well-intended. Loving. Safe. But designed nonetheless. And a child can ride along in a well-designed day from breakfast to bedtime without making a single meaningful decision the entire time.

An adult chooses the schedule. An adult chooses the destination. An adult settles the disagreement. An adult solves the problem. The child participates, but the child rarely directs.

When that pattern becomes the norm, an unintended lesson can take root. Not that the child is incapable. The lesson is that someone else is usually responsible for making things happen.

Life requires the opposite belief.

Life requires a person to believe they can influence outcomes, tolerate uncertainty, solve problems, and recover from mistakes without waiting for rescue. Psychologists call this an internal locus of control. Put plainly, it is the belief that your actions matter. And that belief does not appear overnight. It gets built the same way capability does, through hundreds of ordinary moments that were uncomfortable, unscheduled, and entirely the child's problem to solve.

That may be why so many adults look back warmly on experiences that were not especially enjoyable at the time. The tree they fell out of. The bike chain they fixed on the side of the road. The fort that collapsed twice before it finally held. The creek they should not have crossed. The argument they eventually worked out.

Those memories are not valuable because they were perfect. They are valuable because they were theirs.

The child was not simply living childhood. The child was helping create it.

The conversation may not be entirely about getting children outside more. Outdoor play matters, but perhaps it was never the true ingredient worth preserving. What mattered most was the freedom hidden inside those experiences. The freedom to explore, to fail, to solve problems, to make decisions, and to discover personal capability without someone standing ready to redirect the next step.

The deeper question is whether children are getting enough room to become the authors of their own story. Because before a child develops confidence, they need opportunities to discover competence. Before they discover competence, they need opportunities to exercise agency. And before agency can take hold, someone has to be willing to step back just far enough for the child to find out what they are made of.

That last part is harder than it sounds. Stepping back when you love someone takes a particular kind of trust. Trust in the child. Trust in the process. Trust that a scraped knee or a collapsed plan or a wrong turn is not a failure of parenting. It is the education.

A Closing Thought Shared..

Perhaps the goal was never to raise children who simply followed directions well. Perhaps the goal was always to raise children who could eventually direct themselves.

One day those children become adults. The schedules disappear. The teachers are gone. Parents grow older. The world stops handing out instructions and begins asking questions instead.

Who are you? What do you believe? What will you do when things go wrong?

Those answers are rarely found in a classroom, a workbook, or an app. More often they are discovered in hundreds of ordinary moments where a child was given enough freedom to think, enough responsibility to choose, and enough trust to learn.

Much like other kids, the kids from my hometown figured that out the hard way. Most of us did not know we were being educated. We just thought we were outside.

Turns out those were the same thing.

— McHenry Counseling —