The moments that teach us the most are rarely the ones we plan for. They happen on sidewalks, in living rooms, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon when something becomes harder than expected and a child looks to us to help them figure out what to do with that.
This is one of those stories, and it starts with a bike.
Mabel and Her Bike
My daughter Mabel had been asking for a bike, and when she finally got one, she was ready.
Or she thought she was.
What she discovered pretty quickly was that riding a bike asks a lot of the body all at once. Balance, steering, pedaling, all of it happening at the same time — all of it new.
“This is too hard,” she told me. “I’m scared. I can’t do it. It’s the bike’s fault.”
It was really, really hard. I watched her struggle. I watched her legs catch the pedals when she lost her balance, leaving a bruise that became its own source of distress.
And I felt that pull, the one every parent knows — to fix it.
But I did not go there first. And the reason why is at the heart of everything we teach in this work.
What the Brain Actually Needs First
When Mabel was standing there telling me she could not do it and that the bike was the problem, she was not in the thinking part of her brain. She was in her survival brain. And the survival brain does not respond to logic, no matter how loving or well-intentioned that logic is.
The brain develops from the bottom up, and from the inside out. The most foundational regions, the ones responsible for survival, for safety, for movement, have to be reached first. Talking to a child’s thinking brain when her survival brain is overwhelmed is a little like knocking on a door when no one’s home.
What the survival brain needs is not words. It needs rhythm. It needs movement. It needs the felt sense of safety in a regulated body nearby.
So that is where I began.
The Walk, the Rocking Chair, and the Unconscious Breath
We stopped. We left the bike where it was and walked home. Mabel cried the whole way. I did not try to problem-solve. I did not try to correct anything she was saying. I regulated my own body, my own breath, and I walked beside her and listened.
When we got home, we put arnica on her leg. I gave her what I often call an “emotional support band-aid.” We blew on it and added a little ice pack. Then we sat down in a rocking chair together, she climbed into my lap, and we rocked while she cried.
What begins to settle the most foundational regions of the brain is rhythmic, patterned, repetitive sensory input and movement — the rocking, the walking, the steady and predictable input that tells the nervous system it does not have to work so hard to stay safe. At some point, Mabel took a big unconscious breath. Her body had begun to soften, and the lower regions of her brain were beginning to regulate.
Feelings Before Fixing
When the rocking had done its work and her body had found a little more stillness, that was when I asked her about what she was feeling.
She told me how frustrated she was. She told me how scared she was, that every time the balance shifted, it felt like she was about to fall and really hurt herself. She told me all of it, now that there was space in her to tell it.
And then, together, we problem-solved. We decided to take the pedals off so she could focus on balance and steering without anything else getting in the way. She was part of that decision, and that mattered.
It was only after all of that — the settling, the listening, the problem-solving — that I brought up her mindset. Now that her body had found some steadiness, there was finally room for that conversation. I told her gently that as long as she kept saying it was too hard and that she could not do it, her body was going to stay in that place of overwhelm. We talked about what she could say to herself instead, and what we landed on together was this: I can do hard things. Yes, this is hard, and I can do hard things.
She said it. She believed it. And then. . . she rode the bike.
What This Has to Do With the Horses
If I had not known what I know, I would have tried to fix her mindset first. I would have addressed the thoughts, the negative self-talk, the blame she was placing on the bike. I would have been speaking to a part of her brain that was not available to hear me yet.
This is one of the things we work on with parents all the time, and one of the reasons we do it with horses.
Horses ask things of us that feel uncertain and hard. They create moments where children and parents alike find themselves thinking, I cannot do this, this is too much, I do not know how to do this.
And what we are doing in those moments, in those pastures, alongside our animals, is practicing. Practicing how to stay. Practicing how to regulate. Practicing how to tolerate discomfort and move through something hard together, not by bypassing the hard part, but by learning to be present inside it.
The bike is one kind of hard thing. The horse is another. And the child standing in front of something that feels too big is the same in both places. So is the parent who wants to help.
Your Invitation
What Mabel needed from me that afternoon was not a pep talk. It was a walk, a rocking chair, and a parent who could stay regulated long enough for her own nervous system to find its way back.
That is learnable. All of it.
NL for Young Children & Parents was created for the practitioners who support families every day. If you have ever wished parents could better understand what their child’s behavior is communicating—or felt unsure how to help them move from managing behavior to building connection—this course was designed for you.
If the story of Mabel and her bike feels familiar in any way, this may be a place worth exploring.
Learn more about the NL for Young Children & Parents course and check out our upcoming conference, The Missing Link: Healing Does Not Skip a Generation to go even deeper.
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