He Said, “I Made a Mistake Today.” A Parenting Lesson About Accountability
A school referral turned into a bedtime conversation about mistakes, accountability, and one of the most important life skills kids can learn: how to own it and move on.
How to Teach Kids to Focus on What They Can Control
Yesterday, my son looked at me from the pitcher’s mound with tears in his eyes.
He made a small gesture toward the dugout.
“Take me out. I’m done.”
A couple of routine plays hadn’t been made behind him. Nothing that necessarily showed up as errors in the scorebook, but anyone who has played enough baseball knew they were outs that should have been recorded.
One missed out became another baserunner.
Then another pitch.
Another hit.
The inning started to snowball.
But I wasn’t watching the inning unravel.
I was watching my son unravel.
Over the past year, Gio has become increasingly frustrated when teammates don’t make plays behind him. As a pitcher, I understand the feeling. It can feel like you’re trying to hold back an avalanche by yourself.
The problem is that his frustration doesn’t help him.
It hurts him.
When Gio gets angry, he stops pitching.
He starts throwing.
His mechanics speed up. He tries to overpower hitters instead of trusting his pitches. His command disappears.
After the game, I asked him a simple question.
“When you get angry on the mound, does it help you pitch better?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“No.”
“What happens?”
“I try to throw harder.”
Exactly.
The frustration wasn’t solving the problem.
It had become part of the problem.
And the next morning, I realized he was ready for one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned.
The Two Circles That Changed My Thinking
I wish someone had taught me this when I was 13.
When I look back at my twenties and even parts of my thirties, I spent an incredible amount of energy fighting reality.
I replayed conversations.
I got angry when life felt unfair.
I worried about what other people were doing.
I carried situations around long after there was anything I could do about them.
Looking back, I think that was one of the reasons I was genuinely unhappy for stretches of my life.
Not because difficult things happened.
Difficult things happen to everyone.
I just hadn’t learned the difference between something that mattered to me and something I could actually control.
Years ago, I came across an idea rooted in Stoic philosophy that changed the way I thought about problems.
So that morning, I grabbed a piece of notebook paper and drew two circles for Gio.
One said:
Things That Matter
The other said:
Things I Can Control
Then I shaded the part where they overlapped.
“This,” I told him, “is where your energy belongs.”
It almost looked too simple to be useful.
But I’ve probably used those two circles more than any complicated system for making decisions I’ve ever encountered.
How to Teach Kids to Focus on What They Can Control
We went back through the inning from the day before.
“Could you control whether the right fielder got a better jump on that bloop?”
“No.”
“Could you control whether the shortstop charged that slow ground ball?”
“No.”
“So where do those things go?”
Outside the circle.
Then I asked him another question.
“Do they matter?”
He thought about it.
Sure, they mattered in the moment. He wanted to win. He wanted his teammates to make the plays they were capable of making.
I want him to care about those things.
I don’t want to raise a kid who shrugs when his team loses and says nothing matters.
But caring about something doesn’t mean you control it.
That’s the distinction.
So I asked him:
“What can you control?”
“My response.”
There it was.
His breathing.
His body language.
His attitude.
His mechanics.
His next pitch.
Whether he trusted his teammates after they made a mistake.
Whether he kept competing when things weren’t going his way.
Those were inside the overlap.
Those things mattered.
And those were the things worth spending his energy on.
That’s really the whole exercise.
When something is upsetting you, ask two questions:
- Does this matter?
- Can I control it?
If it doesn’t matter, let it go.
If it matters but you can’t control it, you still have to learn to let it go.
But if it matters and you can control it?
That’s where you act.
That’s where your energy belongs.
The Lesson Wasn’t Really About Baseball
The more I thought about our conversation, the more I realized I wasn’t teaching Gio a baseball lesson.
I was trying to teach him something I still have to practice myself.
This year, my business gave me plenty of chances.
I couldn’t control how long the county took to review our permits.
I couldn’t control inspection delays.
I couldn’t control our commercial refrigerator dying days before an inspection.
Those things absolutely mattered.
But they weren’t mine to control.
What was mine?
Replacing the refrigerator.
Preparing for the inspection.
Communicating with my team.
Figuring out the next step.
Moving forward.
I could spend three days being angry that reality wasn’t cooperating with my plans.
Or I could deal with the small piece of reality that actually belonged to me.
Only one of those responses made anything better.
I still forget this.
I still catch myself replaying things somebody said.
I still get irritated by decisions other people make.
I still occasionally find myself mentally prosecuting a case that has no judge, no jury and absolutely no possibility of changing the outcome.
Then, eventually, I remember the circles.
Does it matter?
Can I control it?
Where is the overlap?
Why I Love That Baseball Keeps Teaching This
One of the reasons I love coaching youth sports is that baseball constantly gives kids opportunities to practice accountability, leadership, and resilience. I've written before about how youth sports teach accountability, and yesterday reminded me that some of the biggest lessons happen after the final out.
This is one of the reasons I love youth sports.
Baseball keeps giving kids small versions of problems they’ll encounter for the rest of their lives.
A teammate misses a play.
An umpire misses a call.
A coach makes a decision you don’t like.
The ball takes a bad hop.
None of it feels small when you’re 13.
And maybe that’s the point.
Because years later, the missed ground ball becomes something else.
A delayed permit.
A difficult coworker.
A customer who disappoints you.
Someone saying something unfair about you.
A decision that doesn’t go your way.
You don’t magically stop getting frustrated when you become an adult.
You just get more expensive things to be frustrated about.
What changed for me wasn’t discovering that life can be unfair.
I already knew that.
It was realizing that I didn’t have to spend myself fighting every part of reality I didn’t like.
Some things matter.
Some things are within my control.
And every once in a while, those two circles overlap.
That’s where I want my energy to go.
If Gio can learn that at 13 instead of 48, that difficult inning may end up being one of the most valuable games he ever pitched.
The circles didn’t make the world easier.
They just made it clearer where to spend ourselves.
Know what’s enough. Build what matters.
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