As a young boxer trying to make it on his own for the first time, future heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson would find himself so hungry that he had no choice but to head over to his mother’s house late at night.
“Don’t tell Mom we’re hungry,” he told the friend who was with him. “I don’t want her to know I haven’t been able to manage on what I’ve been making.” But no sooner had Floyd said hello than his mother was making him a snack.
“Don’t bother, Mom,” he said, playing it cool. “We had a big meal tonight at a restaurant and couldn’t take another bite.” Just a snack, his mother insisted, before serving an enormous meal. “I kept wondering if my mother knew that this wasn’t a social call,” Floyd would reflect years later in his memoirs, that “I wasn’t eating just to be polite.”
Of course she knew! A parent always does! But she didn’t say a word. She just did what she needed to do, caring not only about her son’s well-being but also for his feelings and his pride.
When our kids need help, our only job is to provide it. To help, not lecture. To be of service, never to humiliate. This is how you create the kind of relationship Floyd and his mother had—the kind where your kids know they can always come home for help at any time, day or night.