I read a post recently about yoga. Except, of course, it was not really about yoga.

The author described falling out of poses over and over in class. She said that naturally her inner sense of balance isn’t that good and to help her, her teacher had given her one instruction: pick a point, focus and keep your eyes there. And while she knew this, she still couldn’t stop looking aside and kept glancing sideways at the person next to her, trying to see how they were holding it together. Every time she looked away from her own spot on the wall, she lost her balance.

I read that and thought: this is fencing parenting in one paragraph.

Parents do it more than anyone wants to admit.

You see a family whose kid just made the podium, and you want to know their formula. How many lessons a week? Who’s the coach? What is their training regime? What is the competition schedule? Where exactly did they get this experience? You want the steps, because if you get the steps right, maybe your kid gets the same outcome.

I understand the impulse completely. It comes from love, not vanity. You want your kid to have what that other kid has. Heck, not once as a father have I had similar thoughts about other aspects of life – not fencing, of course, because at this stage I know better, but about music, math, or a myriad of other things. Thankfully, I was able to catch myself in these moments and bring my gaze back to my spot on the wall.

I can’t stress it enough: the steps you’re copying were never the whole story. You’re watching the finished pose, to continue the yoga analogy, not the years of wobbling that got them there. You don’t see the seasons where that kid cried in the parking lot, or the year they almost quit, or the hundreds of things their parents tried that didn’t work before they found the one thing that did. Or maybe the opposite, you never see the parents in the club and barely in competitions, and think they have a secret sauce and not the obvious reason – the parents let their child enjoy and play.

You are most often comparing things that can’t be compared, trying to copy a formula that might not work in your case.

But I think the worst is not even this. The worst is the moment you start copying someone else’s path, you stop paying attention to your own kid, to their desires and needs, to their strengths and weaknesses, to their pace, and to what actually moves them. You’re too busy glancing sideways to notice what’s happening with your own child, because it is not your own child you see, but somebody else’s formula that isn’t working on yours.

This is exactly what happened to the yoga writer. The sideways glance didn’t just fail to help her balance. It’s what caused her to lose it.

In the yoga studio, every student picked their own spot, a crack in the plaster or a scuff on the baseboard. Something fixed, something theirs, something to return to when things got wobbly. And they kept focusing on their own spot, ignoring everything and everybody else. Think about it this way: somebody else’s perfect balance would not improve your own.

Your fencer needs the same thing – their own fixed point. Not somebody else’s training plan, but their own. Maybe that would be a specific technical goal for the season, or just showing up and working hard regardless of results. Maybe it would be as simple as “we’re building the habit of practice before we build the medal count.”

Whatever it is, it has to be theirs. Not borrowed from the family whose child looks successful.

And you need your own fixed point too, as a parent. A reason you’re doing this that has nothing to do with anyone else’s kid.

Every fencer wobbles trying to keep balance, and you can be sure that family wobbles too. There is no way to find a perfect balance without trying.

The hard part is not staying perfectly still, but remembering to look back at your own spot after you glance away, instead of chasing somebody else’s version of progress.

Being off balance for a second just means you’re standing on your own two feet.

So next time you catch yourself sizing up another kid’s path, or another family’s routine, take it as your cue. Find your spot on the wall and remember to focus on it, ignoring everybody else.

That’s the only place the work actually happens.

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