Charisse Nixon, a psychology professor at Penn State Behrend, ran a simple exercise in her classroom. It showed, in a few minutes, something I have been telling parents at our club for years, usually without much success.

She handed out a sheet with three words. The task: rearrange the letters of each word to make a new word, and raise your hand as soon as you solve it.

What the students didn’t know was that the class got two different sheets.

The first half received the word BAT, and the second half received the word WHIRL. Two seconds later half of the room raised their hands, easily turning it into TAB, while the other half kept staring at their sheets.

The second word followed the same pattern. The first half got LEMON, and two seconds later their hands were up with MELON. The second half got SLAPSTICK, and as before, they kept staring at the word, unable to rearrange the letters into anything. You could see on their faces a mix of confusion and disbelief.

For the third word, everyone got the same word: CINERAMA. The first half solved it quickly. AMERICAN, and their hands went up. The second half sat there, puzzled, and most of them barely even tried.

Then the professor asked the second group how they felt. The answers came fast: embarrassed, stupid, inadequate, not up to the task, not confident. And almost everyone admitted the same thing. After two failures, they decided they just couldn’t do it, so on the third word they didn’t really try.

Then she told them the truth. WHIRL and SLAPSTICK had no answer, and there was no other word hiding in those letters. The task was impossible from the start, and the whole thing was a setup to demonstrate an important behavior.

What is shocking here is that smart college students, perfectly capable of solving CINERAMA, gave up on it because of two impossible words that came before it. They didn’t judge the third word on its own difficulty. It wasn’t harder for them than for the first group, as it was the same word, in the same classroom, at the same time. The only difference between the two groups was what happened in the two minutes before. The group with WHIRL and SLAPSTICK didn’t know these words were impossible, or that the task was rigged. They assumed the problem was them. They turned the failure inward, against their own worth, and their confidence crashed.

This behavior is called learned helplessness. The psychologist Martin Seligman first described it in the 1960s, and decades of research since then point to the same mechanism. When people repeatedly experience that their effort doesn’t change the outcome, they stop making the effort, even when the situation changes and success is right in front of them. Later research added an important twist: giving up is the default reaction to repeated failure. What has to be learned, through experience, is the opposite. That effort works. That we have control.

Now let’s go to the fencing club.

I have this conversation with parents all the time. Their kid is doing okay in Y10 or Y12. Winning some, losing some, slowly climbing. And the parent wants to speed things up. Fence up in Y14 or even Cadet, or move right away to a higher-level class with much stronger kids, to have the strongest sparring partners every practice. The logic sounds right. Iron sharpens iron. Fence the best and you become the best faster.

I know this sounds counterintuitive to many parents, but I preach the opposite. Slow and steady wins the race. And I see the results of both approaches every season.

A kid who is not ready and gets thrown against fencers far above his level is getting WHIRL and SLAPSTICK in his matches. He loses most, if not all, of his bouts. He attacks, the opponent parries. He waits, the opponent hits him. He changes his distance, he gets hit anyway. Nothing he does matters.

And just like those students, he doesn’t think, “This opponent is two levels above me, of course I lost.” A twelve-year-old doesn’t think like that. He starts thinking, “I suck at fencing.” And it doesn’t take long before he loses his confidence completely, starts finding excuses, and eventually tells you, “I hate fencing.”

The confirmation of his own worthlessness comes at the next big tournament, when he gets a “doable” opponent in front of him, the fencing version of CINERAMA. A kid he is perfectly able to beat. He’s down 2-4, and instead of adjusting, he folds. His brain already knows how this story ends. Parents watch this and can’t understand. In their eyes, he fences every practice with the national-level kids, so how did he lose to this one? But in reality, fencing with them every practice didn’t make him stronger. It taught him that nothing he does works. He survived those practices, and he learned to stop trying.

Instead of progressing, he regresses. And the parent’s answer, very often, is to push even harder.

Now the other path, the one many parents think is too slow. The kid fences at his level, or slightly above. Local tournaments, regionals, opponents he can beat on a good day and lose to on a bad one. This is BAT and LEMON. These bouts aren’t necessarily easy or free of challenge, but they are solvable within his skills. He tries a counterattack, it works. He tries it again, the opponent adjusts, he loses the touch, he changes something and wins the next one. Win or lose, the score reflects what he did on the strip.

Every one of these bouts teaches him that effort connects to outcome.

Then one day, at a national event, this kid meets a really strong opponent. That’s his CINERAMA. A hard word, but one with an answer within his reach. So when he’s down 3-8, he doesn’t fold. He’s not better than that opponent yet, but he arrives with a deep, earned belief that what he does on the strip matters, that every puzzle in front of him can be cracked. He knows what to try, and even if he loses, he walks away with information for his next private lesson, his next class, and his next tournament. So he keeps looking for the solution. Sometimes he finds it. Sometimes he doesn’t, and he loses 15-11 instead of 15-3. A 15-11 loss where he was hunting for answers the whole bout is the best kind of loss there is.

When I talk about this with parents, I always say “easier” in quotes, on purpose. It doesn’t mean easy. A kid who only beats much weaker opponents learns nothing either, and that has its own traps. The right level is where the outcome is uncertain and depends on him. Where he has to work, and the work pays off often enough that he believes in it.

The parents who push their kids up too early think they are buying time, but actually they are spending the most valuable thing a young fencer has, his belief that he can affect what happens on the strip, which is the foundation of his confidence. That belief breaks in a few tournaments. It takes seasons to rebuild.

So when I tell you that your kid isn’t ready for that level yet, I’m not holding him back. I’m making sure that when he finally gets the hard word, he still raises his hand.