Three Kids
Picture a kids class on a Wednesday night. Down the line, one boy is completely absorbed with his new skill of snapping his fingers or his wiggly tooth, half in the class and half out of it.
A few feet away, a girl is slowly starting to unravel because she isn't getting the technique perfectly. Now her head is in her hands, and she's crying hard enough that her six-year-old partner has stopped and is looking over at me for help.
The third kid, another girl, hasn't looked up in ten minutes. When someone next to her starts messing around, she stays focused on the task at hand.
Three children in the same room, participating in the same class, having three very different experiences. I’ve spent years watching moments like these unfold, and one of the most important things I’ve learned is that what a child is doing rarely tells the whole story of what’s happening. Children must be understood within the environments in which they’re developing. I believe parents know their children. But a jiu jitsu coach comes to know them differently, not necessarily more.
And that distinction matters.
A parent knows their child through years of attachment, family dynamics, routines, and experiences. A coach encounters that same child in an environment involving physical resistance, vulnerability, cooperation, competition, and uncertainty. A jiu jitsu environment doesn’t only tell you who a child is; it creates circumstances in which different aspects of that child can emerge.
And that’s why I believe behavior can be observed, but development must be interpreted. What we discover when we begin looking beneath the surface can change everything about how we teach, parent, and understand children.
The Raw Material
Kids bring a lot onto the mat. Rage, sadness, fear, insecurity, ego, and often plain immaturity, because they're seven. Plenty of parents see those things as obstacles to train out of a child before the real learning can start. I see them as raw material or fuel. We call this emotional content. It is energy that children haven’t learned to direct. Initially, a child's emotions and impulses rule their actions. If they are energetic, they may accidentally cartwheel into another child. If they are frustrated, they might squeeze another kid too hard. If they're afraid, they might stop moving completely. If they're embarrassed, they might quit.
Many kids also arrive with limited movement skills. What they have instead is random jolts of energy spilling out of their bodies: flailing arms, kicking legs, weird noises, and bobbly heads. As they develop more understanding and coordination, they discover new ways of organizing their movements and responding to their feelings. With structure, that same energy can fuel deeper play.
We are teaching children that they can be energetic and still have control, frustrated and still think clearly, afraid and still act, embarrassed and still participate. The achievement of skill isn't the disappearance of emotion or childishness; it's the increased ability to act intelligently in spite of it.
That's why so many kids, and so many parents, only ever see jiu jitsu as fighting. On the surface, it does look violent, scary, and destructive. Two kids push as hard as they can against each other, powered by whatever they walked in carrying. If they stop there, that's all it will ever be for them. Kids who stay long enough find something else. They find strategies that allow them to manage forces that would otherwise overwhelm them. Jiu jitsu offers a child another possibility, another part of themselves they haven't met yet. The boy who has only known himself as angry gets to meet the version of himself who stays patient under pressure. The girl who has only known herself as scared gets to meet the one who can breathe on the bottom of side control.
Going inward is scary, and most kids have no map for it. Jiu jitsu gives them a sword to wield and a guide who knows something of the terrain. They still have to enter that dark unknown themselves, but they don’t have to enter it unprepared. Sometimes that mat even gives a voice to the parts of themselves they haven’t learned to speak about. A boy who can't explain what frightens him may reveal something of that fear in how he fights, how he moves, or when he gives up. And over time, he may begin to recognize it himself.
Levels of Leverage
Leverage means getting more out of less. Every kid on the mat is looking for it, whether they know the word or not. What changes as they grow is where their leverage comes from. These aren't fixed developmental identities; they are context-dependent ways of responding to problems.
Powerlessness (what I believe I lack). Many children enter jiu jitsu without knowing how to exercise agency within this unfamiliar environment. It doesn't necessarily mean they’re powerless. In fact, I've seen kids here who have tremendous physical or cognitive advantages who still struggle to shape what happens to them. They don't know themselves yet.
They might be physically strong, intelligent, or naturally coordinated, but none of these attributes matter much if they don't believe they can meaningfully influence what happens to them. I often tell the kids that one of the reasons they may lose has nothing to do with how little they know. It may have everything to do with their reluctance to push through resistance. The child who freezes when someone grabs them. The child who gives up before attempting an escape. The child who assumes the other person is stronger, faster, or better and therefore sees no reason to try. There’s even the sneaky kind of compassion that sometimes conceals fear. A child who says they don’t want to hurt anyone may also be afraid of what will happen to them if they offer real resistance. So they hold back. These children experience jiu jitsu as something that happens to them, rather than something they can participate in shaping.
I have also seen children who have a well-developed sense of agency in their everyday lives but experience a great deal of powerlessness when they encounter jiu jitsu. They might be confident at school, assertive with friends, successful in other sports, and accustomed to being capable. But put them underneath another child who controls their movement, and their familiar ways become useless. They haven't lost agency; they've just encountered an environment where they don't know how to exercise it, and for these kids, it can be incredibly difficult. Jiu jitsu introduces a kind of physical resistance that many children, and even most adults, have never experienced.
It is sustained, intentional resistance from another person who is actively trying to control your movement while you attempt to control theirs.
A child discovers that wanting to move doesn't mean they can move, and trying harder doesn't necessarily produce a better outcome. They also discover that being intelligent doesn't mean you immediately understand. Their existing relationship with themselves is challenged. Jiu jitsu doesn't make a child powerless; it reveals the limits of the power they thought they possessed.
And sometimes, it reveals power they didn't know they had.
Attributes (what I possess). This is when children rely primarily on what they possess, and honestly, this can be a developmental milestone for the powerless kid: from helplessness to agency. But this is where I think a lot of parents should be paying attention to their children. Some children arrive naturally assertive, aggressiv,e or physically dominant. When they first enter a sport, they’re often the ones identified as talented. The most athletic and aggressive kid in the bracket may win a lot of matches because they can push through resistance that overwhelms everyone else. When neither child really understands what’s happening, physical advantages can make all the difference. But there’s a trap here. The child who lacks those advantages may begin to believe jiu jitsu isn’t for them. The world starts to look like the kind of place where only the strong survive. And those who come in possessing those advantages may arrive at the same conclusion. One believes they cannot succeed because they aren’t strong enough. The other believes they succeed because they are. Neither has necessarily discovered what jiu jitsu can offer beyond what they already possess.
Collection (what I know how to do). Next, some kids start gathering techniques and relying heavily on what they have memorized. They learn an armbar, a sweep, a choke with a cool name, and they want more. Some children, particularly those who can’t rely on physical advantages, recognize early that learning what to do offers them a different source of leverage. They may jump straight to this level.
It can look like natural talent at first, but we should be careful about what we’re actually observing. A child who learns techniques quickly doesn’t necessarily understand why they work, when to use them, or what to do when they don’t. For these kids, collecting techniques can feel like progress, and partly it is. But their sense of competence can be fragile. They might feel like they’re really good one week and get absolutely smoked the next. And that can be confusing.
They learned the technique. They remembered the steps. They did what they were taught. So why didn’t it work?
Without a deeper understanding, they may begin to lose confidence in themselves or even jiu jitsu, because they believed they were doing everything right.
Fundamentals (what I understand). Now the child starts to understand why the moves work. Base, posture, connection, angles, distance, timing. A handful of ideas sits beneath thousands of techniques, and once a kid begins to recognize them, the moves stop being separate things to memorize. Leverage stops being something they have and becomes something they understand. I don't think parents realize how long this process can take, and I understand completely why a parent wouldn’t care as long as their child’s jiu jitsu is functional. Yet I think this is the stage where jiu jitsu can begin contributing to a child’s burgeoning understanding of mastery itself. That it requires a great deal of experience, sparring, study, and opportunities to test fundamental concepts against resistance.
I have a kid now whose questions go beyond technique. He asks, “How do I stay balanced? How do I keep good posture? What am I not understanding about this technique?” We’re also starting to have deeper discussions about jiu jitsu, where he’s able to formulate original thoughts. This is a child who is becoming literate in jiu jitsu. And through that process, he’s beginning to uncover something about learning: that competence can be developed through understanding, experimentation, and sustained engagement with difficulty. In my experience, this is incredibly rare in children, but it doesn’t have to be.
I’ve watched children leave during long stretches of struggle, sometimes just as their understanding was beginning to take shape. Others remain dependent on physical advantages or collections of techniques. Some are athletic specimens who can force their way through resistance, win a few gold medals, and move on to other sports. Others spend countless hours drilling and learning moves without necessarily understanding the principles that connect them. None of these are travesties.
But the child who develops a fundamental understanding of jiu jitsu unlocks the sport for themselves. They can maintain structure, recognize opportunities, and draw upon their attributes and techniques when the situation calls for them. They haven’t abandoned the earlier levels of leverage. They’ve learned how to organize them.
Creation (what I can generate). Here is the child who can make their own jiu jitsu and survive. They solve problems nobody taught them. A scramble, a bad position, a partner who does something strange: they take that chaos and turn it into something that's useful. They can recognize underlying relationships and construct an appropriate response in real time. They aren’t limited to only reproducing what they are told. And because they trust their ability to respond, they can remain engaged even when an opponent overwhelms them. Their emotions don’t necessarily disappear, but those emotions no longer have to determine what they do next.
This is where emotional content can become a resource they know how to direct, even in unfamiliar circumstances. Imagine a girl getting upset in the middle of a match. She’s losing, she’s frustrated, and she can feel herself beginning to unravel. But instead of giving in to that feeling, something inside her says, “No! Not today!”
The frustration doesn’t disappear. It becomes fuel. And rather than losing control, she uses that energy to dig deeper and find a solution. Her range of possible responses has expanded. Development isn’t just about becoming less vulnerable. It’s becoming more capable while remaining vulnerable.
The goal isn't simply to teach kids increasingly sophisticated answers; it is to develop kids who can generate intelligible responses even when the situation is unfamiliar and resistance is overwhelming.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand that empowering a child is not about making sure they win, protecting them from difficulty, or convincing them that they can do anything they put their mind to. It’s helping them develop the understanding and capacity to remain an active participant in circumstances they cannot fully control. One of the most important distinctions we make at Gentle Human is that power becomes less about controlling the outcome and more about possessing the capacity to respond.
The Valley
Throughout these levels of leverage, there's a stretch of land I've watched hundreds of kids walk into. I call it the valley. It's the unfamiliar territory a child enters when their existing ways of responding are no longer enough. When the situation demands something they can’t reliably provide. Sometimes what’s needed is a deeper understanding of jiu jitsu. Other times, it’s a deeper understanding of themselves.
A physically dominant child might enter the valley when strength or speed stops working. A technically knowledgeable child might enter it when an opponent does something unfamiliar. A child who has never entered competition might enter it simply by stepping onto a competition mat for the first time. The valley isn’t necessarily what separates one level of leverage from another; it is what happens when a child does not have sufficient resources for the situation they are in. When they come face to face with reality and require new skills. Children regularly succeed on the mats without having developed a dependable capacity to do so consistently. A child might escape a pin or win a match through luck, attributes, improvisation, or an opponent’s mistake. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they have learned how to escape a pin or win a match. The valley is where a child encounters that difference between what they can sometimes accomplish and what they can meaningfully generate.
What I have always found interesting is that children respond differently to this unfamiliar territory and it must be interpreted properly. I have seen children remain there for a while, experimenting with different possibilities. Parents may recognize this as the child who keeps trying until they emerge with a new understanding or skill. And I’ve watched children retreat back into old habits. They may win a tournament and feel like they are the best in the world. At the next tournament they might end up in a challenging bracket, and suddenly fear and doubt appear and their behavior shifts toward avoiding the valley. They believe that they have gotten worse at jiu jitsu, and once that belief takes hold, they may become less willing to experiment, initiate exchanges, or expose themselves to further failure. Their beliefs about their abilities begin to constrain their behavior. They shrink, even though they have not actually lost anything; they’ve just encountered circumstances in which those abilities are no longer sufficient.
The child hasn’t become worse; the circumstances are exposing what they haven’t yet learned.
Their old leverage, or lack thereof, is running out, and the new kind hasn't shown up yet. This is one of the most frustrating parts of training, and where a lot of kids check out or want to give up. This is a hot take, but I honestly feel like meaningful learning can’t really occur until a child has a powerful enough reason to learn. Not every kid in the room has a reason to be there. They may enjoy jiu jitsu, but that doesn’t necessarily mean understanding it has become important enough to them to endure the difficulty involved. And sometimes, it’s the difficulty itself that gives them a reason.
A child who has always relied on strength may have little incentive to understand leverage until strength stops working. A child who wins with the same handful of techniques may have little reason to investigate anything else until those techniques begin to fail. This is why performance and learning aren't identical. A child who wins appears to be progressing, while a child who loses appears to be struggling. But sometimes the child who appears to be progressing is simply continuing to exploit an existing advantage. Meanwhile, the child who appears to be struggling may be confronting the very limitations that new skills must grow from. Sometimes the valley can resemble powerlessness. Even a child who understands fundamentals can encounter a situation that leaves them feeling helpless. The difference is that the child may now possess a different relationship with that feeling. One child interprets helplessness as an identity: I am powerless. Another interprets it as a temporary condition: I don’t know what to do yet.
What I want parents to know is that the valley is the doorway. Some of the most meaningful development on the mats isn’t technical at all. It’s finding out that you can enter unfamiliar territory without needing to know in advance how everything will turn out. This isn’t something children naturally understand, and it can be incredibly frustrating to learn that reality doesn’t bend so easily to what they want. When their familiar ways of responding stop working, that frustration can become a powerful reason to search for something new. From a developmental perspective, it is an opportunity for reorganization.
The valley creates the conditions for change, but it doesn't guarantee development, which is why coaching matters. My job isn't only to produce better behavior or better jiu jitsu. It’s also to help children develop a more sophisticated relationship with themselves. When a kid repeatedly loses to another child, they don't necessarily think, My posture is bad. I keep putting my arm in the wrong place. My understanding of positional hierarchy is all wrong. They think, Boy, do I stink. And sometimes that turns into, I'm not good at anything.
Children don't always have the cognitive or emotional resources to distinguish their performance from their worth. Adults also struggle to separate their performance from their worth, and parents can experience something similar through their child’s perfomance. We want them to succeed. We want them to feel capable. We want to know that the time, money, and effort we’re investing are leading somewhere. But their development doesn’t always announce itself through the outcomes we’re looking for and that can bring up a whole host of complex feelings like helplessness, anger, frustration, disappointment, embarrassment, maybe even confusion. As a coach, I have to help children discover that their existing solutions are insufficient without allowing that discovery to become evidence that they are insufficient. This might be the most challenging part of the job. I’m not trying to protect them from the truth about their abilities. I’m trying to help them understand that the truth about their abilities isn’t the whole truth about who they are.
And just to give another side to this, sometimes the valley isn't dramatic. I typically say to my students that you can either be frustrated or fascinated. Some children lean more toward fascination, even though they still might be frustrated at times. One of the most rewarding aspects of coaching is stumbling on a game that is so compelling to a child that they become so immersed in the joy of jiu jitsu. Their self-consciousness gives way to fascination, and for a little while, they forget the limitations they’ve placed on themselves. Sometimes development requires children to confront their limitations. Other times, it requires them to forget those limitations long enough to discover something new.
This is why we focus on deep play at the gym. Play isn’t just a reward for hard work and it doesn't only prepare children to endure difficulty. It can create the conditions in which kids discover new possibilities without experiencing those discoveries as threatening or overwhelming. Sometimes you can get a child to forget about a particularly challenging or scary experience long enough for them to overcome it and realize they are capable. Struggle is not the only way. Development can also happen through delight, curiosity, excitement, experimentation, competition, and necessity. Sometimes the best thing I can do as a coach is to make this unfamiliar territory navigable, so that when a child looks back, they don't even realize they've crossed miles and miles of new terrain.
Reading Your Child
Go back to those three kids.
The boy constantly snapping his fingers may still be inside his comfort zone. So might the kid who hangs back, never fully commits to a drill, and goes half speed so a loss doesn't count. Clowning around and holding back can look different from the window, but sometimes they serve the same purpose. If nothing is risked, nothing has to be felt. There is nuance to this, of course. I have known some kids who goof off or do their own thing because the level of difficulty is not high enough to produce meaningful learning or engagement. And I’ve coached children who behave similarly because the work is so difficult that they can’t engage productively.
Sometimes they’re protecting themselves from the possibility of failure by withholding effort. Sometimes they’re bored. Sometimes they’re overwhelmed. And sometimes they’re entertaining themselves with something more interesting to them. The behavior may look the same, but what that means for the child can be entirely different. It is the coach’s responsibility to recognize the difference. Some children eventually discover that their familiar ways of participating are no longer enough. That disparity can motivate them to experiment, engage more fully, and reorganize their understanding. Others may become discouraged or want to quit. And that’s why I can’t interpret a child’s behavior based solely on what I see them doing.
I don’t just observe isolated behaviors. I have to develop an understanding of the child through repeated interactions, changing circumstances, and the child’s responses to different demands. What’s incredible, and deeply fascinating to me, is how much this varies day to day, from one environment to another. Just last week, a kid who is usually very confident in himself asked me whether his next tournament would be easier or harder. I told him I don’t know, but all we can do is prepare right now. At his first tournament, he demolished everyone. At his second, he competed in an older age division and didn’t have nearly the same success. I’ve also noticed some reluctance in rolling with certain teammates. One student in particular used to be someone he couldn’t wait to train with. But when I paired them together recently, his response was tear-filled.
He’s becoming apprehensive about challenges he once approached eagerly. He hasn’t forgotten how to do jiu jitsu. He hasn’t suddenly become less capable. But the experiences have changed his expectations of reality, and those expectations are beginning to influence his behavior. He’s beginning to recognize something about the world that his earlier success may not have required him to consider. There are people out there that he cannot easily beat. There are situations in which his abilities are insufficient. Now what will he do?
The girl with her head in her hands is standing right on the boundary line. She's focused. She's committed. She cares enough that it hurts when it doesn't work. I know this because she repeatedly asks to try again, and she responds when I tell her, "You can be frustrated and still participate." The meltdown is what happens when all that raw material is moving and doesn't have a channel yet. From the window, it looks like the worst moment of class. From where I stand, I see something promising: a child who’s struggling and still asking to try again. It gives me an opportunity to coach, build confidence and competence, and help the kid understand struggle as part of learning. The downside is that, if not handled correctly, it can become a source of inferiority. A child may begin to believe that difficulty is evidence that they’re incapable, rather than evidence that there’s something they haven’t learned yet.
The boy’s emotional response is fairly silent. He’s apprehensive, asks questions, and begins avoiding certain training partners. The girl’s response kicks you in the teeth. She becomes frustrated enough to have a meltdown in the middle of the room. A parent watching through the window might assume the boy is doing better emotionally because he’s not visibly upset. But as the one on the mat, my observations produce something more complicated. The quieter child may be retreating from difficulty, while the visibly distressed child may be actively pursuing it. That doesn’t mean one child is developing better than the other. In fact, they may be drawing on entirely different forms of leverage, confronting different limitations, or simply responding differently to uncertainty. What it means is that emotional appearance alone doesn’t tell us how a child is relating to a challenge.
Kids move back and forth between these places. A child who's crossing over in practice can drop all the way back to brute force in a big match when they're tired or scared. Possessing an ability and being able to access it under pressure are different things. It doesn’t necessarily mean they lost something. It means they're seven, or eleven, or human.
So much of what parents hope their children will develop can take shape in these crossings: confidence that doesn't depend on winning, discipline that comes from the inside, the ability to stay with something hard, and even kindness toward a partner who's struggling. None of that is found on the surface. Kids develop these capacities through experience, through relationships, and through the opportunities they’re given to practice them.
They get there by going through.
At the Entrance
A kids jiu jitsu class is one of the clearest examples of vulnerability I've ever seen. Every round, a child risks being seen losing, frustrated, or afraid, in front of their friends, their coaches, and you. They might think, I'm strong. I'm fast. I'm good at jiu jitsu. I'm bad at jiu jitsu. I always lose. I can't do this. All in the span of a week. Their identities are so closely tied to their immediate experience. Yet with the right support, they often return and do it again next week. Eventually, something happens on the journey: they discover the version of themselves they currently know isn't the only version available. The child who has always believed they are weak doesn't need me to convince them they are strong. They may not believe me or might become dependent on my reassurance. They need experiences that make their existing understanding of themselves inadequate. The experience creates a contradiction the kid now has to account for.
That's why, even when they discover this, development isn't a permanent departure from vulnerability. It's an expanding capacity to recognize where we are, make sense of what we’re experiencing, and reorganize ourselves around what we discover.
After about fifteen years of this, I know I can't make the journey for them. No coach can. Each kid goes toward their own core in their own time, and my job is to recognize when they’re approaching unfamiliar territory and to be there as they find their way through it. The entrance is where the adult must decide how to accompany the child without taking over.
It’s extremely difficult as a coach not to become so invested in a child’s success that I begin trying to control the developmental process itself. But the one thing I try to keep in mind is that children require experiences that belong to them.
That's the hard part for parents, too. You'll want to go in after them, pull them out of the valley, fix the meltdown, or find an activity where it's easier. But our children will make multiple crossings throughout their lives, and we won’t always be able to make those journeys easier for them. Sometimes, as parents, we have our own valleys to cross. Watching our pride and joy experience uncertainty, vulnerability, and temporary incompetence can confront us with our own discomfort. We may discover that we need to develop a different relationship with not knowing, not succeeding, and not being able to control the outcome. And perhaps part of accompanying our children is learning how to remain present through those experiences without needing to resolve them immediately.
Watching a kid return from that place, carrying more of themselves than they knew was there, is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done. Children aren't projects to be completed; they're humans slowly becoming acquainted with themselves. We are witnesses and guides to that process. We can only recognize what a child might become, without confusing that possibility with an obligation for them to become it. For some children, discovering that they can resist is transformative. For others, learning to remain engaged while losing is transformative. And for others, developing enough confidence to participate is a major achievement, and the significance of that achievement depends partly on where the child began.
A child can still lose. A child can still cry. A child can still struggle to pay attention. A child can still beat themselves up. But something has changed. Perhaps they try again. Ask for help. Stop putting themselves down. Begin to understand why something works, or doesn’t. Or can now tolerate an experience they previously avoided. Those changes don’t always show up on podiums, in promotions, or in the outcomes adults find easiest to measure.
But they are meaningful.