When he teaches me patience, even though I thought I was his teacher

It’s 6:45 PM. It’s been a long day, the paperwork has piled up, and the only thing I want is for dinner to be ready, teeth to be brushed, and for calm to finally return. That evening, my son decided to put on his shoes all by himself.

It’s a simple gesture, in theory. But there, by the door, every movement seems to last an eternity. The Velcro getting caught in the lace, the heel refusing to slide in, the little pout of concentration that slows the pace even further. My foot taps nervously on the floor. In my head, I’m counting the minutes. I can already see myself saying: "Let me do it, we’re in a hurry."

It was there, in that narrow hallway, that I realized the disconnect. I thought my role was to teach him how to go fast, how to be efficient, how to "know how to do things." In reality, it was he who, through his absolute slowness, was giving me a lesson in patience that I hadn't seen coming.

What we think we know: patience as a lesson to be taught

We often imagine patience as a virtue that we possess and must infuse into our children. We repeat "wait two minutes" or "be patient" to them, as if it were a muscle they had to flex on command. We see ourselves as the guides for their impulsivity, the guardians of calm in the face of their storms.

We think our role as parents is to be the ones who master time. We organize, we plan, we anticipate. We believe that teaching them about life means teaching them to fit into our rhythm—the rhythm of the clock and efficiency. Yet, this patience we demand from them is often something we struggle to apply to ourselves when their needs don't fit into our boxes.

The nuance is that patience perhaps isn't a discipline we teach, but an experience we share. It’s not a theoretical course; it’s a chemical reaction that occurs (or doesn't) in the friction between our two realities.

What it really means: two clocks beating to a different drum

When a child spends ten minutes observing an ant on the sidewalk while we’re already late for school, they aren't trying to provoke us. They aren't "slow." They are simply there.

For a child, the future doesn't really exist yet and the past is already far away. They live in a sort of perpetual present where the importance of a task is measured by the interest they take in it, not by the time displayed on the wall. What we interpret as a lack of discipline or slowness is often total immersion.

When he struggles with his shoes, he isn't wasting time. He is discovering the resistance of materials, the coordination of his fingers, the pleasure of succeeding on his own. We are the ones injecting the notion of "wasted time" into the equation.

In reality, this moment of friction reveals our own relationship with urgency. Why am I in such a hurry? Will these five minutes really change the course of my evening? Often, the answer is no. But the habit of rushing is so deeply rooted that it becomes our default mode. The child is the last bulwark against this frantic race. They are the ones who force us to stop, not because they want to, but because they don't know how to do otherwise.

How to reflect on it: changing our perspective on waiting

Rather than seeing these moments as obstacles to our organization, we can try to see them as forced breathing spaces. It’s not easy. It requires letting go of the image of the parent "who has it all under control" and finishes everything exactly on time.

We can start by asking ourselves what happens inside us when waiting becomes unbearable. Is it fatigue? Is it the fear of being judged if we arrive late? Or is it simply that we have forgotten how to do nothing for three minutes?

At Alba Time, we’ve often noticed that the stories we create with children have this same power. Sometimes, a child wants to listen to the same narrative again or lingers on a plot detail that seems insignificant to us. We want to move forward, to get to the next part. But it is in this "useless" time that the bond is woven. By agreeing to sit beside them, without expecting anything productive, we rediscover a form of presence that the adult world has made us lose.

It’s not about becoming perfect parents who never get annoyed. It’s just about recognizing that, sometimes, the little 3-foot-tall human is right: the ant on the sidewalk really deserves a look, and the Velcro on the shoe is an adventure in itself.

The next time I feel impatience rising in the hallway, I’ll try to remember that he isn't the one lagging behind my world; maybe I’m the one who forgot how to inhabit his.

Alexis