The Curling Parent

I became a mother later than most of the women I grew up with. By the time my daughter arrived, I had already spent decades building a career, and I was learning, in the same season, to help care for the generation above me as well as the one I was raising. That is its own quiet arithmetic — young and old, both leaning in, and you somewhere in the middle doing the math every single day. My generation has a name for that squeeze. What we do not have is a good name for how it shapes the way we parent.

So I have been reaching for one, and I keep landing on the same image. I am a curling parent.

Not the way the Scandinavians mean it, they coined curlingförälder years ago, and they meant it as a warning: the parent who races ahead, scrubbing away every obstacle until the child never meets a rough patch at all. That is not what I am describing. That is just the helicopter in a heavier coat. I do not want to sweep the ice perfectly smooth. A perfectly smooth life teaches a child nothing about her own balance.

Watch an actual curling match. The stone moves on its own. No one carries it, no one steers it by hand, no one hovers over it. The sweepers cannot touch it. All they can do is race ahead and brush the ice in front of it, not to make it effortless, but to help it travel a little farther and hold a little truer to the line the thrower already chose. The stone is doing the work. The sweeping only clears enough.

That is the whole of it. My daughter is moving under her own power. I am not building guardrails around her, because guardrails decide the path for you. I am down on the ice ahead of her, sweeping the rough spots, not all of them, and not perfectly. Enough. Enough to keep her momentum. Enough to get her to the end.

And here is the part I did not expect. She has her eyes on the goal. I have my eyes on her feet.

That is the trade a curling parent makes, and I want to name it plainly, because it is not all noble. When you are the one down on the ice, staring at the next few feet, you are not looking at the horizon. Your child sees the whole sheet, the target, the future she is aiming for. You see friction. You see the rock coming up. There is a real risk in that, that you spend so long watching her feet that you forget to lift your head and see where she is actually going, and whether it is still where she wants to go.

So I am learning to sweep and look up. To clear the rough patch and then stand, briefly, and let her tell me what she sees from where she is aiming. Because the goal was always hers. My job was never to choose it or to smooth the entire way to it. My job is the next few feet, and the next, and the trust that she is reading the line better than I can from down here.

If you are a curling parent too — sandwiched, a little older, sweeping like mad while she glides on ahead — I want to tell you the thing no one told me. You are not doing too little by refusing to clear every rock, and you are not doing too much by getting down on the ice. You are doing the harder, quieter thing in between. You are keeping her moving without taking the throwaway from her.

Keep sweeping. Then look up, and let her show you the goal.

This is the kind of parent Sum Total was built for — the whole household in the picture, the parent counted in, not just the student. If it would help to have someone sweeping alongside you, schedule a Free Conversation with us: 20 minutes, no commitment, no pressure. And if this reaches a parent you love, that is exactly who it is for.

Robynne Lofton is Co-Founder of Sum Total Consulting.