Your kid is stuck on something. You can see the fix. You could probably make it happen with one phone call.
That moment, wanting to step in, is the hardest part of the job. And usually the best thing you can do is sit on your hands.
Steve Jobs's parents were good at sitting on their hands.
Steve was 12. He was building a frequency counter and he needed parts he couldn't get. He needed parts from Hewlett-Packard. Most kids would have given up.
He opened the phone book.
He looked up "Hewlett, William." As in Bill Hewlett. As in the Hewlett. Co-founder of Hewlett-Packard.
Steve called him at home.
Hewlett picked up.
They talked for twenty minutes. Hewlett laughed. He sent Steve the parts. And he offered him a summer job at HP.
So Steve worked the assembly line at thirteen years old. Putting nuts and bolts on frequency counters.
Look at what his parents did here.
Nothing.
They didn't track down the parts. They didn't make the introduction. They didn't pick up the phone so their kid wouldn't have to.
A 12 year old cold-called the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard because there was no one standing between him and the problem.
That's the move. Not engineering the struggle, refusing to take it away.