How years of play gave my son one real tool for the hardest moment of his year — a middle finger, a fistful of rage, and a choice.
This is really a story about how to teach kids to think before reacting — not by lecturing, but through years of ordinary games that quietly built the skill. The clinical name for it is self-control; in our house, we just called it making a good move.
If your kid has ever said something in anger that scared you a little — something you didn’t know was in there — read this before you decide what kind of kid you’re raising. Mine said it at the park last summer. He was eleven. And what came out of his mouth sent a shiver down my spine.
Logan was playing basketball with a friend when another boy wandered onto the court and, out of nowhere, gave him the middle finger — ran off, jogged back, flashed it again. Logan was fuming. But to his credit, he didn’t react physically. He mumbled something to his friend and walked off.
Later, I asked what he’d whispered. His answer stopped me cold: “We were talking about how we want to injure that kid.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“Mine,” he admitted, looking at his shoes.
“Okay,” I said, drawing on our shared language of strategy. “Let’s think about this like we’re playing chess. You’re evaluating this move to injure the kid. First you’d have to decide how. What exactly were you thinking of doing?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Exactly. Thinking something and doing something are completely different. Say you decided to break the kid’s finger — what would you actually have to do? And what are the consequences? He’s not going to stand there and wait, right?
What’s your probability of success? And what’s his probability of hurting you as you try to hurt him?”
He nodded slowly.
“Look — it’s great that your ultimate choice was not to engage physically. That’s a huge step from just reacting. But I get that you had an urge. So here’s a challenge: brainstorm all the OTHER options besides injure him. Later, we can game them out, just like in chess, to see which gives the best outcome.”
The Game It Out Method
I have a name for what we did on that walk home. We call it the Game It Out Method — and it’s become our move whenever a big feeling shows up:
- Name the move. “What did you want to do?” Say it out loud.
- Play it out. “Then what happens? And then?” Follow it to the end.
- Count the odds. “What are the odds it works — and the odds it backfires?”
- Find other moves. “What ELSE could you do?” Get three more.
- Pick the best ending. “Which one gets the outcome you actually want?”
You don’t shut the feeling down. You game it out.
If you’re raising a kid who feels everything at full volume — who freezes or explodes before he thinks — I put together a free one-page guide with the small, concrete moves that help a kid like that. It’s tied to the picture book I’m working on. No spam, just the guide.
How to Teach Kids to Think Before Reacting
That calm, strategic conversation at the park wasn’t luck, and it wasn’t a lecture I’d given the night before. It was the payoff of about seven years of experiments in our home laboratory — none of which ever looked like teaching. It looked like playing.
It started when Logan was about four and I pulled out the Monopoly box. His eyes lit up like Christmas lights at the colorful money and those shiny metal tokens; he grabbed the battleship instantly. Then I looked at the actual rules — mortgages, rent, utilities, jail, for a four-year-old? Oh, boy. A recipe for losing interest, not learning logic. I didn’t care about Monopoly; I cared about what it held: rules, turn-taking, choices.
So I adapted. I’d guide his little hand — “Roll the dice! Move your battleship, one, two, three! You landed on Boardwalk — do you want to buy it?” We ignored rent, utilities, all of it. Whoever owned the most properties won. We changed the rules on the fly, and without realizing it, he’d learned his first real lesson: rules create order, and choices have consequences.
Then came the infamous “Why?” phase. If you’ve got a little one, you know exactly what I mean — that relentless interrogation that can make you want to pull your hair out. My pre-kid self would’ve snapped “Because I said so.” But I’d maintain discipline and turn it into a game instead. Logan at five, holding up an empty gummy bag like a tragic prop: “Why can’t I have more gummies?” My turn. “Because we need to save room in your tummy!”
Why? “Because we’re eating yummy lunch soon!” Why? “So you’re not hungry!” Why? “Because when your tummy’s empty, that’s your body asking for energy!” Why? “And your body needs that energy so we can play a surprise game later!” — and just like that his mind jumped from gummies to which game we’d play. The trick was never to shut the “Why?” down. It was to hook his train of thought onto something he loved, so reasoning always led somewhere good.
Around three or four we found a LEGO chess set, and we didn’t just buy it — we built it together, piece by piece, then played one move at a time. My house rule: he got two take-backs. If he moved his bishop and then spotted a better square, he could take it back and try again. It wasn’t about winning; it was about feeling the chain reaction of decisions without the fear of a mistake he couldn’t undo. He was learning to think a step ahead without knowing there was anything to learn.
We had a 3-in-1 LEGO set too — the same bricks build a Tyrannosaurus, then a Triceratops, then a Pterosaur. He’d build one, take it apart brick by brick, and rebuild it into something entirely different: same pieces, different sequence, different outcome. A little masterclass in seeing possibilities, not just limitations, in what you already have. And the best part? He just thought we were having a good time.
As he got older, we leveled up. Full-rules Monopoly taught capital and risk. Chess with no take-backs taught him to weigh a move before committing to it. Monopoly Deal against five loud cousins taught social deduction — reading faces, guessing intentions. Connect 4 and Gomoku taught him to see my next move coming. But the real payoff was always the debrief afterward: “Why did you move your knight there?” Making him put his own thinking into words was where the strategy actually stuck. These weren’t just games — they were experiments in our home laboratory.
Thinking clearly only helps if you’re calm enough to do it, so I paired all of it with feelings. When Logan’s upset, I name the emotion first: “Are you feeling sad? Maybe a little mad? Can you tell Daddy what’s going on in there?” Giving him the options — showing him I saw the feeling and that it was okay to have — usually took a little weight off his shoulders, a small bridge built between us. Often he’d stay quiet, and that was fine. But naming the storm was never the finish line. It was the on-ramp to solving the problem.
So when that boy flashed his middle finger and something dark flickered in my son, we already had a shared language ready to go. He didn’t need a lecture in that moment. He needed a move.
He didn’t hit anyone that day. He also didn’t need me to shame him for the urge — he needed a better option than his first one. A lot of this he absorbed just from watching how I handle my own hard moments, which is a story of its own (I’ve written about it in “The Silent Lessons”). But the short version is this: you don’t raise a kid who never gets angry. You raise a kid who knows what to do with it.
If this helped:
- Send it to the parent whose kid came home from the playground with his fists still clenched.
- Pass it to the one who’s tired of “but he started it” — this is the move that answers it.
- And save it for your own hard day — the one where your kid scares you a little, and “stop it” isn’t enough. You’re not raising a villain. You’re raising a kid who’s still learning the board.
If you’re raising a kid who feels everything at full volume, you might also like this piece on emotional intelligence — it’s the same work from a different angle.
What’s one way you’ve helped your kid think before he reacts?
