Nobody shoots at a hoop on the roof

Half the stuff my kid "won't do" isn't about skill. He's decided it's out of reach, so he never picks up the ball at all — same way nobody shoots at a hoop bolted to the next building's roof. So my job probably isn't to cheer louder. It's to lower the rim a foot.

Why does anybody shoot a basketball?

Go to any court and watch for a minute. Kids, grown-ups, whoever — somebody picks up a ball and the first thing they do is throw it at the hoop. Make it, great. Miss it, they try again. And again.

If you think about it, the only reason they bother is that the shot isn't impossible. There's some chance it goes in.

Now picture the same hoop, except it's bolted to the roof of the building next door. Nobody shoots at that. You wouldn't even take the ball out of the bag. Why would you.

So maybe whether a person does a thing has less to do with good-or-bad at it, and more to do with whether it feels reachable. I keep noticing this in my kid, and honestly in myself too.

Half of my kid's "I won't" is roof-hoop mode

My four-year-old has a short list of things he's decided he just doesn't do.

• Won't fold the origami crane ("too hard," he says)
• Won't do the buttons — hands those to me
• Won't go near the monkey bars. Ever.

And the thing is, he says "I can't," but he's not saying it after trying. He decided it was impossible up front and never picked up the ball at all.

That's the roof hoop. In his head the whole thing is sitting up on a roof somewhere, and its too far to bother. He won't even get into a shooting stance.

Meanwhile he'll fold paper airplanes forty times in a row, because that rim looks like it's at a normal height. Throw, it lands, sometimes it actually flies. So he keeps throwing.

I put my own hoops on the roof all the time

Figured this was a little-kid thing. It's not — I do it constantly.

• "Get back into a language" (rim is somewhere over the Atlantic)
• "Cook something different every night" (rim is up on the roof of the house)

I say I'll do it. But I never get into the stance, never take the first actual shot. When the rim's too far out, you don't even raise your arms. That's where I am with a few things, if I'm honest about it.

Lowering the rim is the actual job — mine and theirs

When I want to nudge my kid toward something, cheering "just try it!" mostly does nothing. The rim's on the roof in his head. Encouragement doesn't move the rim.

What works is lowering it a foot.

• Crane's too hard? We do just the first triangle fold, together.
• Buttons too hard? He does the last one. Just the last one.
• Monkey bars? We just hang off them for a second. That's it.

"Aim high" is weirdly counterproductive a lot of the time. Set the rim lower and people actually pick up the ball. I've still got a few of my own hoops stuck up on the roof, and yeah — slowly walking those back down too.