The field where the name gets used · for the parent in the middle of it
Good Protocols, SPC · Paul Tan · revised September 2026
And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof.
Zechariah 8:5
I. The Field
I coached rec baseball in the Rainier Valley for a lot of years. South Seattle and Skyway, one of the most diverse corners of the country, kids from every kind of family on every team. The longer I coached, the more I understood that the hardest questions on a ball field are almost never about baseball.
The first essay in this series sits with a man whose own name had been taken from him, so that when he was asked who he was, a crowd of voices answered in his place. I have thought about that story for years, and I can tell you where I see it now. I see it at the registration table in April. A child arrives to sign up for a season of baseball, and before the kid has said a word, the voices have started answering. The form answers with its boxes. The file answers with its history. The category answers with its verdict, and by the time the actual child is standing in front of an actual coach, half the adults in the county believe they already know everything about a kid whose name they have never heard. A coach’s first job, the one I would put before every drill in the book, is the name. Learn it, use it, and let the child discover that on this field, at least, the name gets asked and the kid gets to answer.
If you are the parent of a child who does not fit the box, the kid who is different in a way the grown-ups have opinions about, who is louder or quieter or slower or stranger than the form expected, who carries a diagnosis or a reputation or simply a long question about who they are, then this essay is for you, and I want to say some things to you directly, because most of what gets said about your family is said past you, at volume, by people who have never met your child. You have probably been judged from both directions by now. Judged for pushing, judged for holding back, judged for the way you answered a question at a barbecue. You are tired in a way other parents are not tired.
So before anything else, let me say the thing that should be said first and almost never is. Your love for your child is not the problem. It has never been the problem. You are doing the hardest kind of parenting there is, the kind with no map, in public, with strangers grading your work. Whatever else is true, your child is lucky to have a parent still standing in the room, still asking how to love them well. A lot of kids do not have that. Yours does.
What I have to offer is not a position paper. It is a folding chair next to mine at the field, and thirty years of watching kids grow, and a few things I believe about how children find their way.
II. A Girl Who Loved Baseball
Years ago I coached a girl who loved baseball, the hardball kind, and she was good, an all-star, earning her spot against the boys on the merits. Then high school came and she switched to softball, not because her skill ran out but because the door to baseball quietly closed on her, the way it tends to for girls. She was good enough to play softball at the University of Washington. And as an adult, finally free to choose, she went back to baseball, the love she never lost, and she plays it still while coaching softball on the side. She holds both.
I tell you about her because she is what it looks like when a kid’s real self outlasts everyone’s assumptions about her. The world had a box ready. She did not fit it. And the people who loved her well were not the ones who resolved her quickly, in either direction. They were the ones who protected the room she needed to keep being herself while the world caught up. Her way was long. It ran through high school and college and into her thirties, and it is still unfolding. That is what a child’s way usually looks like. Long.
Your child’s way will be long too. That is not a sorrow. That is the good news, and most of this essay is about why.
III. Playing and Winning Are Two Goods
Let me be plain about the first thing, because you have probably had to fight for it. Your child gets to play.
Rec sports exist so that every kid who signs up gets a uniform, a team, a coach who learns their name, and a season of belonging. That is the whole point of them. Robert Putnam spent a career documenting what happens when those ordinary belongings get rationed, when the teams and the caring adults and the thick web of a childhood migrate to the families who can pay, and the kids with the least are left the most alone. The rec league is one of the last places in this country where a kid from any home, any body, any story, gets a season of belonging for the price of showing up. When I coached, my job on day one was not to solve anything about any child. My job was to learn their name, find them a position, and make sure that by June they knew they were one of us.
A child in the middle of a hard question about who they are needs that more, not less. The team, the reps, the dumb jokes in the dugout, the snow cones after, the ordinary dignity of being expected at practice. Whatever your child is working out, they should get to work it out while playing left field, not exiled from the field until the question is answered. Playing is not a reward for having yourself figured out. No kid on any roster I ever coached had themselves figured out. That is what childhood is for.
There is a separate world of elite competition, varsity cuts, records, scholarships, where the questions get harder and the rules narrower, and that world has its own conversations to have. But it is not the world your nine year old lives in, or your twelve year old on the neighborhood team. Do not let anyone make your child carry an argument that was built for the medal stand. In the world of playing, the door should be wide, and your kid belongs inside it.
IV. The Dugout, Honestly
You know better than anyone that the daily fear is not the roster. It is the dugout, the bench, the party list, the group chat, the places where children sort each other and can be cruel about it.
I will be honest with you the way I would want someone to be honest with me. There are other children in that dugout too, and their unease with your child is not always meanness. A ten year old who does not know what to do with a teammate who is different is not your enemy, and your child, who dreads being stared at or left out, is not his. Two uncertain kids are not a war. They are two kids who both need the adults to be adults. Becky Kennedy gave parents the phrase I lean on here, that two things are true, and a household or a team that can say both truths out loud has already done most of the work.
The answer, almost everywhere I have seen it work, is more dignity for everyone. Every kid bats. Every kid gets an inning in the field. The coach learns every name in the first week and uses it in front of the others. The kid who needs a minute alone in the car before practice gets the minute, and no one is marked by needing it. None of that takes a side. It just lets every child on the roster, including yours, be one of the team. When you advocate at your school or your league, this is the ask that wins, because it protects your child without requiring anyone else’s child to lose. The essay just before this one described a room that held, on a Friday evening, young people the world argues about, and what held it was not a position, because no position could. It was a kindness that did not need anyone at the table to lose. The dugout is the same question at a smaller scale, and it has the same answer. You do not need the league to settle every argument grown-ups are having about children like yours. You need your kid to walk into practice without dread. That is achievable, and you are allowed to insist on it.
V. The Long Way, and the Clock
Now the tender part. I will hold it gently, because I know the weight you carry here.
You have likely been told there is a clock. That the loving move is the fast move. That the label has to be settled now, the track chosen now, the specialization begun now or the door closes, the verdict on what kind of child this is delivered while there is still time to act on it. Maybe you have been told something crueler, that waiting is the same as not caring. I cannot imagine a heavier thing to lay on a parent, and I am sorry if it has been laid on you.
Here is what thirty years around growing kids lets me say with a whole heart. Your child’s story is long. The self they are becoming is being built slowly, the way all selves are, through seasons and friendships and failures and growth spurts, and no version of your child at nine or twelve or thirteen is the finished one, because no version of any child at that age is. This is not a statement about your kid in particular. It is a statement about every kid, the same one I would make about my own.
So when it comes to the things that are hard to undo, the name that follows a child through every file, the door that closes at ten so that one door can be forced open, the verdict spoken in front of the child about who they are and are not, taking time is not a betrayal of your child. Time is not the enemy of your child’s true self. If who they are is deep and real, it will still be deep and real at sixteen, at eighteen, at twenty, and it will be held then by a person far more able to carry a permanent decision than any twelve year old, however brave, could be. We wait on driving and voting and contracts not out of disrespect for the young but out of respect for what growing brains have not finished building. Nothing about your child is diminished by giving it room to ripen before anything permanent is done. Waiting is love taking its time.
And about the fear itself, please hear this. Your child’s pain, if they are in pain, is real and deserves real, unhurried help from people who see the whole of them, their sadness and their anxieties and their friendships and their gifts, not just the one question everyone keeps asking. A parent who slows down and stays close is not gambling with their child. Staying close is the thing that protects kids. The research on what keeps struggling young people safe points again and again to the same unglamorous treasure, a warm, connected relationship with a parent who does not leave the room. You are already doing the protective thing. It is you.
There is an old Hebrew word underneath this whole series, and the essay before this one noticed that English never found a single word for it, so our translations split it in two, rendering it mercy in one verse and kindness in the next. But the old word has a third face the English loses entirely, and it is the one this essay sits with. Hesed is not only the mercy that looks back and the kindness that makes room. It is the love that stays. It is loyalty across seasons, the kind sworn in covenants precisely because it would have to hold through years nobody could foresee. Mercy is the door, and kindness is the room, and the staying is what makes the room safe enough to grow up in. For a child, the staying has a particular look. It looks like a parent still there in the fourth season, still bringing the folding chairs, still unhurried, and it looks like the child, under that long roof, being free to do the one thing children were built to do with time, which is play.
VI. Reading the Grain
I learned woodworking before I learned coaching, and the two taught me the same lesson. James Krenov, the cabinetmaker whose books formed a generation of us at the bench, worked without dimensioned drawings, composing directly in the wood, because he held that the maker’s first task is to understand the nature of the material before acting on it. The material tells you, if you are patient enough to listen. The first essay in this series kept George Nakashima’s free edge, the tree’s own line honored rather than milled square. Krenov’s grain is the same lesson from the same bench. You do not force a plank into a shape it will not hold, and you do not glance at rough lumber and declare you already know what is in it.
Your child has a grain. It is real, it is theirs, and it is still revealing itself, the way it does in every child. Your work is not to carve the final shape this year, and it is not to sand away what you see. Your work is the room. Warm enough that your child never has to perform for your love, in any direction. Slow enough that nothing permanent outruns their growing. Safe enough that they can change their mind, and change it again, without shame, because changing is what children are supposed to do. A home where a kid is free to explore is also a home where a kid is free to circle back, and both freedoms are the same freedom.
Hold who they are today as real, hold their heart as precious, hold their becoming as unfinished, and refuse every voice, from any side, that demands you trade one of those for another. The people who love your child well will be recognizable by one mark. They will not be in a hurry.
VII. The Streets Full of Children
The verse at the head of this essay comes from a strange and beautiful place. Zechariah was writing to a people just back from exile, standing in the rubble of a city that had been taken from them, and he gave them a picture of what the healed city would look like when the restoration was complete. He did not picture a fortress. He did not picture a victory parade, or a city of people who had finally gotten all their answers right. He pictured old men and old women sitting in the streets, and the streets full of boys and girls playing. That is the whole vision. The generations at rest, outdoors, together, and the children at play, because a city where the children can play in the streets is a city where the fighting has actually stopped.
I once heard a coach screaming at a kid who was goofing around between bases, “this is not a game, son, this is not a game.” It was, of course, a game. That is what the man forgot, and it is what the whole country keeps forgetting about our kids. Your child was not born to be a case, or a cause, or an example of something. They were born to be a kid, with a glove that smells like an old car and a bike with a clicking wheel and a team that groans when practice gets rained out. The loudest voices around your child, on every side, need your child to stand for something. Your child needs to be nine. Or twelve, or fifteen. They need seasons, and belonging, and one or two grown people who are not going anywhere.
The first essay in this series ended with a man sent home to tell his own story, and the second described the room strong enough to hear it without a verdict. This one only adds the last piece, the piece Zechariah saw. The door opens, the room holds, and then, if the mercy and the kindness have done their work, the room lets out onto a street where the children are playing, and the playing is not a break from the healing. The playing is what the healing was for.
Be the steady one. Wide doors for playing. Dignity in every dugout. Patience around everything that is hard to undo. Who they are today held as real and their heart held as precious, neither sacrificed to the other, and the long way honored, because the long way is the only way any of us ever became ourselves.
The field is still the safest place in the world for a child to be who they are while they are figuring out who they are. Get them signed up. Learn the coach’s name. Bring the folding chairs. Your kid is here now, this season, and so are you, and that is the whole game.
VIII. In One Breath
A parent in the middle of it has been judged from both directions, and the first true thing is that their love was never the problem. A girl who loved baseball needed a long way and people who would not resolve her quickly, and every child’s way is long, which is the good news. Playing and winning are two different goods, and in the world of playing the door should be wide, because a child works out who they are while playing left field, not in exile from the field. The dugout holds two uncertain kids and not a war, and the answer is dignity for everyone, because every kid batting takes no side. Around everything that is hard to undo, time is not the enemy of a child’s true self, and the parent who stays close is already doing the protective thing. The old word beneath this series carries a third face past mercy and past kindness, the love that stays, and under that long roof a child is free to play, which is what children were built to do with time. Read the grain, keep the free edge, refuse every hurry, and remember what the healed city looks like in the oldest picture we have of one: the generations at rest, and the streets full of boys and girls playing.
Good Protocols, SPC · Letting Kids Play · the third essay of Culture Care in Hard Places, following My Name Is Not Legion, which sits with mercy, and The Kindness That Is Strong Enough, which sits with kindness; this one sits with play · thinking alongside Robert Putnam on the belongings a community owes its children, Becky Kennedy on two things being true, James Krenov on reading the grain, and the prophet Zechariah on the healed city · revised September 2026