Follow along in the captions for the full story 👉

Follow along in the captions for the full story 👉

#momlife #artistmindset #raisingkids #trolls #tattoolife

Earlier that night, I was downstairs struggling with a new content format, stuck in my own head about getting it right, when I heard her upstairs. 👉

She's six.

She'd wanted to find a realistic drawing tutorial on her own, so she asked me to write down the words 'drawing videos' and 'drawing tutorials' so she could search for it herself on her YouTube Kids account.

That's already a lot of effort before she even sat down to create anything. Any artist knows that feeling, the prep alone can derail you before you've made a single mark. 👉

She got stressed, couldn't find what she wanted fast enough, and needed it done that night to show at school the next day.

I recognized that pressure instantly. Not just from tonight. From years of it.

The has-to-be-right, has-to-be-now, black and white thinking I've carried since I was a kid myself, the same thing I was fighting downstairs with this new format. 👉

By the time I got upstairs she was in tears.

I sat down and hugged her.

She started her own breathing exercise before I even said anything.

We just breathed together. I needed that as much as she did. 👉

We found a realistic dog portrait, a step up from the tutorials she'd drawn before, the kind of natural next challenge that comes with improving.

She started on her own.

I stepped out for a few minutes, came back, and she was close to melting down again, this time over her tablet not standing right and pressing too hard with her pencil. 👉

I sat next to her, asked if I could show her how to hold her pencil and how to lightly sketch.

The stress didn't disappear, but it came down.

We got through the whole tutorial together.

Every time a line didn't come out the way she wanted, I reminded her that hers can be different and still be good. 👉

And then she said it herself.

"This is practice and how we get better."

Something her dad and I have been teaching her for a while now, and it finally came back out of her own mouth, unprompted.

"Yes, baby. This is how we get better. For mommy too." 👉

When the drawing was done, she asked if she could skip