TODD THOMPSON
Special to Hutch Post
I stood at the edge of a two-story dock, frozen.
An hour earlier, we had left our son at a birthday party on a two-story dock overlooking the lake. While he stayed to have fun, my wife, daughter, and I joined with some friends - who also had a son at the party - on the other side of the lake.
As we arrived, I witnessed one of my friends hurl himself into the water. This dock was two stories high as well. As he surfaced, he turned toward me and shouted, “Your turn!”
I barreled up the stairs like I’d done it a thousand times—no big deal, I thought, until I reached the edge.
I’ve climbed mountains, parachuted from planes, even swum with sharks—but today, my legs trembled, my muscles froze, and my heart rate rose. I couldn’t move.
There was no danger—no jagged rocks, no strong current, no real reason not to jump.
And yet, you’d think I was standing on the edge of a skyscraper, being asked to leap without a parachute.
The night before, my young son had been overtired. My wife and I asked him to go upstairs and brush his teeth. He refused.
Not just a firm “no”—a full-blown fit. My usually sweet child transformed from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. Tantrums and tears, he swore burglars might get him because it was dark.
We knew this wasn’t rational. He’d gone up by himself many times before. But no amount of logic calmed him. For ten minutes, he and I argued—me reasoning, him resisting, both of us escalating.
At the time, I was frustrated. He wasn’t listening. He wasn’t being logical.
But when standing on that dock, feet locked in place, I gained a deeper understanding of my son.
What I was experiencing wasn’t logic either—it was fear. Irrational, involuntary, and very real.
As I stood fighting between fact and fear, my friend and his six-year-old daughter blew past me, jumping in—twice!
The part of the brain that processes fear—the amygdala—doesn’t distinguish between real threats and imagined ones. It reacts the same way whether we’re running from a bear or peering off a perfectly safe platform into a calm lake. The fear feels just as real.
My son wasn’t being stubborn. The fear I felt now was the same fear he had faced the night before. His brain, like mine, was trying to protect him—even when there was nothing to be protected from.
So—I jumped.
As I emerged from the water, I felt exhilarated—not just from the jump, but from a deeper understanding of my son’s fear and what it takes to inspire courage.
Courage doesn’t mean being unafraid; it means choosing to move forward in spite of the fear. In that quiet realization, I gained a new appreciation for what my son had gone through the night before.
When we picked him up from the birthday party later that day, he was full of swagger.
“Dad! I jumped off the second-story dock five times! It was awesome!”
My daughter chimed in, “Daddy did too—but only once! You should’ve seen how scared he was!”
“We all get scared sometimes,” he grinned. “I might’ve been, too, if it was at night.”
He wasn’t wrong. We do all get scared. Age doesn’t insulate us from fear—it just gives us better words to hide behind. But fear isn’t something to defeat. It’s something to understand. And when it comes to parenting, that understanding might be the most important tool we have.
Because kids don’t need us to be fearless—they need us to show them how to move forward when fear shows up. They need calm more than control. Validation more than correction. Presence more than persuasion.
We all get scared. The key is not to stand paralyzed at the edge forever.
The key is to jump.
Todd Thompson is the Leavenworth County Attorney