What I Can Control.

A Stoic's Unexpected Gift to Exhausted Parents

A morning that holds everything at once. The light doesn't ask what you can handle.

Sunday morning. I woke up to a text from my daughter Stella, sent at 12:18 in the morning while I slept.

She was freaking out. Her boyfriend had gotten too drunk (he's pledging a fraternity at their university, which says it all), raised his voice at her when she tried to suggest he drink water, and she had misplaced her David Yurman bracelet. At the end of her message, she wrote the thing that went straight to my heart: I just miss my mom.

I didn't see it until 6:31am. By then, she had been awake and alone with it for hours.

I sent her a text back — Oh Stella, I'm sorry I missed your text. I'll be awake all day and am here for you 🌺💕 — and then I sat with the particular helplessness of being a parent who cannot reach through a phone screen.

Later that morning, scrolling through my Facebook feed, I saw a report from a local news outlet: a teen brawl at a shopping center in Reston, one hospitalized, police using drones and a helicopter. My son Sam had been out with his friends the night before — Reston, Annandale, Vienna, Falls Church, all over Northern Virginia. I texted him. Did you see this? Were you near there?

He said no, looked at his phone, and said nothing more about it.

Then my partner Phil sent me a link about three high school seniors killed in a crash in Fredericksburg. Speed was a factor. Not alcohol. Just speed, and youth, and an ordinary night that turned into something no family recovers from. Sam gets his full license in two weeks.

I said "speed kills" to him. Some other things about responsibility and consequences. I could feel it going in one ear and out the other.

It was a lot for a Sunday morning.

And into all of that walked Epictetus — a philosopher born into slavery in the Roman Empire around 50 AD, a man who had control over almost nothing in his life — with something I needed to hear.

The Man With Nothing Left But His Mind

The Pantheon in Rome — built in the world where Epictetus lived, thought, and endured.

Epictetus couldn't choose his circumstances. He was owned. He had no freedom of movement, no legal standing, no power over most of what happened to him each day.

And from that position — one of the most constrained positions a human being can occupy — he built a philosophy that has endured for two thousand years. It begins with a single, deceptively simple observation:

"Some things are in our control. Others are not." — Epictetus, Enchiridion

That's the whole foundation. Not try harder. Not want less. Not be better. Just: know the difference between what is yours to work with and what isn't.

The Stoics called this the dichotomy of control. And I am not a Stoic philosopher. I am a speech-language pathologist and parent coach with five children, a blended family, a glass-walled office where the sun rises and sets while I work, and a deeply imperfect track record of living this principle in real time. But I keep coming back to it. Especially on Sundays like that one.

The Parenting Illusion

Here is the honest truth I have learned across thirty years of working with young children and families, and across raising five of my own:

We do not control our children.

I know. Take a breath.

A child arrives in this world with their own internal landscape. Their own hunger and fullness. Their own fatigue, their own nervous system, their own way of taking in the world and making meaning of it. Their own feelings. Their own timing.

We can guide, shape, model, nurture, respond, repair, and try again. We can say "speed kills" at the kitchen table. We can text back at 6:31 in the morning. We can be awake all day and here for you. But we cannot reach in and rearrange another person's interior life by force of will — not even when that person is our child and we love them more than we can say.

And yet. How much of our parenting energy goes toward trying to control precisely that? The behavior that shouldn't be happening. The child who isn't listening. The teenager who tunes out our very reasonable concerns about mortality and driving and consequences. The college student making choices we can see more clearly than they can.

What Epictetus understood — and what parenting keeps teaching us, whether we want the lesson or not — is that the suffering we create for ourselves is almost always located in the gap between what we expect to control and what we actually can.

The Brain Science Epictetus Didn't Have (But Kind of Knew Anyway)

Here's something Epictetus couldn't have known but would not have been surprised by: the part of the human brain responsible for step-by-step reasoning, weighing consequences, and thinking before acting — the prefrontal cortex — isn't fully developed until around age 25.

I used to say to my son Michael when he was a teenager: Think before you act. I say it to Sam now. And I feel, every single time, like I am giving instructions to a piece of software that hasn't been fully installed yet. The hardware isn't there. It's not that he doesn't care. It's that the architecture is still under construction.

This is partly why I find myself fascinated by artificial intelligence right now — building LUMA, my AI parenting assistant, has given me a strange new window into this. I can write step-by-step reasoning directly into an AI's instructions. I can define its boundaries, its identity, its values, its rules. I can say think through this step by step before writing your final response, and it will do exactly that, every single time, without exception.

A sixteen-year-old will look at you with supreme patience and explain why your concern is statistically overblown.

The irony is not lost on me.

But here is the other side of that coin — the side that arrived on my screen Sunday night, just when I needed it.

The Shot

0.4 seconds. 35 feet. No time to think. That's also the adolescent brain.

Down 19 points in the second half. UConn versus Duke, Elite Eight, 2026. The top-seeded Blue Devils had been dominating. With 0.4 seconds left and the game on the line, the ball found its way to Braylon Mullins — a freshman — who caught it from 35 feet behind the arc and fired.

It went in.

UConn 73, Duke 72. Final Four.

The reactions on the faces of the coaches, the players, the fans — sheer, uncontained joy. The kind you only get when something impossible just happened.

And I thought: Braylon Mullins did not think through that shot step by step. He couldn't. There was no time. There was no prefrontal cortex committee meeting about probability and risk and consequence. There was just the ball, the clock, the basket, and a body that had practiced enough times to act without deliberating.

The adolescent brain is not only a liability. It is also capable of breathtaking, unself-conscious courage. The fearlessness, the living fully in the present moment, the willingness to take the shot without catastrophizing — those are features, not only bugs.

Epictetus might have recognized something admirable in that. The Stoics valued presence. Acting without being paralyzed by outcomes you cannot control.

The wisdom — the part still being built in Sam and Stella and every young person we love — is in learning which moments call for which. When to fire without hesitation and when to pull back and think. That's the developmental work of the next decade. It's not finished yet. And our job, in the meantime, is not to do their growing for them. It's to be steady enough that they have something to come back to.

Circumstances Reveal

The Epictetus quote I've been sitting with longest is this one:

"Circumstances don't make the man, they only reveal him to himself." — Epictetus

I've been turning the parenting version of this over for weeks.

Circumstances don't make the parent. They reveal the parent to themselves.

A child's meltdown doesn't make you impatient. It reveals whether patience is something you've built yet, or something you're still building.

A teenager who tunes you out doesn't make you ineffective. It reveals where your edges are. And edges, if you're willing to look at them honestly, are exactly where growth begins.

A midnight text you slept through doesn't make you a bad mother. It reveals that you are human, that you sleep, and that what you do next — I'm here, I'm awake, I'm sorry I missed you — matters more than the gap.

I have been revealed, many times, in ways I wasn't proud of. A raised voice when I meant to stay calm. A closed-off moment when I meant to stay open. A flicker of wishing the child in front of me would just be easier, when the whole point is that they aren't supposed to be easier. They're supposed to be themselves.

Epictetus didn't say circumstances are fine, actually. He didn't say they don't hurt. He said they don't define you. What they do is show you where you are. And that honest accounting — the willingness to look at the gap between who you're being and who you want to be — is where all the real work happens.

That's what I mean when I say wonder before you worry. Not that the worry isn't real. It's that curiosity — about yourself, about your child, about what this moment is actually asking of you — is a more useful place to begin.

What Is Actually Yours

So if we can't control the child, what can we control?

Epictetus was clear: our judgments, our intentions, our responses. Our inner work. What we bring to the moment.

In parenting terms: we can control how we show up.

Not perfectly. Not always. Not without practice and failure and a lot of repair. (Ed Tronick's research tells us that even the most attuned parents are only truly in sync with their children about 30% of the time. The rest of the time, we repair. We come back. We try again.)

And this takes practice. Real practice. The kind you don't get right the first time.

You wouldn't pick up a new sport and expect to excel immediately. Each child, in a real sense, is an entirely new sport — different nervous system, different temperament, different communication style, different everything. The tools that worked beautifully with one may not translate at all to the next.

What you can do is keep showing up. Keep being available. Keep sending the 6:31am text. Keep saying "speed kills" even when it doesn't land, because one day it might, and either way your child knows you said it.

Stella called me after she read my text. We talked. I reminded her that reasoning with a drunk college student isn't going to get you very far — the step-by-step reasoning function is temporarily offline. She chuckled a bit. She was okay.

Sam is home. He's fine. In two weeks he'll have his full license and he and his friends will drive all over Northern Virginia and I will not be able to control a single mile of it.

What I can control is who I am in the moments before and after. Whether I stay curious instead of catastrophizing. Whether I stay connected when the conversation is hard. Whether I sit in my glass-walled office watching the sunrise and choose, again, to love what I cannot hold.

The child is not the problem to solve. The child is a separate human being to know.

This Week's Invitation

One moment. That's all.

This week, when something hard happens — a child who tunes you out, a behavior that frightens you, a text you wake up to in the morning — pause long enough to ask:

What part of this is actually mine to work with?

Not to abandon the moment. Not to stop parenting. But to locate yourself within it. To find what is genuinely yours: your breath, your tone, your choice about what comes next.

Epictetus wrote his philosophy from the only place he had — his own interior life. That's the place none of us can lose, and none of us can give away, unless we do it by accident in the heat of a hard parenting moment.

The good news is that it's always there. And every day — every single ordinary, sometimes terrifying, sometimes transcendent day of raising a human being — offers a new chance to practice finding it.

Even on Sundays that start with too much.

Showing up is what's yours. It always has been.

About the Author

Cindi Z. Stevens Copeland is a speech-language pathologist with more than 30 years of experience, 10 of which have been in early intervention, and the founder of Right Track Parenting. She is the creator of the Investigative Parenting methodology — Wonder Before You Worry, Imagine Before You Interpret, Create Before You Catastrophize — and a certified parent coach with graduate study in Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Northern Virginia and writes weekly about the research, philosophy, and real-life moments that shape how we raise humans.

© 2026 Cynthia Z. Stevens Copeland. All rights reserved.