Portland KidsOutAndAbout Newsletter
March 5, 2026

Local in-person events this weekend

FREE events this weekend

Local in-person events next weekend

2026 Summer Camp Preview

Local Preschools

It's CSA Sign Up Season

Big List of Family-Friendly Museums

Big List of Indoor Play Centers

Post your organization and events to our site (It's all FREE!)

Tue, Mar 17: Portland's 85th Annual St. Patrick's Day Celebration
Fri, Mar 20: 2026 Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival at Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm
Sat, Mar 21: BodyVox: Junior Artist Generator at Walters Cultural Art Center
Sat, Mar 21: TITANIC: The Artifact Exhibition at Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI)
Sat, Mar 21: The 2026 Chess A2Z Inaugural Open
Mon, Mar 23: Snow White at Portland'5 Centers for the Arts
Fri, Mar 27: Art Supply Swap! at Kindred Vancouver
Sat, Mar 28: Thriftapalooza Portland at The Portland Expo Center
Sat, Mar 28: NWCT presents Alice in Wonderland
Sat, Mar 28: Lee Farms Easter Egg Hunts 2026

Dear KidsOutAndAbout readers:

When I was a teenager, I had a teacher who became a mentor without ever knowing he was one. He was aware I’d been going through some difficult times, and was glad to hear I was almost on the other side. “Some people aren't lucky enough to have dealt with hard things when they're young,” he told me. Then he added the phrase that has echoed in my head for decades: “Remember the rocks.”

Life, he explained, was always going to toss boulders into my path. The trick was to recognize, early, that even if it was painful or scary, I was capable of getting around, or over, or through them. Remembering how I’d managed would help me trust myself more when the next, bigger ones appeared.

As a parent, I think about that often, about how the only way to become someone who does hard things is… to do hard things.

It’s tempting to rush in and smooth every unpleasant obstacle our kids encounter. When we email the teacher, mend the friendship, rescue the forgotten homework, eliminate every discomfort, we may feel helpful in the moment, but in fact we’re quietly removing the practice stones they need. Resilience doesn’t come from being told “You’re strong”; it comes from evidence that only they can gather, from working through manageable challenges and thinking, That was hard. And I handled it. We don’t need to manufacture their challenges—being a kid is difficult enough. And we don’t abandon them to do it all on their own, either. We just learn to pause, to weigh advice against intervention, and to let them see what they can manage.

The goal is that later in life, when something truly difficult lands in our children's path, they won’t just hope they can manage it, they’ll know. Now, many years later, when I encounter something daunting, I think back to my mentor and remember the rocks. "I do hard things," I tell myself. And it works.

—Debra Ross, publisher of KidsOutAndAbout.com, co-author of The Eclipse Effect: How to Seize Extraordinary Moments to Build Strong Communities

KidsOutAndAbout.com: Discover more. Do more. Connect more.

If you like my publisher's column, you can easily scroll through past columns in the "Notes from Deb" section of our site.