I present to you Mike Strambler,  a psychologist and Associate Professor at the Yale School of Medicine and author of the Substack “As Is.”

As insightful as Mike is, his tween-age son is right there with him. When I met Mike at a party several months ago, we got to talking about kids, confidence and condescension, and he told me the story he now relates below, about his son’s final taekwondo tournament:

When I was around 10, my mom signed me up for karate classes at a spot in downtown Camden, NJ. It was called Iron Cobra, and the dojo was led by a tall, slim, tough-as-nails Black man named Thor (no lie). If you’ve seen the cult classic flick, The Last Dragon, think Sho’nuff, but without the perm (or whatever that was). Thor was also a cop who was a bit of a legendary mentor of other Black Camden cops.

During my first trial session, I cried before I even got to the tough stuff. It was embarrassing as hell and still stings as I write this. I kept returning, though, and eventually toughened up. I think that was my mom’s plan all along, and it was a good one. It built character and resilience in me.

It wasn’t the most practical form of self-defense, though. There were a lot of routines, called katas, that we had to learn, and I often wondered how I would use them in a fight. There was this one part of a kata called “cat stance,” where we would raise our hands like claws and bring them downward while breathing out and making a sound like a cat’s hiss.

When I had to put my karate skills to the test in my first real street fight, they lost out to Fat Tony and his regular hood tactics. I told myself that I would never lose a fight again, and I never did.

But the Iron Cobra sparring was no joke. I remember being a white belt and standing in line with other white belts at the beginning of a row of black belts, preparing to spar them. We’d fight one black belt for a minute or so and then move down the line to the next one. They didn’t go full tilt on us, but they weren’t soft either. They’d really take solid shots at us. This was part of belt promotions, too, along with demonstrating katas and breaking boards and bricks using various kicks and punches.

You really had to prove something to move up a belt. And you could fail or borderline pass, which was like being on probation and was signified by a white tape on your new belt. It happened once to my best friend Hassan and me, and it felt like a mark of shame—a scarlet letter. I couldn’t wait to get re-tested to get that tape removed.

Some things we did at Iron Cobra would get Thor canceled or reported to DCF today. One routine involved diving and rolling over students lined up side-by-side on their hands and knees. After everyone went, they’d add one more student to the line and repeat the diving. This would continue until there was no one left who was willing to go (we could drop out at any time). It was fun for me; I was athletic, and I liked challenging myself to see how far I could go, but I knew when I hit my limit. Some of the more uninhibited students would really push it, though, and there would regularly be some of them who would land on their heads and cry, sometimes to the jeers of others making the sound of a screeching car, “Scurrrch!”

Breaking a board at my first Iron Cobra belt promotion test. Thor is at the right edge with arms crossed. There is a stack of bricks in the background on the left.

To move to the fourth belt, you had to break a brick with your head; I mean one of those gray two-inch concrete paver bricks. This was the same brick I had to break with a heel kick to move to the third belt. Once, I watched a grown-ass man make several attempts at breaking that brick with his head. I don’t remember if he eventually broke it, but the image of him trying to do it is burned into my brain, even his features—dark-skinned, heavyweight, about 220lbs. My mom, who was there for my promotion to the third belt, was watching too. I could feel us thinking the same thought, “There’s no way in hell you’re doing that.” And so it was; I stopped at the third belt (Hassan did, too), and that was that.

When my son, at age 6, wanted to do taekwondo, I was excited. It brought back a lot of the Iron Cobra memories and felt like an experience we could bond around. I loved how persistent he was and how seriously he took it. Like me, he naturally has a serious and reserved demeanor, and it takes a while for him to open up to people. If he lets you get past that, though, you’ll find he’s hilarious, caring, and super deep. He’s always had an uncanny drive to master certain things he sets his mind to and will persist at trying well beyond the normal kid’s patience threshold. So, it wasn’t entirely surprising to me that he stuck with taekwondo, but I was proud nonetheless.

And like karate did for me, taekwondo developed toughness, discipline, and character in him. He was terrified at his first belt promotion, but with our help, he learned to work through the anxiety and eventually was able to mostly coast through the successive promotions (there were about 15 belts at this gym, so there were a lot of promotions). That really built his tolerance for performance anxiety, which transferred to other domains like school.

The physical demands were nowhere near what I endured, though. The wood they broke was about a third of the thickness of the ones I had to break, the sparring was a lot lighter, the exercises were far less demanding, the instructors were much gentler, and of course, there were no bricks in sight. I half-expected this, given the shift in the treatment of kids since my childhood to being much gentler. Still, I often found myself wishing he could at least get a little taste of Iron Cobra and the benefits I got from it.

As Sam began to get closer to the black belt, I noticed something. He began to get more timid about telling people about his progress of moving up the ranks and he would shrug off our declarations of how proud we were of him. When my wife and I asked why, he would say that it really wasn’t a big deal, despite two full years of steadfast dedication and hard work, even through the COVID pandemic. I initially attributed this to his shyness and his tendency to avoid attention. But eventually, it became clear.

Shortly after earning his black belt, he participated in a tournament where he sparred with another black belt kid. Since there wasn’t another kid his age and at his level, he had to go up against a second-degree black belt with considerably greater skill. The kid really got the best of Sam, and he lost by a sizeable margin.

It was hard to watch because I could see him lose confidence along the way despite my wife and I trying to pump him up. In the end, he felt emotionally defeated and embarrassed. My wife and I went to console him by telling him it was okay and that this opponent was an entire level above him. He should be proud of going against him, we said. But when his instructors told him how great of a job he did, he started to tear up. And for some reason—maybe because he had no one else available to fight—he was given a gold medal.

After that, Taekwondo was never the same again for Sam, and I had a sense of why. He eventually articulated that he was angry about being lied to. His instructors lied to him about how well he did, and the tournament organizers lied to him by giving him a gold medal. To him, it was obvious that he didn’t earn what he received, and he was insulted by others pretending that he had. He was furious when he told us this and said several times that he was going to throw his medal in the trash.

It was heartbreaking for me to see him go through this—even more than seeing him lose the match. But I was also impressed at his ability to put words to such complex feelings at the age of 10. He was sharing feelings of condescension, a feeling I know all too well.

It was a feeling that had been building for some time. He’s a very perceptive kid, and the entire time in taekwondo, he was observing all the signs of what he experienced as dishonesty. The unearned praise, the near impossibility of failing a promotion test regardless of performance, and the multiple tries kids were given to pass during promotion. He had been taking all that in and by the time he reached the black belt, it all crystalized. The tournament was just what put him over the edge.

All this stuff made him question his entire taekwondo experience. Did I really earn those belts and trophies? Was I really as good as I thought? How would I even know? How long have I been lied to? For a kid with a natural drive to master things, this led to profound disillusionment because he could no longer trust any benchmarks of success or mastery. How could he when the masters were withholding honest benchmarks?

Don’t get me wrong; the taekwondo experience wasn’t all bad, just like Iron Cobra wasn’t all good for me. As I said, Sam did get a lot out of it, including skill, fitness, anxiety management, and discipline. For some kids, this type of experience is an excellent choice. Like with anything, a parent needs to know what the right fit is for how their kid is built. For Sam, he had different expectations of what this would be.

In the end, Sam decided to end taekwondo. He’s fine—he moved on to tennis, basketball, and robotics—but he still has the distrust of adults to give him honest feedback. This was not entirely due to his time at taekwondo. Taekwondo was just one part of a larger everyone-gets-a-trophy culture he was picking up on. It was everywhere, and his perceptions of it were pretty damn accurate.

…Ultimately, the lesson Sam reinforced for me is that kids don’t just want to feel good—they also want and need to be good, to earn their accomplishments, to know where they truly stand. Sam’s feeling of distrust wasn’t just about disappointment; it was a statement about his dignity.

Kids deserve what Sam demands from me and others: adults who care enough to tell them the truth, even when it’s difficult. The magic of childhood doesn’t come from sheltering kids from reality—it comes from giving them the tools to navigate it with confidence. That begins with honesty. It’s not always the easiest path, but watching Sam grow into someone who values truth and seeks genuine mastery has convinced me it’s the right one.