By Aaron Weaver
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — For author and parenting expert Michelle Icard, growth begins on what she calls “the uncomfortable path.”
Icard led “A Leadership Conversation with Michelle Icard” Wednesday morning as part of the 2026 CBF General Assembly in Jacksonville, helping pastors and church leaders think about parenting, youth ministry, congregational leadership, failure and resilience.
Icard, whose books include 8 Setbacks That Can Make a Child a Success, Fourteen Talks by Age Fourteen and Middle School Makeover, invited participants to consider how lessons from parenting and adolescent development might help churches create healthier spaces for risk, failure and growth.
“Where I want people’s kids to be is on the uncomfortable path,” Icard said. “I want you to have to figure out and your child to have to figure out what to do when their friend doesn’t want to be friends with them anymore.”
Icard said the same principle applies beyond parenting.
“I think that this is probably also true for any community that you work with,” she said. “You want to feel some discomfort. First of all, we all know that discomfort is what comes with growth.”
Drawing on research about learned helplessness, Icard said young people need opportunities to discover that they can act in difficult situations.
“So much of my work is really focused on how do I help the caring adults in kids’ lives show them ways to feel empowered,” she said, “ways to feel like they have some control over what’s happening around them, ways to experience discomfort because that’s important and then learn if I do one small thing I might feel better.”
That requires adults to resist the impulse to fix every problem.
“We have to give people a lot of little experiences where they feel pain and we don’t fix it for them,” Icard said, “so that they can figure out how to cope and how to build that resilience.”
She called that posture “greenhouse parenting.”
“When I talk to parents about greenhouse parenting, what I say is it is not your job to make life hard for your kids,” Icard said. “All you have to do is have a very comforting, nourishing, loving environment at home and then open the door and let your kids go out into the world where they will make dumb choices and they will feel regret and they will experience pain.”
The world, she said, already provides “so many opportunities for discomfort.” The role of adults is to let young people leave the greenhouse, encounter those experiences and return to process what happened.
Icard said adults often misunderstand rites of passage as chronological milestones rather than experiences that include testing, failure, learning and return.
“A real rite of passage includes failure,” Icard said.
Real growth, she explained, comes as young people separate from a group, face a challenge, make mistakes, learn from them and are welcomed back into community.
“We have to get okay with the idea that growth includes failure,” she said.
The conversation later turned to risk-taking. Icard said adolescents are driven toward risk as part of becoming independent, and adults who refuse to allow healthy risks may push young people toward more hidden and unsafe choices.
“If kids are not given the opportunity to take risk, they find other ways to take it,” Icard said. “If we don’t let them take risk out loud in the open, they are pushed underground and to more unsafe places.”
For Icard, risk is not one-size-fits-all. It depends on the person, the context and what actually stretches someone.
“We cannot expect kids or adults to nevertake a risk or to only take risk that feels good to us,” she said. “A risk isn’t a risk unless it creates a certain amount of queasiness in your stomach.”
That need for growth is not limited to teenagers, Icard said. Adults also need opportunities to stretch, risk and rediscover who they are becoming.
“The point is we have to create opportunities for people to take risk,” she said. “There is a deep need and desire to feel growth, and that comes through taking risk.”
Participants reflected on the usefulness of hearing from a voice outside congregational ministry. One wrote, “I enjoyed the fact that she wasn’t directly out of the church and brought a perspective that was still applicable.”
Another participant named a concrete next step: “I’m planning a talk with our deacon leadership team about how we embrace risk. As well as a parent meeting and possible book study.”
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