1 - The Boy Who Couldn't See

Toye Oyelese

Hello and welcome to Navigating Uncertainty. I’m Dr. Toye Oyelese. If this is your first time joining, I’m glad you’re here—I always say, what I have to share isn’t research. It’s life. The stories and ideas I talk about, they come from raising my sons—Dejo and Dele—and years seeing families as a doctor. No fancy credentials in child psychology, just tried-and-sometimes-failed experience. I figured I’d start this first episode by telling you about the day I realized something crucial—not about parenting, but about myself. You see, I was seven years old… and I was blind, without knowing it. Sounds dramatic, right? But really, I was just a regular kid on the University of Ibadan campus, chasing a football with friends, catching snippets of television, doing well in school. Nobody thought anything was off—including me.

Toye Oyelese

Then my uncle visits from the UK. He takes me to a football match—big event for a little boy! But I’m squinting, trying to see the scoreboard, and he keeps asking, “Toye, what’s the score?” Every time, I guess, until finally, he’s frustrated. "The boy is blind," he tells my mother. Next day, I’m at the optician—a cousin, I remember it clearly. He sets a lens in front of my eyes, and suddenly, everything gets… sharp. I mean, uncomfortably sharp. Every leaf, every crease in a face jumped out at me. There’s a kind of terror in realizing the world was meant to look that way. My mum, bless her, sees the tears streaming down, and she starts crying too. “Can everyone see like this?” I asked her. That’s when it hit me—I felt freed and completely thrown off at the same time. Gaining clarity wasn’t just magical. It was overwhelming, and I see now that’s how breakthroughs actually feel for children. Not just with glasses, but when they crack reading, or finally get the rules in friendships, or see the natural consequences of actions. It’s a flood. The world gets both bigger and scarier.

Toye Oyelese

Where was I going with that… oh, yes. For days after getting glasses, I remember struggling to make sense of this new world. My brain couldn’t keep up with the detail. I think that’s what we sometimes get wrong as adults—we assume a breakthrough is always pure relief for kids. But it’s both: relief and confusion, liberation and a kind of loss. That’s the territory your child is always travelling.

Toye Oyelese

Now, let’s dig a little deeper into what happened after that big, blurry-to-clear day. I mean, getting glasses changed everything, but I didn’t suddenly lose the skills I’d developed to cope in the blur, right? Think about it—I’d functioned all those years half-blind. Along the way, I learned to read patterns and moods, to pay attention to the environment, make decisions on partial information. Nobody praised those adaptations—they didn’t even know they existed. But looking back, they made me resourceful in ways that seeing kids maybe never needed to be. Your child is—right now—building things in the blur. Whether it’s figuring out how to be a friend, or struggling with reading, or getting through social messiness at school—there’s a whole world of adaptations happening that you can’t see yet.

Toye Oyelese

And here’s the thing: a breakthrough doesn’t erase what they learned in the struggle. It layers clarity on top of hard-earned intuition. That’s why, as parents, we sometimes have to step back. I know it’s hard! Every cell in you wants to step in, to smooth the way. But some skills—balance, for example, or frustration tolerance, or problem-solving—those can only grow through being wobbly, through real frustration, through confronting small failures. You can’t teach a child to balance by explaining it, just like you can’t build muscle by watching someone else exercise.

Toye Oyelese

I sometimes get asked in my clinic—when do you intervene? When do you step back? Honestly, I wish there was a formula. But most of the time, I’ve found it’s about being present—letting them wrestle with the blur, showing up, but not swooping in every time they falter. It’s so tempting to take over the homework, fix the playground disputes, solve the sibling arguments…but if you always rescue them, they lose out on that process of messy navigation. I might be wrong about this, but I think the best gift is sometimes letting them find their own path in the fog, so to speak. That’s where resilience begins.

Toye Oyelese

Now, you might be thinking, “Okay, but how do you know when to help and when to let go?” Well, let’s bring Erik Erikson into the conversation. Years after my childhood blur, when I was slogging through medical school—a tongue-twister curriculum if there ever was one!—I stumbled across Erikson’s psychosocial stages. He describes these recurring challenges, or “crises,” every child faces. Each stage: you resolve it, you gain a kind of superpower—hope, will, purpose, competence. Fail to resolve it, and you move forward, sure, but without that new strength. Basically, childhood development is less like a ladder and more like a video game with levels and bosses. Each challenge is both a test and an opportunity. Realizing this changed how I parented my own boys.

Toye Oyelese

Here’s where my frameworks come in—Primary Responsibility, the Process Method, the Rules Framework. These aren’t prescriptive checklists—trust me, real life refuses to be scripted! They’re thinking tools that I developed over decades, partly from Erikson, but mostly by living through a thousand situations with my kids. My aim isn’t to hand you step-by-step instructions. I mean, how could I? Your family, your child, your context—none of that is mine. What I can give is a clear way of thinking: Is this my job, or my child’s? Am I helping, or am I enabling? Am I focusing on outcomes I can’t control, or am I doing the work I can actually influence?

Toye Oyelese

When I raised Dejo and Dele—and they’re both engineers now, doing things I can't even pretend to understand—I found again and again that it wasn’t about always getting it right. It was about showing up with consistency. Sometimes I stepped in too much and had to pull back. Other days, I watched them struggle and wanted to jump in, but held still. Process over perfection. Consistency over control. That’s how you build capability, in children and in yourself as a parent.

Toye Oyelese

Let me be clear—this podcast won’t promise perfect outcomes or scripts for every scenario. What I hope to offer are frameworks that give you clarity—on what’s yours to do, and what must be left to your child’s own efforts. Over the next episodes, you’ll hear practical ways to use these ideas—how to pick them up, mess them up, and try again. That’s how you—and your child—develop capability.

Toye Oyelese

So, if you take just one thing from today: Remember the boy who didn’t know he was blind. Your child might be stumbling through their own blur, building strengths you can’t even see yet. Be there with them—not to rescue, not to prescribe, but to witness and support. Next time, I’ll talk about what “game” your child is really playing, those developmental quests, and why you truly can’t do it for them—even if you want to. I’m Dr. Toye Oyelese, and thanks so much for listening.