Apples are Easier

September 17, 2026

Honeycrisp apples are ripening now throughout the Northeast. I love me a good Honeycrisp; they’re the overachiever of apples: crisp, sweet, and notoriously difficult to grow. Granny Smiths, on the other hand, won't be ready until next month. Plant the two trees side by side, give them the same sun and rain and attention, and you still wouldn’t expect them to ripen together.

In one sense, children are like that. We know perfectly well that they develop at different rates, even within the same family. One child talks early, another reads early, another takes longer to find confidence or friends or the thing that makes them light up. But here’s where the apple comparison falls apart: Apples are predictable. Even with variations in summer rain and temperature, growers know exactly when Honeycrisps and Granny Smiths will ripen. Parents have no such luxury.

Development does have a sequence; skills build on other skills, and sometimes a delay really does deserve attention. But there is no neat timetable for how any given child will blossom. Your firstborn will teach you remarkably little about the second. One may crawl forever and then suddenly walk; another may struggle with reading and later devour books. We want the chart. We want reassurance that the next thing is coming, preferably soon enough that we can stop wondering whether we should be worrying.

Mostly, though, what we get is a trajectory: a direction, a next step, another season of watching and helping and paying attention. Good parenting means noticing when support is needed without mistaking “not yet” for “never,” or someone else’s pace for the standard. Apples are easier: They come with harvest dates. Kids follow their own invisible calendars.

—Debra Ross, publisher

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