Optimizing Parenting: The O2X Guide to Leading Little Humans

By O2X Vice President of Government, Brendan Stickles

I spent the last year teaching my teenager to drive.

My friends and family found great joy in my lack of enthusiasm for this parental rite of passage. Before I devolved into my current era as a middle-aged dad, I was a fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy. I flew fifty combat missions, spent over three years at sea, and landed on an aircraft carrier more than five hundred times. I also spent six years as a flight instructor—teaching rookie aviators how to land jets on aircraft carriers at night.

My fellow suburban, lawn-mowing dads deduced that coaching parallel parking between garbage cans on our tree-lined street would be comparatively stress-free.

Well, those dads were fucking wrong.

For all my neighbors who have taught their child to drive, you should be commended for your bravery and heroism. Teaching a teenager to drive in Maryland is far more stressful than teaching a pilot to land on a carrier in the Middle East.

But my friends did get one thing right. At the risk of feeding my already overdeveloped pilot ego, I was once objectively good at teaching humans with not-yet-fully-developed brains to operate heavy machinery under stress. That was my thing.

In a previous life, I supervised thousands of carrier landings. Nobody on my watch ever died. I stood on the back of the aircraft carrier and talked terrified pilots through engine failures and cockpit fires. I vectored jets down through storms and heavy seas when the pilots couldn’t even see the ship. I once pulled a pilot from the flight schedule because they didn’t seem like themselves at breakfast.

My naval career was built on judgment, trust, and staying calm under what was, objectively, an unsustainable amount of life-or-death pressure. My profession was built around teaching young people to fly. And at the risk of sounding like Iceman, I was great. Really, really great.

At teaching my own daughter to drive?

I was bad. Really, really bad.

About a month into our father-daughter adventure, gripping the dashboard in the passenger seat of our 2012 Honda Pilot with 200,000 miles, I had an epiphany. As we barreled around I-495, sandwiched between a barrage of Beltway Bandits and a never-ending stream of eighteen-wheelers, I stopped trying to be a great dad and defaulted to what I actually knew how to do.

I went back to leading young humans through stress.

I quit reinventing myself as a parent and relied on my training as a leader.

We dodged our way off the highway and pulled back into our neighborhood. I asked her to back into our driveway. We bounced over the curb and started heading for the lawn.

“No big deal,” I said, beginning an explanation about how, when you’re backing up, you turn the wheel the opposite way you want the car to go.

“Opposite way I want the back to go or the front to go?” she asked.

“Neither? I mean… both. I mean… the car,” I said, providing zero useful information. “Look, we can’t be on the lawn, so whatever you think you should do, next time just do the opposite.”

She wasn’t getting it. I wasn’t explaining it. The bushes were taking a beating. The Honda would be fine, but my freshly seeded lawn was at risk. Everyone was losing.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s try this. Let’s swap.”

I drove us to an empty parking lot behind the local CVS. I got out of the car, grabbed a few cardboard boxes from a dumpster, and built a makeshift parking space. I opened the trunk, pulled out a lawn chair, walked a safe distance away, and unfolded it.

“Okay,” I said. “You passed your check ride. It’s time for your first solo.” I tossed her the keys. “Back in and out of the spot.”

She stared at me, aghast.

“Dad, I’m not allowed to drive unless a licensed adult is in the car.”

“I know, I know, I know,” I said, waving my hand. “And I’m proud of you for following the rules. Keep doing that. But right now, I’ll be right here if the cops show up. It’s not you—it’s me. You’re doing great, and I trust you. I don’t know how to teach this—but you’re smart, and you’ll figure it out.”

I plopped down into the chair and put my headphones in.

“Go get ’em. Back in and out. Twenty times.”

It turns out both flight instruction and driver’s education have very little to do with operating machinery. They’re about responsibility, judgment, trust, and learning through iteration.

As I watched her adjust the mirrors, raise the seat, and pick a playlist, I remembered a story I used to tell my pilots—about her, when she was a toddler.

At dinner, when she was three, she would knock over her cup and announce, cheerfully, “Uh oh! The milk spilled!”

Before launching off the carrier, I’d tell my pilots that story and remind them of the basic structure of a sentence: subject, verb, object.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” I’d say in the ready room, “don’t be like my three-year-old.

“If you have pigtails, a lisp, and a sippy cup, ‘uh oh, the milk spilled’ is adorable. For us adults—military officers, and especially naval aviators—that sentence structure is less endearing. I need you to be the protagonist in your own story.

“The milk didn’t spill. The milk can’t spill. Milk is the object. You spilled the milk. Subject. Verb. Object. Own it.”

Then I’d push it further.

“You fly the jet. The jet didn’t crash—the pilot crashed the jet. The brakes didn’t catch on fire—you landed fast and heavy with inadequate skill to compensate for insufficient decision. Be the subject of your own sentence. Don’t spill the fucking milk.”

Then I’d send them off the aircraft carrier at night.
I thought it was a pretty good speech.

Fifteen years later, climbing off my high horse and into the passenger seat next to that same little girl, I was halfway through the milk speech when she cut me off.

“Got it, Dad. I won’t spill the milk.”

Apparently, I’d given PG-rated versions before.

“Okay then,” I said quietly. “Let’s go.”

She put the car in drive.

Subject. Verb. Object.
The protagonist of her own life story.

From the comfort and safety of my lawn chair, I finally understood my internal conflict.

Dr. Laurie Craigen of Boston University says vulnerability comes from a combination of risk, uncertainty, and emotional exposure. Not all stress is created equal. No matter how dangerous, I never felt vulnerable flying jets or teaching people to fly.

I felt deeply vulnerable handing my teenager the keys.

Some mistakes you don’t get to learn from. In the Navy, I witnessed two ejections and attended my share of funerals. The best leaders were ruthless about accepting risk without a commensurate potential for reward—and equally patient in forgiving teachable errors.

You can learn from scraping the bushes or bouncing over a curb. But more than five hundred people will die on Maryland roads this year, and they won’t get a debrief.

Successful adults are built on as many failures as they survive. Great leaders understand the difference between failure that teaches and failure that ends the mission.

In the corporate world, it’s easy to preach “fail fast and fail often.” But on truly high-performing teams, some failures are catastrophic.

The challenge—in the cockpit, the boardroom, or the passenger seat—is eliminating calamitous downside risk while allowing as many small, learnable mistakes as the system can tolerate. That tension—setting the floor while still allowing the ceiling to rise—is what separates great leaders from good ones.

Watching my daughter figure out when to cut the wheel when backing into a parking spot, I started thinking about how many people I knew navigating the same uneasy overlap between professional competence and parental uncertainty. 

We spend our adult lives building expertise; in my case learning how to manage risk, make decisions under pressure, and lead in systems where mistakes carry consequences. And then we come home and improvise through the most consequential leadership role we’ll ever hold.

At O2X, leadership has always been understood through a small set of human fundamentals—sleep, nutrition, mental performance, stress management, and movement—and I began to wonder what those principles might reveal when applied not to operators or executives, but to raising kids. Instead of talking to expert parents, I became interested in talking to experts in leadership—and in understanding how their professional mastery held up under the most personal and unforgiving leadership challenge there is: raising their own children.

I thought of my friend Dr. Nick Barringer, the first Army dietitian to complete Ranger School—an expert in fueling Olympians and professional fighters—now trying to pack a first-grade lunchbox that comes home empty.

I wondered what I could learn from Adam LaReau, a former Navy SEAL, about translating the resilience learned in Afghanistan into the cancer ward at Boston Children’s Hospital—and what real resilience looks like to a five-year-old facing a life-or-death fight.

I made a mental note to ask Josh Lamont, a professional athletic trainer trusted with elite careers, how he teaches his own kids to respect their bodies while still knowing when it’s okay to push.

I wanted to ask Dr. Katy Turner how managing pressure for professional football players and elite soldiers helped her manage the heart-rate spike of watching her child step onto a wrestling mat for the first time.

And I wondered what Dr. Jamie Tartar, a sleep neuroscientist, thought about her expertise when she found herself with not one—but two—infants. Because nothing humbles a sleep expert faster than two screaming babies.

Instead of looking for expert parents, I decided to look for expert leaders—and to understand how their expertise shaped their approach to the hardest leadership role there is.

I also decided that every leader should teach a teenager to drive.

She hit the boxes. 

She yelled. 

She turned the music up. 

She swore with an abandon that made my New Jersey roots and sailor’s heart proud.

And then—like I knew she would—she figured it out.

After the twentieth successful landing of the Honda, she pulled up next to my lawn chair. I took my headphones out as she turned down the Taylor Swift and rolled down the window.

“Got it! Thanks, Dad.”

“Nice work,” I said. “We’ve got time for ice cream and a quick debrief, if you want.”

She rolled her eyes at the debrief but smiled at the ice cream.

“Sounds great.” She unbuckled her seat belt. “You wanna drive?”

“Nope,” I said, heading for the passenger seat. “All you. You’re doing great.”

Really, really great.