Bravery isn’t a personality trait. Bishop Mariann Budde says it’s something we all learn.
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The Episcopal Bishop of Washington has been writing about courage for years. Her newest book brings the message to the youngest readers yet — and what she really wanted to talk about was us.
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On January 21, 2025, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington stood at the pulpit of the National Cathedral the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration and asked, plainly and directly, for mercy. The sermon rippled out across the internet within hours. Critics called it political overreach. Admirers called it one of the bravest things they’d seen in years. Bishop Mariann Budde, characteristically, would probably say it was neither. She’d say it was just what the moment required.
On July 7th, she publishes I Can Learn to Be Brave, a picture book for children ages 4 to 8, illustrated by Holly Hatam. It’s the third in a series that began with the New York Times bestseller How We Learn to Be Brave and continued with the young adult adaptation We Can Be Brave. The same essential message, now carried all the way to the youngest readers.
When I sat down with Bishop Budde recently, the book was our starting point. But what we really wanted to talk about was parenting — what it costs, what it asks, and why raising brave kids might be the bravest thing most of us ever do.
Bravery starts earlier than you think
She opened with something I’ve been thinking about ever since. “Watching children grow,” she said, “is a masterclass in courage.”
She wasn’t being metaphorical. Children, she pointed out, are crossing developmental thresholds at a pace we rarely stop to appreciate. Every single thing is a first. The 7-month-old who gets up on all fours. The first grader walking up the school steps without her mom. The teenager handing over their college applications. “We lose track of the magnitude of it,” she said. And when we do, we miss something important — not just about our kids, but about what bravery actually is.
The working definition most of us carry is wrong, Budde argues. We’ve made bravery into a personality trait, something that belongs to a particular kind of person. Fearless. Bold. Unflinching. But that’s not how it works. “Courage isn’t just for these people over here that are brave and do these amazing things,” she said. “It’s actually in all of us. We learn how to be brave.” And the learning always involves doing something for the first time, which means it always involves not knowing whether you can.
My daughter, now almost 15, has been proving this since she was four. After weeks of begging to get her ears pierced, I finally said yes — but only after making sure she understood what she was signing up for. I told her it meant getting a hole poked through her skin, nothing like the stick-on situation she’d been applying daily for a month. “I KNOW,” she insisted. “And I won’t cry. I’ll laugh.” When the day came, she hoisted herself up into that chair, took a deep breath, and didn’t flinch. She didn’t laugh, but she sure as anything didn’t shed a single tear. She’s been like that ever since. Brave isn’t a thing she performs. It’s just how she moves through the world, and frankly she’s taught me as much about bravery as I hope to have taught her.
This framing matters especially right now, when youth anxiety is at historic levels and parents are trying to figure out how to help their kids face a world that feels increasingly hard to explain. If bravery is a trait you either have or you don’t, then anxious kids are simply at a disadvantage. But if bravery is something you build, one threshold at a time, then even the most cautious child is already practicing it — they just might need someone to name it. That’s part of what the picture book is doing. But it’s also what Budde is doing in conversations like this one.
Why failure is part of raising brave kids
On the question of failure — which is inseparable from bravery — she was clear in a way I found quite comforting. Failure isn’t a detour on the path to courage. It’s the path. “Sometimes the bravest thing of all is to acknowledge that right now, I can’t do this,” she said. “And that doesn’t mean you are any less brave.”
She told me about her younger son, now in his 30s, who decided to major in theater in college. “I said to him, Patrick, that means you’re going to have to get really accustomed to disappointment and failure.” She said it with love, not warning. She was proud of the program he attended for making that part of the curriculum. Because nothing in the arts — nothing in science, nothing in any field — survives without the ability to walk through failure and keep going.
She also pushed back gently on the idea that it’s our job to shield kids from hard feelings. “Part of what it means to be human is to face hard things,” she said. “And one of the things that allows us to do that is to be surrounded by love and belonging.” Not fixing it. Not explaining it away. Just being there, and reminding them that their worth isn’t contingent on the outcome.
It’s harder for the parent
Here’s the part Budde said that I keep coming back to: “Sometimes it’s harder for the parent than for the child.”
She’s right. The hardest part of raising brave kids is letting them take risks we can’t control, face disappointments we can’t fix, and eventually walk out the door to live lives we can’t predict. Budde doesn’t offer a formula for that. She’s too honest for formulas. Instead, she talks about staying attuned to your child, reading their signals, and knowing when to say “you’ve got this” versus when to say “not yet.” None of it is tidy. All of it requires practice.
She shared two moments from her own parenting that demanded particular courage. The first was September 11, 2001. Her kids were in elementary and middle school, and she had to manage her own terror while also holding space for theirs. The second was sending her son to college. “I was a basket case,” she said, laughing. “But those were as much about me as for them.”
I know that feeling. My son left for Temple University in Philadelphia two years ago, and I will not pretend I held it together gracefully. What helped, more than I expected, was that he roomed with his best friend since kindergarten. Closing that dorm room door with the two of them on the other side — those familiar faces, that familiar dynamic — gave me just enough to hold onto. It was still hard. But it made it just a touch less fraught.
Budde’s point isn’t that it gets easier. It’s that we grow into it, imperfectly, the same way our kids do. “I wasn’t a confident parent for a long time,” she told me. “The most scared I ever was, was when they were infants.” I knew exactly what she meant. After a home birth, watching the midwife pack up to leave, I had a full-blown moment of — wait, you’re going where? There is no preparation for the specific terror of being left alone with a newborn for the first time, no matter how many books you’ve read or classes you’ve taken. You just have to do it. Which, come to think of it, is the whole point.
Bravery isn’t a solo act
Budde also pushes back on the idea that bravery is something we raise in isolation. She talked about a municipal initiative in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, where she used to live, that identified ten conditions children need in order to thrive and committed public resources to building them. “Why aren’t all of our towns doing that?” she asked. Her point: we can’t bubble-wrap our kids into courage, and we can’t outsource it to the village either. We have to be part of communities actively invested in the health of all children, not just our own.
“I can’t just say to my faith community, you need to teach this,” she said. “I need to be part of that faith community and, as an adult, help to foster that for all the children.” The same logic applies to schools, neighborhoods, civic life. It’s hard, she acknowledged. But the alternative is ceding ground we can’t afford to lose.
What we’re really teaching them
Toward the end of our conversation, Budde said something that felt like the throughline for everything she’s written and everything she’s done. “Raising them to be brave is really the only thing. You’ve just got to face it.”
Brave and healthy. Self-aware. Resilient. Not because the world will be kind to them, but because it might not be, and they’ll need to know they can move through it anyway. And she made one more point that I think is easy to miss: our kids are watching us do it too. They need to see us fail, grieve, face disappointment, and keep going. How we carry our own imperfection, she said, is a marking event for them.
That’s a different kind of pressure than I usually feel as a parent. Less about what I’m protecting them from and more about what I’m showing them. Which means that every time I do something hard, every time I face something uncertain and do it anyway, I’m not just surviving. I’m teaching.
I Can Learn to Be Brave by Mariann Edgar Budde, illustrated by Holly Hatam, publishes July 7th.
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