Article · open draft
The Sanchos of Our Quixotes
By Carlos Miranda Levy · July 13, 2026 · first draft for the founder's review and rewrite — placeholders pending interview
By Carlos Miranda Levy · July 13, 2026 · first draft for the founder's review and rewrite — placeholders pending interview
Your child walks into the kitchen with a cardboard sword and an impossible plan. He’s going to build a rocket. He’s going to be the best in the world at something he discovered this morning. He’s going to dig a tunnel to the other side of the planet, starting in the backyard. He says it with total seriousness, without a drop of irony, and he looks at you expecting — not permission: enlistment.
And there, in a quarter of a second, it gets decided what kind of parent you’re going to be. Because you can do what almost everyone does, which is, with the best of intentions, start shrinking the plan until it fits inside the reasonable. Or you can do something else. You can go get your sword.
We’ve grown used to reading Don Quixote as the poor old man who mistakes windmills for giants: a joke, a delusion, a cautionary tale about what happens when you take dreams too seriously. But look at your child with the cardboard sword and you’ll see that reading falls short. What the child has isn’t delusion. It’s something far more valuable and far more fragile: the refusal to shrink the world down to the size of the sensible.
The child takes the rocket seriously. And that seriousness — that capacity to treat the impossible as a work agenda — is exactly the material out of which come the scientists, the founders, the ones who actually change something. It is not a defect that life will go on correcting. It is a force that life will go on spending, with our help or in spite of it. The question isn’t whether your child is right about the rocket. It’s whether his seriousness deserves a squire.
It deserves a squire.
Here is the heart of the founder’s thesis, in his words:
We parents must be the Sanchos of our Quixote children — and enable them.
Sancho, read generously, is the most beautiful thing in the book: the enthusiastic companion who, naively, enables his knight’s madness. Look at what Sancho does, because it’s the exact opposite of watching from the bench. Sancho doesn’t explain to Don Quixote that the giants are windmills and stay home. Sancho saddles up, loads the provisions, learns the trade, and rides. He enters the adventure instead of commenting on it. He chooses the quest that isn’t his, rides alongside, and — this is the decisive part — he stays.
That is enabling. It isn’t applauding from the couch while the child plays alone. It’s getting into the game: learning the rocket’s rules, finding the cardboard, holding the ladder. It’s the difference between the parent who says “how nice, keep playing” and the one who asks “where do we start?”
And this is also the hardest pillar of this house’s creed. Our creed — NEVER HELP: Engage, Enable, Inspire, Empower, Connect — has one word that costs us parents more than any other: Enable. Not doing it for the child. Not solving it for him. Enabling him: giving him what he needs so the adventure is his. Sancho is that word made into a story. That’s why we tell it with the most beloved companionship in the language.
Now, careful, because this is where this article stakes its honesty.
Enabling the adventure is not lying about reality. And Sancho — the real one, not the caricature — was never a yes-man. Sancho argues. Sancho negotiates. Sancho tells his knight, to his face, that those over there are windmills. The rule that saves this idea from becoming permissive parenting fits in one line:
Enable the knight; don’t lie to him about the windmills.
You can ride along on the rocket adventure and tell your son that cardboard doesn’t hold up to fire. You can take his plan to be the best in the world seriously and tell him, without cruelty, how many hours sit behind a “best in the world.” You don’t pull him off the horse: you adjust his course. The white lie — “yes, tomorrow you’ll reach China through the backyard” — isn’t love, it’s abandonment with a kind face: it leaves him alone in front of a crash you saw coming and kept quiet about.
The honest squire does both things at once, and that simultaneity is the whole trade: he holds up the dream with one hand and points at the windmill with the other. The girl doesn’t need to be lied to in order to dream. She needs someone to believe in the adventure enough to tell her the truth inside it.
[INTERVIEW: Carlos — a windmill he named to his son with honesty without pulling him off the horse: which was it, how did he say it, and how did the boy take it? (Question 2 of the brief; documented facts only, §9.3.) A lived example here turns the rule into a scene and lifts the section out of the abstract.]
And yes, the squire sometimes dismounts and says no. There are adventures that don’t get enabled — the ones that cause harm, the ones that aren’t safe — and there the enthusiasm yields, without theatrics, to protection. Enabling has limits, and knowing them is part of the trade, not a betrayal of it.
We have to talk about the ending, because the book has a bitter one. Don Quixote dies sane. He recovers his judgment, renounces his books, declares himself the enemy of his own adventures — “I am now the enemy of Amadís of Gaul…” — and dies of sensibleness a few pages later. Sanity, in Cervantes, arrives as a surrender. The knight is cured of his dream, and the cure kills him.
Here is the line this whole essay is about:
A Sancho-parent’s job is to make sure our Quixotes never have to recant — that the dream matures instead of dying of realism.
Because there are two ways for the adventure to end. One is that it grows: that the boy who was going to dig to China becomes the geologist who truly understands what’s under the backyard; that the impossible plan settles, with the years and an honest squire alongside, into a life with direction. That is not a recantation. It’s a maturation. The dream didn’t die: it grew up.
The other way is that the dream surrenders. That by force of “be realistic,” of windmills named without tenderness, of squires who never mounted, the child learns that dreaming was an embarrassment to be cured of. That he arrives at twenty already reconciled to the small, the enemy of his own Amadíses. That — and not the failure of any rocket — is what a Sancho-parent exists to prevent.
We can’t guarantee the adventure reaches its destination. No squire can. What is in our hands is that the dream not die of premature realism for lack of company. That if one day it changes, it changes because it matured, not because it grew ashamed.
One last thing, which is almost a confession from this house. This site is not your Sancho. The squire of your child’s adventure is you — it has to be you, because you’re the one who knows the knight, the one who can ride, the one who stays. We stay in the stables: we saddle the horses, keep the provisions at hand, maintain the trade. But the adventure is yours to ride. [SOURCE: verify — the claim that Don Quixote is the most-translated work in Spanish in history, if it’s to be asserted in the text; use only if it can be cited well]
As the house guide says — and we leave it here as what it is, a wink:
“Every parent is a Quixote… and every child too. I just saddle the horses.”
So when your child walks into the kitchen with the cardboard sword and the impossible plan, you already know what gets decided in that quarter of a second. Not whether he’s right. Whether he rides alone, or with you alongside.
Go get your sword.
Note from Carlos
This idea was born in a conversation about Sancho himself: the squire who saddled the donkey knowing how knights’ stories end — and stayed until the last page. That’s what we are, or should be: the Sanchos of our Quixotes. Not the adult who corrects the dream from the doorway, but the one who enters the adventure, negotiates with the knight, and doesn’t lie to him about the windmills. The Coach is right about his part, as he almost always is: enthusiasm without structure doesn’t survive the first blow — in my house the adventure has a training schedule too. But the order of the factors matters: first you saddle, then you train. A dream nobody enabled never even gets far enough to need discipline. May our Quixotes mature their dream — instead of watching it die of realism.
Virgilio “Coach” Reyes — the structure
Twenty-five years standing at the edge of a court taught me something this very pretty text is missing: enthusiasm enables the dream, but what makes it survive the first blow is structure. It’s not enough for the knight that you ride beside him; he needs training, repetition, a plan for the week. I’ll walk the hard stretch with you — but I won’t run the race for you, or for your son. Saddling the horse is the beginning. Teaching him to ride every day is what doesn’t show in this essay, and it’s half the job.
Sancho, “the Squire”
At last somebody reads me as I deserve, and not as the fat fellow who talks nonsense. Yes: I rode by choice, not by deception. But let nobody confuse the squire with the flatterer — I told my master those were windmills, and I told him mounted, not from the doorway. That is the art: I defend neither the parents’ sanity nor the children’s fantasy, I defend the boy’s quest. I enable it and I negotiate it. Let him dream all he likes; the windmills I name for him myself, with affection and on time.
Polo — the caretaker
If this essay gave you the urge to saddle up, the pantry has places to start: “Planting something you can eat” (/actividades/sembrar-para-comer), a long adventure with real windmills — patience, the harvest that sometimes doesn’t come — for accompanying without lying; “The conversation that comes too early” (/actividades/conversaciones-demasiado-tempranas), for taking him seriously as a thinker; and /sistemas, if you want to see how a dream becomes a sustained practice. I show you the stables; the horse you ride yourself.
[INTERVIEW] — 4:
[SOURCE] — 1:
This piece is a draft written in the open. If something rang false, was missing, or felt like too much — tell us: good comments rewrite articles.