Picture a kid who keeps leaving her library book at home on Fridays. After the third overdue notice, the two of you sit down and come up with a plan: a sticky note on the front door that says LIBRARY BOOK in big letters. She draws a little book next to the words. Everyone feels good. The problem has a solution, the solution is visible, and the conversation ends with a high five.
The following Friday, the book is still on her bedroom floor, and the sticky note is still on the door. It turns out she leaves through the garage on school days, and nobody thought to ask.
This is the moment most of us skip in the problem solving process. We come up with a fix, we feel the relief of having a fix, and we treat that relief as proof. In the SOLVED method, verify is the step that asks a less comfortable question: did it actually work? Don't get caught celebrating the plan instead of the result.
Why we celebrate too early
Coming up with a solution feels like finishing. It took effort, some creativity, and usually a bit of negotiation. For a child especially, the conversation itself can be tiring, and saying "we fixed it" is a way to close it. Adults are not much different. A meeting that ends with an action item feels productive whether or not the action item changes anything.
The trouble is that a plan is a guess. It might be a good guess, based on real evidence, but it remains a guess until reality has had a chance to respond. The sticky note was a reasonable idea. It just rested on an assumption about which door she used, and nobody tested that assumption until the plan had already failed once.
What verifying actually looks like
When kids hear "check your work," they usually picture rereading a math problem. Verifying a real-world solution is broader than that. It means returning to the original problem and asking whether it has changed. A few questions help:
- What did the problem look like before? If you stated the problem clearly at the start, you already have this.
- What would we see if the fix is working? Name something observable, such as "the book is in the backpack on Friday morning," rather than "she'll remember better."
- When will we look? Choose a specific day, not "we'll see how it goes."
- Who will look? Ideally the child does the checking, with you as backup.
The second question carries the most weight. Nobody can check "remember better." Anyone can check "book returned on time three Fridays in a row."
Pick the check date before you start
One practical habit makes a large difference: decide when you will verify at the same time you decide on the plan, and write the date down next to it. Picture the library book conversation ending not with a high five but with "Let's check next Friday at breakfast and see if the book is in your bag." The high five can wait for Friday.
This does two things. It makes verification an ordinary part of the plan rather than a follow-up that feels like a parent checking up on a child. It also gives the child a stake in the outcome, because now she wants to see whether her idea worked.
For problems that come and go, one check is not enough. A fix that works once might be luck. Two or three checks spread over a few weeks will tell you much more.
When the check says no
This is where verifying earns its place. If Friday comes and the book is still upstairs, the temptation is to treat it as a failure, either of the plan or of the kid. Neither view is useful. A failed check is information. It tells you something you did not know before: maybe she uses a different door, or maybe Friday mornings are rushed for a reason nobody mentioned.
The useful response is to go back a step, neither starting over nor giving up. Ask what happened, look at the evidence, and adjust. Perhaps the note moves to the garage door, or the book goes into the backpack on Thursday night. Then you pick a new check date and look again.
Kids who see this loop a few times learn something that is hard to teach directly. They learn that being wrong about a solution is ordinary, and that the people who solve problems well are simply the ones who go back and look.
Adults need this step too
The habit spreads fastest when kids watch adults do it. I try to check my own fixes out loud, partly because I still catch myself skipping that step. A simple “I changed that last week, so let’s see if it worked” shows a kid that checking isn’t about who was wrong. It’s just how you find out whether the problem is really gone.
It also helps to admit when the step got skipped. Saying "we never checked whether that worked, so let's look now" shows that verifying is something you can return to, even late.
If you would like a structured way to practice this with kids, the SOLVED Complete Bundle pairs a kids' book with a parent and teacher companion, built around the same steps of the SOLVED method. It gives you shared language for conversations like the library book one, so that verify sits alongside the other steps rather than getting lost at the end.
If you want to start smaller, download the free worksheet at https://solved360.com/pages/free. Use it on one small problem this week, and before anyone celebrates, write down the day you will check.