October 18, 2022 • 23 mins
Parents are already highly motivated, they want to get it right when it comes to raising their children. So what are the tools to help them succeed? Barry advocates that parents learn to listen, teach children how to manage risk on their own, and trust that they know their children well enough to give them what they really need.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome.
(00:35):
You're listening to the Happiness formula. I'm your host, Mike
Coscarelli today. Parenthood captain obvious here. But being a parent
is tough. There's no one size fits all playbook for
raising a kid, but Barry explains that there are some
general guidelines that can help, like avoid being a quote
(00:59):
unquote distracted parent. Yes, that means putting away your phone.
I know there's so much sweet stuff to look at,
but you've got to do it. Put away your phone
and listen to your child. Tell a story as closely
as you would listen to your best friend. So listen up.
Berries Here with all the wisdom, it is obviously an
(01:25):
awesome responsibility to be a parent, but it requires real
delicacy of judgment and perceptiveness and sensitivity to know when
you are actually doing the parenting and when you're not.
And let me just say, having spent fifty years as
a teacher, the same thing is true when you're teaching.
(01:47):
Even when you're teaching college age students, we are essentially
always teaching, even when we're off stage, and the lessons
we communicate when we are not explicitly communicating lessons maybe
the most profound lessons of all. So the responsibility on
(02:08):
parents is an awesome responsibility, and it takes wisdom to
discharge that responsibility. Well, we know that we need to
listen to our children, just as we need to listen
to our friends. We need the understanding that only listening
provides in order to be good parents. But how do
(02:30):
we learn to listen to our children? A clinical psychologist
named Wendy Mogul has some good parental advice. Should you
listen to your children's point to your child's point of
view at all? Yes, because listening is respectful, because he
might provide you with information that will change your mind,
(02:52):
and because you want to set the example of being
a good listener. But listen briefly. If you are tempted
to reason with your child. Resists that temptation, think about
using words in moderation. Don't try to provide instant solutions
to your child's problems. Instead, be quiet and just listen.
(03:18):
If you find yourself arguing with any child older than two,
you are wasting your time. That strikes me as a
little pessimistic. Your child skills are arguing are better than yours.
In general, talk less and act more. Be a role model,
(03:38):
don't be a lecturer. A major complaint that out of
lessons have is that nobody listens to them. The habit
of listening and of expecting to be listened to needs
to start early. If we're always distracted, our children will
perceive us as half listening and they'll stop trying to
(04:00):
talk to us. So this is what Wendy Mogul said,
and Wendy Able said this in a book called The
Blessings of a Skinned Knee that she published before cell
phones existed, and so the phenomenon of distracted parenting was
around even before cell phones. I think it has only
(04:25):
increased dramatically in magnitude with the advent of cell phones.
A good rule to adopt is that your cell phone
is in your pocket when you're talking to your kid.
It's a hard one for people to adopt, but if
you do it, maybe your kid will do it when
your kid becomes a teenager. Wouldn't that be nice? So listen,
(04:50):
but don't listen too long, don't rush your listening, don't
talk too much. Listen attentively, or your child will stop
trying to talk to you, but don't listen to long arguments,
resist reasoning with your child. If you're an experienced parent,
this may make perfect sense to you. It's common sense,
(05:11):
you'll say. If you're a novice parent, this seemingly contradictory
advice will leave you completely confused. And it is contradictory
advice because really the advice that Mogul is giving is
what it means to listen and how depends on the
kid and depends on the circumstance. Raising children like Olivia
(05:39):
often provides the needed experience that parents need because our
children helped teach us how to be parents. One of
the first things they teach us, if we're open to
hearing it, is how to listen to a lot more
than words. There's a child psychologist named Bunny Oi who
(06:07):
has written about this, and she speaks for many of us.
I think when she writes, I have found that even
your average parents, with everyday children and everyday stresses, also
finds listening to a child who cannot be verbally extremely expressive,
(06:29):
somewhat awkward, uncomfortable, confusing, tedious. They wish their child would
or could get to the point and say what is
on his or her mind, and when he can't, even
well meaning parents can give up and tune out. Sometimes
their attention drifts away from the child because they assume
(06:52):
that a child talks about what's on his mind when
he or she is ready. Sometimes parents worried that by waiting,
they're being manipulated for attention, and that too much attention
is bad for children. Some have been taught that if
it can't be spoken, it probably isn't all that important anyway. Again,
(07:18):
we learn a lot of different and often contradictory things
in raising our children. They can't all be right. Well,
they can all be right, they just can't all be
right at the same moment in time. And what we
are really learning as we parent our children is to
know our children well enough to know which of these
(07:39):
pieces of advice is the right piece of advice to
be following at a given moment. Another thing our children
can help teach us is how to tame and balance
our best intentions. We need to learn to do this
because some of the traits that make us good parents
and friends can block exactly the kind of listening we need.
(08:03):
If we're too patient, and we never interrupt. Not only
will our shrewd teenager talk circles around us, but will
hesitate to interrupt and ask the kind of questions our
children need to have asked but haven't thought of. But
if we interrupt too often, will undermine their self confidence
in their ability to learn how to frame arguments themselves,
(08:24):
and we may frustrate them or not hear what we
have to say. If if we're too honest telling them
how we're feeling and thinking about what they're saying, we
risk being too judgmental, or we risk encouraging them to
say only what they think we want to hear. At
(08:46):
the same time, the detachment and perspective that they need
from us demands that we be honest and courageous enough,
at least sometimes to give them the tough love that
they need. Without it, we risk becoming sympathetic reflectors of
what they say, binding them by shining their own feelings
(09:08):
back at them. So it's hard to be a parent.
Let's get that clear. We know that I suspect most
people who become parents don't know it until they become parents,
or they wouldn't become parents. Second, every kid is different. Third,
(09:32):
you are never sure what works and what doesn't. Fourth,
you can count on making mistakes, sometimes big ones. Five.
You can't learn how to be a good parent from
books on how to be a good parent. Books like
(09:53):
rules may provide guidelines, but because every child is different,
and because every situation is different, parents must learn to
judge for themselves when to follow those guidelines and when
to ignore them. It seems as though what I'm saying
here is that nobody knows anything. I'm not parents know
(10:19):
a lot. What is true is that nobody knows everything.
There are no guarantees. Whenever we use our judgment, there's
a chance that will get it wrong. If we're open
to learning from our mistakes, there is reason to be
(10:41):
optimistic that will be right more and more often as
our children teach us how to be their parents. It
is parenting is the example par excellence of the need
for practical wisdom. We learned pretty quickly that there aren't
rules or formulas, and that the outside experts can only
(11:04):
point us very roughly in the right direction. Almost every
moment of parenting is a moment of making decisions and
the particularities of each of our kids and rapidly changing
circumstances of our lives demand judgment. What this means is
that parent parenting is an excellent school for developing practical wisdom.
(11:31):
There are several reasons to think that not only that
relations with family and friends are a school for wisdom,
but that there are an especially good school for wisdom,
better probably than the workplace. First, we really want to
get it right as friends, as parents, as lovers, we
(11:53):
are highly motivated to do the right thing. Second, we
know our friends and family in a way that doctors
rarely know their patients and teachers rarely know their students. Third,
we have teachers. We have people teaching us to be
parents who are our teachers. Mostly our children are our teachers.
(12:19):
Children teach their parents how to be parents, not with words,
of course, but with reactions to parental efforts to raise kids.
This one needs structure. That one needs freedom, This one
needs criticism, That one needs encouragement. I should make it clear, however,
(12:44):
that just because there's a teacher doesn't mean there's a learner.
We learn from experience. But as I said before, some
people have thirty years of experience while others have the
same experience for thirty years. To develop wisdom we must
be open to being. The psychologist Bonnie Oi, who I
(13:09):
mentioned a few minutes ago, said this, The wisest mothers
I know seem perpetually open and accepting of whatever happens
with their children, willing to revisit and refine their notion
of who this person is as he or she changes
and grows. And they seem to have found ways to
(13:31):
suspend the need for certainty in their understanding of their children,
and are able to turn a blind eye to what
others people are doing with or for their children. They
wait and they watch, like a gardener who has scattered
seed of unknown origin, waits for signs to tell her
(13:52):
whether she will have beans or a pumpkin comes summer.
When I've asked these mothers about this difference in their outlooks,
they laugh and they tell me that their children grew
them up. Now it's worth making a point in light
of this uh quote from Bonnie Oi, and that is
(14:13):
her book is also a decade old. My sense is
that in modern attitude toward parenting and towards the vulnerability
of children is that the stakes are high. You can't
afford to make mistakes because the stakes are high. And
(14:34):
the result is a kind of hovering and sort of
lack of relaxation about what to do when it comes
to raising kids. That is to say, of course, the
stakes are high when you raise kids, but they aren't
high on a minute to minute, second to second basis.
(14:54):
And I think more and more parents feel like they
have to be making the right decision every minute of
every day, and that puts a kind of pressure on
them and on the relationship that I think is good
for nobody. And so Bonnie Oil was writing at a
time when raising children was a bit more relaxed than
(15:14):
it is now, and that maybe an important difference. Right now,
it's time for a quick break, but when we come
back that delicate balance between being a helicopter parent and
being a little too chill. It's harder to be a
(15:48):
parent now and it used to be, I believe. Wendy Mogul,
another child psychologist. She practices is in Los Angeles, and
she has quite an affluent clientele, and she noticed over
the years that most of the families who came to
see her had concerns that really didn't belong in any
(16:11):
standard diagnostic category. Their kids were suffering non major psychopathology,
they didn't need therapy, at least not the kind of
therapy that Mogul had been trained to provide. What they needed,
Mogul eventually concluded, was advice from a mensch mention as
(16:31):
a Yiddish expression that means basically a wise person. These
parents were nervous, and they needed to know when to
be demanding and when to be relaxed, when to be supportive,
when to be critical, when to be protective, when to
let their kids loose. Parents problems seemed to be twofold. First,
(16:54):
they wanted their kids lives to be perfect, spared any
hurt or disappointment. Second, they didn't trust their judgment about
how to do that, So they were coming to the
expert to find out how. These are the kinds of
problems that a wise person can help answer, not necessarily
(17:16):
a professional clinician. And what Mogul slowly came to realize
is that her training as a therapist was largely irrelevant.
Mogul tells us in this book, she wrote the Blessings
of a skin Knee. The Talmud sums up the Jewish
perspective on child rearing in a single sentence. A father
(17:39):
is obligated to teach his son how to swim. Jewish
wisdom holds that our children don't belong to us. They
are both alone and a gift from God, and the
gift has strings attached. Our job is to raise our
children to leave us. The children's job is to find
(18:00):
their own path in life. If they stay carefully protected
in the nest of the family, children will become weak
and fearful, or feel too comfortable to want to leave.
And thus the blessings of a skinned knee. Let your
kids suffer occasional discomfort, occasional failure, and occasional inconvenience. Be
(18:26):
there to make sure that the injuries, the discomforts, and
the inconveniences are relatively minimal. Be there to make sure
that your child is safe, but just not too safe.
Real protection, Mogul says, means teaching children how to manage
(18:47):
risks on their own, not shielding them from every hazard.
By giving them a chance to survive some danger and
letting them make some reckless or thoughtless choices, we teach
them how to withstand the bumps and the knocks of life.
Us the title the Blessings of a skinned knee, so
(19:11):
I think Mogul is right. If we never let go,
our children will never learn how to swim. But when
and how to let go remains the puzzle Overprotective parents
may need to stop worrying so much that they will
not let their kids walk down the block to a
friend's house, even when she's eleven. They may may need
(19:35):
to learn not to call the school to protect their
kids from ridicule or teasing. They may need to learn
that it's okay to let their kids go to the
restaurant bathroom by themselves. But teaching kids to swim requires balance,
some independence but not too much, some danger, but lots
(19:56):
of safety. How do parents know what the balance is
and is it the same for every child? Questions like
the unfortunately have no simple answers. Wendy Mogul's book is
quite wise. It's not written for neglectful or indifferent parents.
(20:17):
It's not written for parents who think, to themselves, I
learned the hard way, so can he. It's written for
parents who want to protect, protect, protect. These parents do
need to be nudged to let their kids into the pool.
They do need to learn the blessings of a skin knee,
but that's not because the parents are protective it's because
(20:42):
they're too protective. Aristotle understood this when he argued for
the importance of moderation, for the importance of the mean,
as I have beaten you over the head about already
the importance of the mean in our daily activities. As
I have suggested, the mean does not come from calculating
(21:04):
using a formula. It doesn't come from reading an advice book.
It comes from knowing your child and using wise judgment.
Judging when and how to say no is another manifestation
of the tension that parents feel between the urge to
(21:27):
encourage independence and the urge to protect. If you say
no all the time, your kids will never experience those
skin knees. If you don't say no, then if your
kids are lucky enough to survive their childhoods, they will
surely grow into monsters. So the lesson that parents typically
learned from their children is to pick your battles. At first,
(21:51):
you stop your kids from throwing food on the floor,
taking toys from their siblings, leaving their clothes in a
heap in the middle of whatever room they happen to
be in. Then you start worrying about how they use
your stuff without asking, barge into your bedroom without shocking,
don't do anything to help around the house, interrupt you
with urgent requests while you're on the phone, and never
(22:12):
accept no without an argument. Still later you worry that
they ignore curfews, hang out with other kids you think
are trouble, experiment with drugs and alcohol, and drive when
they shouldn't be driving. Pick your battles. A few parents
want to be drill sergeants, so they let their children
lead them. They learn to expect a lot from obedient
(22:36):
children and settle for basic safety and civility from unruly ones.
It seems unfair to ratchet up standards for kids who
basically do what they're told, and the look to lower
them for the more rebellious types. And no doubt the
kids themselves will often see it as unfair, but that
(22:58):
is what parents do. To give each kid what she
needs and what she can hand door, not to treat
each kid the same. That's the way wise parents operate. Well,
thanks for listening. After this episode, I feel like I
(23:20):
owe my parents a phone call and probably an apology. Okay,
maybe a few apologies. Join us next time. When Barry
talks about how rules can be a war on wisdom,
The Happiness Formula from One Day University is a production
of I Heart Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're
(23:43):
enjoying the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app,
and check out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history,
pop culture, true crime, and more.
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day university. Welcome.
(00:35):
You're listening to the Happiness formula. I'm your host, Mike
Coscarelli today. Parenthood captain obvious here. But being a parent
is tough. There's no one size fits all playbook for
raising a kid, but Barry explains that there are some
general guidelines that can help, like avoid being a quote
(00:59):
unquote distracted parent. Yes, that means putting away your phone.
I know there's so much sweet stuff to look at,
but you've got to do it. Put away your phone
and listen to your child. Tell a story as closely
as you would listen to your best friend. So listen up.
Berries Here with all the wisdom, it is obviously an
(01:25):
awesome responsibility to be a parent, but it requires real
delicacy of judgment and perceptiveness and sensitivity to know when
you are actually doing the parenting and when you're not.
And let me just say, having spent fifty years as
a teacher, the same thing is true when you're teaching.
(01:47):
Even when you're teaching college age students, we are essentially
always teaching, even when we're off stage, and the lessons
we communicate when we are not explicitly communicating lessons maybe
the most profound lessons of all. So the responsibility on
(02:08):
parents is an awesome responsibility, and it takes wisdom to
discharge that responsibility. Well, we know that we need to
listen to our children, just as we need to listen
to our friends. We need the understanding that only listening
provides in order to be good parents. But how do
(02:30):
we learn to listen to our children? A clinical psychologist
named Wendy Mogul has some good parental advice. Should you
listen to your children's point to your child's point of
view at all? Yes, because listening is respectful, because he
might provide you with information that will change your mind,
(02:52):
and because you want to set the example of being
a good listener. But listen briefly. If you are tempted
to reason with your child. Resists that temptation, think about
using words in moderation. Don't try to provide instant solutions
to your child's problems. Instead, be quiet and just listen.
(03:18):
If you find yourself arguing with any child older than two,
you are wasting your time. That strikes me as a
little pessimistic. Your child skills are arguing are better than yours.
In general, talk less and act more. Be a role model,
(03:38):
don't be a lecturer. A major complaint that out of
lessons have is that nobody listens to them. The habit
of listening and of expecting to be listened to needs
to start early. If we're always distracted, our children will
perceive us as half listening and they'll stop trying to
(04:00):
talk to us. So this is what Wendy Mogul said,
and Wendy Able said this in a book called The
Blessings of a Skinned Knee that she published before cell
phones existed, and so the phenomenon of distracted parenting was
around even before cell phones. I think it has only
(04:25):
increased dramatically in magnitude with the advent of cell phones.
A good rule to adopt is that your cell phone
is in your pocket when you're talking to your kid.
It's a hard one for people to adopt, but if
you do it, maybe your kid will do it when
your kid becomes a teenager. Wouldn't that be nice? So listen,
(04:50):
but don't listen too long, don't rush your listening, don't
talk too much. Listen attentively, or your child will stop
trying to talk to you, but don't listen to long arguments,
resist reasoning with your child. If you're an experienced parent,
this may make perfect sense to you. It's common sense,
(05:11):
you'll say. If you're a novice parent, this seemingly contradictory
advice will leave you completely confused. And it is contradictory
advice because really the advice that Mogul is giving is
what it means to listen and how depends on the
kid and depends on the circumstance. Raising children like Olivia
(05:39):
often provides the needed experience that parents need because our
children helped teach us how to be parents. One of
the first things they teach us, if we're open to
hearing it, is how to listen to a lot more
than words. There's a child psychologist named Bunny Oi who
(06:07):
has written about this, and she speaks for many of us.
I think when she writes, I have found that even
your average parents, with everyday children and everyday stresses, also
finds listening to a child who cannot be verbally extremely expressive,
(06:29):
somewhat awkward, uncomfortable, confusing, tedious. They wish their child would
or could get to the point and say what is
on his or her mind, and when he can't, even
well meaning parents can give up and tune out. Sometimes
their attention drifts away from the child because they assume
(06:52):
that a child talks about what's on his mind when
he or she is ready. Sometimes parents worried that by waiting,
they're being manipulated for attention, and that too much attention
is bad for children. Some have been taught that if
it can't be spoken, it probably isn't all that important anyway. Again,
(07:18):
we learn a lot of different and often contradictory things
in raising our children. They can't all be right. Well,
they can all be right, they just can't all be
right at the same moment in time. And what we
are really learning as we parent our children is to
know our children well enough to know which of these
(07:39):
pieces of advice is the right piece of advice to
be following at a given moment. Another thing our children
can help teach us is how to tame and balance
our best intentions. We need to learn to do this
because some of the traits that make us good parents
and friends can block exactly the kind of listening we need.
(08:03):
If we're too patient, and we never interrupt. Not only
will our shrewd teenager talk circles around us, but will
hesitate to interrupt and ask the kind of questions our
children need to have asked but haven't thought of. But
if we interrupt too often, will undermine their self confidence
in their ability to learn how to frame arguments themselves,
(08:24):
and we may frustrate them or not hear what we
have to say. If if we're too honest telling them
how we're feeling and thinking about what they're saying, we
risk being too judgmental, or we risk encouraging them to
say only what they think we want to hear. At
(08:46):
the same time, the detachment and perspective that they need
from us demands that we be honest and courageous enough,
at least sometimes to give them the tough love that
they need. Without it, we risk becoming sympathetic reflectors of
what they say, binding them by shining their own feelings
(09:08):
back at them. So it's hard to be a parent.
Let's get that clear. We know that I suspect most
people who become parents don't know it until they become parents,
or they wouldn't become parents. Second, every kid is different. Third,
(09:32):
you are never sure what works and what doesn't. Fourth,
you can count on making mistakes, sometimes big ones. Five.
You can't learn how to be a good parent from
books on how to be a good parent. Books like
(09:53):
rules may provide guidelines, but because every child is different,
and because every situation is different, parents must learn to
judge for themselves when to follow those guidelines and when
to ignore them. It seems as though what I'm saying
here is that nobody knows anything. I'm not parents know
(10:19):
a lot. What is true is that nobody knows everything.
There are no guarantees. Whenever we use our judgment, there's
a chance that will get it wrong. If we're open
to learning from our mistakes, there is reason to be
(10:41):
optimistic that will be right more and more often as
our children teach us how to be their parents. It
is parenting is the example par excellence of the need
for practical wisdom. We learned pretty quickly that there aren't
rules or formulas, and that the outside experts can only
(11:04):
point us very roughly in the right direction. Almost every
moment of parenting is a moment of making decisions and
the particularities of each of our kids and rapidly changing
circumstances of our lives demand judgment. What this means is
that parent parenting is an excellent school for developing practical wisdom.
(11:31):
There are several reasons to think that not only that
relations with family and friends are a school for wisdom,
but that there are an especially good school for wisdom,
better probably than the workplace. First, we really want to
get it right as friends, as parents, as lovers, we
(11:53):
are highly motivated to do the right thing. Second, we
know our friends and family in a way that doctors
rarely know their patients and teachers rarely know their students. Third,
we have teachers. We have people teaching us to be
parents who are our teachers. Mostly our children are our teachers.
(12:19):
Children teach their parents how to be parents, not with words,
of course, but with reactions to parental efforts to raise kids.
This one needs structure. That one needs freedom, This one
needs criticism, That one needs encouragement. I should make it clear, however,
(12:44):
that just because there's a teacher doesn't mean there's a learner.
We learn from experience. But as I said before, some
people have thirty years of experience while others have the
same experience for thirty years. To develop wisdom we must
be open to being. The psychologist Bonnie Oi, who I
(13:09):
mentioned a few minutes ago, said this, The wisest mothers
I know seem perpetually open and accepting of whatever happens
with their children, willing to revisit and refine their notion
of who this person is as he or she changes
and grows. And they seem to have found ways to
(13:31):
suspend the need for certainty in their understanding of their children,
and are able to turn a blind eye to what
others people are doing with or for their children. They
wait and they watch, like a gardener who has scattered
seed of unknown origin, waits for signs to tell her
(13:52):
whether she will have beans or a pumpkin comes summer.
When I've asked these mothers about this difference in their outlooks,
they laugh and they tell me that their children grew
them up. Now it's worth making a point in light
of this uh quote from Bonnie Oi, and that is
(14:13):
her book is also a decade old. My sense is
that in modern attitude toward parenting and towards the vulnerability
of children is that the stakes are high. You can't
afford to make mistakes because the stakes are high. And
(14:34):
the result is a kind of hovering and sort of
lack of relaxation about what to do when it comes
to raising kids. That is to say, of course, the
stakes are high when you raise kids, but they aren't
high on a minute to minute, second to second basis.
(14:54):
And I think more and more parents feel like they
have to be making the right decision every minute of
every day, and that puts a kind of pressure on
them and on the relationship that I think is good
for nobody. And so Bonnie Oil was writing at a
time when raising children was a bit more relaxed than
(15:14):
it is now, and that maybe an important difference. Right now,
it's time for a quick break, but when we come
back that delicate balance between being a helicopter parent and
being a little too chill. It's harder to be a
(15:48):
parent now and it used to be, I believe. Wendy Mogul,
another child psychologist. She practices is in Los Angeles, and
she has quite an affluent clientele, and she noticed over
the years that most of the families who came to
see her had concerns that really didn't belong in any
(16:11):
standard diagnostic category. Their kids were suffering non major psychopathology,
they didn't need therapy, at least not the kind of
therapy that Mogul had been trained to provide. What they needed,
Mogul eventually concluded, was advice from a mensch mention as
(16:31):
a Yiddish expression that means basically a wise person. These
parents were nervous, and they needed to know when to
be demanding and when to be relaxed, when to be supportive,
when to be critical, when to be protective, when to
let their kids loose. Parents problems seemed to be twofold. First,
(16:54):
they wanted their kids lives to be perfect, spared any
hurt or disappointment. Second, they didn't trust their judgment about
how to do that, So they were coming to the
expert to find out how. These are the kinds of
problems that a wise person can help answer, not necessarily
(17:16):
a professional clinician. And what Mogul slowly came to realize
is that her training as a therapist was largely irrelevant.
Mogul tells us in this book, she wrote the Blessings
of a skin Knee. The Talmud sums up the Jewish
perspective on child rearing in a single sentence. A father
(17:39):
is obligated to teach his son how to swim. Jewish
wisdom holds that our children don't belong to us. They
are both alone and a gift from God, and the
gift has strings attached. Our job is to raise our
children to leave us. The children's job is to find
(18:00):
their own path in life. If they stay carefully protected
in the nest of the family, children will become weak
and fearful, or feel too comfortable to want to leave.
And thus the blessings of a skinned knee. Let your
kids suffer occasional discomfort, occasional failure, and occasional inconvenience. Be
(18:26):
there to make sure that the injuries, the discomforts, and
the inconveniences are relatively minimal. Be there to make sure
that your child is safe, but just not too safe.
Real protection, Mogul says, means teaching children how to manage
(18:47):
risks on their own, not shielding them from every hazard.
By giving them a chance to survive some danger and
letting them make some reckless or thoughtless choices, we teach
them how to withstand the bumps and the knocks of life.
Us the title the Blessings of a skinned knee, so
(19:11):
I think Mogul is right. If we never let go,
our children will never learn how to swim. But when
and how to let go remains the puzzle Overprotective parents
may need to stop worrying so much that they will
not let their kids walk down the block to a
friend's house, even when she's eleven. They may may need
(19:35):
to learn not to call the school to protect their
kids from ridicule or teasing. They may need to learn
that it's okay to let their kids go to the
restaurant bathroom by themselves. But teaching kids to swim requires balance,
some independence but not too much, some danger, but lots
(19:56):
of safety. How do parents know what the balance is
and is it the same for every child? Questions like
the unfortunately have no simple answers. Wendy Mogul's book is
quite wise. It's not written for neglectful or indifferent parents.
(20:17):
It's not written for parents who think, to themselves, I
learned the hard way, so can he. It's written for
parents who want to protect, protect, protect. These parents do
need to be nudged to let their kids into the pool.
They do need to learn the blessings of a skin knee,
but that's not because the parents are protective it's because
(20:42):
they're too protective. Aristotle understood this when he argued for
the importance of moderation, for the importance of the mean,
as I have beaten you over the head about already
the importance of the mean in our daily activities. As
I have suggested, the mean does not come from calculating
(21:04):
using a formula. It doesn't come from reading an advice book.
It comes from knowing your child and using wise judgment.
Judging when and how to say no is another manifestation
of the tension that parents feel between the urge to
(21:27):
encourage independence and the urge to protect. If you say
no all the time, your kids will never experience those
skin knees. If you don't say no, then if your
kids are lucky enough to survive their childhoods, they will
surely grow into monsters. So the lesson that parents typically
learned from their children is to pick your battles. At first,
(21:51):
you stop your kids from throwing food on the floor,
taking toys from their siblings, leaving their clothes in a
heap in the middle of whatever room they happen to
be in. Then you start worrying about how they use
your stuff without asking, barge into your bedroom without shocking,
don't do anything to help around the house, interrupt you
with urgent requests while you're on the phone, and never
(22:12):
accept no without an argument. Still later you worry that
they ignore curfews, hang out with other kids you think
are trouble, experiment with drugs and alcohol, and drive when
they shouldn't be driving. Pick your battles. A few parents
want to be drill sergeants, so they let their children
lead them. They learn to expect a lot from obedient
(22:36):
children and settle for basic safety and civility from unruly ones.
It seems unfair to ratchet up standards for kids who
basically do what they're told, and the look to lower
them for the more rebellious types. And no doubt the
kids themselves will often see it as unfair, but that
(22:58):
is what parents do. To give each kid what she
needs and what she can hand door, not to treat
each kid the same. That's the way wise parents operate. Well,
thanks for listening. After this episode, I feel like I
(23:20):
owe my parents a phone call and probably an apology. Okay,
maybe a few apologies. Join us next time. When Barry
talks about how rules can be a war on wisdom,
The Happiness Formula from One Day University is a production
of I Heart Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're
(23:43):
enjoying the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app,
and check out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history,
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