Jocko Podcast - Jocko Underground: You Might Be Worrying Too Much About Your Kids.

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

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This is the Jocko Underground Podcast, number 157, sitting here with Echo Charles E.C. Yes, sir. We got some questions from the troopers of the world. What's happening in the world? Let's find out. Let's give some recommendations. Some courses of action to take.

People are wondering how to do certain things under certain circumstances. And we can provide courses of action. Yeah. Courses of action. Like, try this. Check your feedback. If that's going well, continue. If it's not going well, adjust.

Yeah. But it's good to have some courses of action. Yeah, fully. So let's get to it. Okay. First question. Hey, Jocco, hey Charles. I'm a 40-year-old male from Germany.

I have a family and two children and a great job as a teacher in higher learning. Since having children, I have been afraid that I might lose them. For example, through illness or accident. The worry is at a low level, but is always there. And it affects me in my daily life. Several years ago, I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, which I manage well through psychotherapy, exercise, and discipline daily routine, including playing saxophiles. and lots of reading. However, I still struggle to let go. For example, when the children walk to school

alone in the future, play outside unsupervised, or be out on their own. How can I handle that fear? Thanks from Germany. Well, clearly you care about your kids, which is awesome. That's great. And that's a very common feeling for people to have. We care about our kids. We hope people care about their kids. And look, I'm glad you're getting some professional help. And I'm sure your therapist can give you a course of action. That's probably better than my course of action, my recommendation. But, you know, if I had to think about this or just give you some thoughts about it, again, I think you should check with your professional and see what they say. One thing I noticed you say that there's a low level worry that's always there.

I think that's pretty common for parents to have like a low level. concern that about your kids. I don't think that's abnormal. I think that's, in fact, I think it's healthy that you have, hey, a little voice in your head that's going, you know, at a low level going up, I hope my kids are okay. I hope everything's all right. I hope there's not, you know, a school shooting. I hope there's not a bus crash or whatever.

Like, things can happen. The terrible things happen. So I think that's totally normal. But you do say that it affects you in your daily life, which I, I, I, I, I, I would wonder how it affects you in your daily life. If it makes you check the news more often or something, you know, okay, you know, it's like a little bit of a, but if it makes you not wanna work or something like that,

then I could see where it could be a problem. But I would keep these things in mind a little bit. You know, you want your children to be safe, of course, but you also want them to be functional. You want them to have enjoyable lives, right? But what if I told you you could actually hurt them by being overprotective? right that you can you can shelter your kids to a point where they don't develop or you can pass

on your own irrational fears to them and you can give them anxiety or other end of the spectrum you could make them rebel against you in a disastrous way where they're emotionally detached from you and they don't want to talk to you and just leave me alone and so you see what I'm saying so if you have extreme behavior, which again, right now it doesn't sound like your, it doesn't sound like, worrying about your kids is not extreme behavior, but you have to, you have to kind of cap it there, right? You have to kind of cap it there. So you don't want them to overcompensate for your overprotectiveness by becoming either risk addicts or, you know, acting out in ways to get back at you because you interfered with them. Like those things happen. So we don't want those things

to happen. There's a long list we could make of things that could go on there. And it's important to note that children are very difficult to predict. I have known amazing parents, amazing parents, you know, I wouldn't go so far as to use the word perfect, but I've known parents that were really good parents and have had two, you know, three kids, two of which are wonderful children and have carried. out excellent productive achievements in their lives. And one kid has just been a total disaster. Drug addict, yeah, mostly it's drugs that gets them.

But drug addict or nonproductive or quitting, you know, not doing anything, not working, being lazy, like all those things. Same exact parents. Now look, your birth order and where you are and what's going on at the time, all that stuff plays in a role. But what I'm saying is you can provide the same household to, you can provide the same household to, children and you can have it work for some and not work for others, right? And there's some kids that become more resilient because of certain types of behavior, Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know,

you heard about Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was on our podcast and just him talking about his dad, very cold, you know, alcoholic, borderline abusive. And that breaks some people and turns them into abusers, but no, like Arnold Schwarzenegger turned out to be a nice guy and very successful. So there's there's things that are there's things that are happening when you're raising kids and I think it's best to try and be as balanced as you can because if you start going extreme in one direction you might get extreme you might create extreme reactions right what is the physics saying every action has an equal and opposite reaction so this is why you don't want to have a bunch of extreme actions because it might create an extreme reaction and we don't want to do that we

don't we don't have enough control over the experiment to to to test with extreme behaviors you want as a parent to be kind of middle of the road you want to be kind of middle of the road you know you you want your kids so you know you want your kids to do stuff but you don't want to go crazy you want to get good grades in school but you don't want them to cheat to get there you see what I'm saying like there's all these things you want to be a good stable middle the road person Now, the, the, there's things in life that that you cannot mitigate. You see what I'm saying?

Like there's, you can't protect your children from every possible risk. If you do try to protect them from every possible risk, in other words, if you overprotect your children, you will do more harm than good. And what's hard about that explanation is that if you have that, that very rare catastrophe, catastrophic incident. Like, for instance, if your kid can break their neck wrestling. Happens.

Happens once every 10 years. Like, of all the kids in the world that are wrestling, once every 10 years, or football, right? Playing tackle football. Once every five years, how often we say someone breaks their neck and gets paralyzed in football? Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, it's not a huge number. Once every five years. Once every five years of all, All the individual football plays that take place across the country. Now, you're in Germany. I don't know what the equivalent, but American football. I'm talking about American football. Once every five years, a kid gets paralyzed.

And if I'm telling you that, hey, overprotecting them will do more harm than good, and then you end up with that kid out of the millions, the one in 300 million football plays and your kid gets paralyzed, obviously these words that I'm saying have no bearing whatsoever. whatsoever. But in the event that your kid is not one of the one in 300 million that now gets all the benefits and the friendships and the athletic skills and the leadership skills and the mental toughness from playing football, you take all that stuff away that there's a

remote chance that this is something bad could happen. Well, your kid's going to get sick when traveling. Okay, so no traveling. Your kid dies on a plane. Your kid can die on a plane crash, right? So we're not going to put our kids on planes. And so now our kids not going to travel, not going to see the world, not going to feel comfortable, not going to be paranoid. What about kids drowning in pools?

Kids drown. So what are we going to do? No pools. Not teach them how to swim. Like if your kid never gets wet, they're never going to drown. But they're also not going to go to swim. And by the way, there's going to be certain situations that you can't control. So there's risk with everything that we do.

And there's a certain amount of risk that you cannot mitigate as a parent. And what you have to do is you kind of have to do a risk assessment of saying, okay, yes, there's a one in 300 million chance that if my kid, what sport would they be playing in Germany where you could get injured? Obviously soccer is real big. Okay, judo. We'll go judo. Occasionally judo, you get thrown in your neck, you break your neck. But man, take that away. Okay, so now we're not doing judo.

And by the way, you can blow out your knees doing soccer. And by the way, you can, you see, just hockey. Well, you get checked in hockey, you get head trauma, you get TBI. You see what I'm saying? It's like everything has risks. Traveling has risks. Interacting with other human beings have risk. Going to school has risks.

You know, you're in Germany right now. They're having these vehicular attacks where people are plowing down. Terrorists are plowing down groups of people. So let's not go to any other, let's not go to any events anymore. no fair no circus no movie theater like you see what I'm saying so you have to recognize that there's some risk there's some things that you cannot mitigate you cannot mitigate that risk other than putting your kid into a bubble and if you do that it will negatively impact not just negatively impact there's a decent chance it kind of wrecks their life so being that's

the hardest thing about being a parent it's kind of like I wrote about the dichotomy of leadership like you love your you love your guys but you still got to send them out on missions that's the ultimate dichotomy well guess what you're doing with your kids you love your kids you don't want anything bad to happen but in order for them to grow up in order for them to become productive humans and and resilient humans they've got to go out and live and in living there is risk there's a bunch of risk that you cannot control. And this goes back to combat. Like there's some things in combat you can't control.

You cannot control some things in combat. And if you focus on those things, you're missing on the things that you can control. So let's focus on the things we can control with our kids, making them situationally aware, making them healthy, helping them learn how to make good decisions. Those kind of things will mitigate way more.

risk than you keeping them from doing anything. So that's my kind of that's my two sense. I'm sure your therapist is going to give you some some protocols to go through, which I'm sure will be very helpful. Yeah, you, uh, one that I like that you, I guess in a way taught me, whatever, explain to me where, uh, let your, let my kids brush up against the guard rails of failure. Yes, but, but with that, Let them go off the cliff. Yeah, exactly. No, but even before that, let them do this stuff.

Like, you know how like, you know, we want to, I think you were talking about making lunches or something like that. I forget, but you're like, hey, let them do it or tell them they got to do it. So it's basically in a nutshell, teach them to do stuff and try to make that a routine and a habit, like teach them to do stuff so they know how to do certain things. And so when you do that, let them brush a big, against the card reels of So they know how it feels. So they know how to correct themselves, you know? So you're going to have to worry way less about a kid who knows how to do stuff. And then on top of it knows how to if they don't, if they're not successful, they know how to bounce back and be normal. Rather than just this fragile person who doesn't know how to do nothing. And that's really what we're worried about. They're going to go outside in the real world, whether it be out just out to play on their own or when they're going to grow up and go into normal society, we worry that, okay, they're not going to be okay. That's essentially it. In whatever way, however far, however far. imagination can go that's what we're worried about but you reduce that chance of something them not

being okay if they know how to do more stuff including recover yeah from bad stuff because that kind of stuff can happen you know when i was a little kid so at my house we had a like a steep hill in our front yard and uh my dad was like need them the lawn needed to be mowed and i was pretty little you know and And I was like, okay, so I'm out there mowing the lawn. And it's a very steep hill. And I, like, fell. And the lawnmower fell, too. So me and the lawnmower were, like, tumbling down the hill.

And it was... You ever seen somebody on a BMX bicycle in their... They fall, and they, like, get all tangled up in their bike? Yeah, I've been that guy before. Okay. It kind of... It kind of was close to being that. It was close to being that,

but it was a lawnmower with those blade spinning. But I remember thinking to myself, this probably was not a good idea. Like in motion, I'm like, I might lose an arm right now. But that's probably one of those things where you can do a risk assessment

and say to yourself like, oh, what's the worst case? Well, the worst case would be my kid falls and the lawnmower hits him in the head and gets his head chopped. Yeah. So use good judgment. Yeah.

Or even if they, you know, like there's other. jobs I could have done besides that one you know pulling weeds or weed whacker you're not going to lose a limb from your weed whacker mm-hmm so those would have been smart but just the straight lawnmower yeah that little freaking 0.5 horsepower roll so that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the jaco underground podcast so if you want to continue to listen go to jocco underground.com and subscribe and we're doing this we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms so we are not subject to their control

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